Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - The IT Crowd

15 March 201900:58:591,226 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

00:00:06
[Music] hi everybody welcome to reverse the verse live the IT group I'm your host this weekend okay I said this week like it's different everybody every week Content Manager for global video production Jared Huckaby and joining us on the show today this has been one of my white whales I have been chasing this type of show for a long time I started my career in IT and well I don't do it so much anymore I'm very pleased and excited to have members of our IT crew here from three studios around the world simultaneously I do how you doing guys doing good right we're gonna because we've got one two three four guests on this week we're
00:00:55
gonna take a little bit of time I want to go around the world as it were and talk about talk a little bit about who you are and what you do for star citizen and let's go ahead and start with you mr. Mike Jones probably the one that folks will remember most from previous episodes of around the verse Mike who are you and what do you do for star citizen well I'm Mike Jones I'm senior director of corporate and publishing technology and so that's means I head up the IT and DevOps publishing operations and so this is my team I I do a little bit of everything it's changing a little bit now as the company grows but you know I started with building the pcs and starting hiring people and building
00:01:44
policies and procedures and so now I kind of just help guide the team and jump in where I can right and sitting to your left Paul on to tell us who you are and what you do for star citizen sure Paul Vaden I'm the director of corporate technology essentially the the IT Director for all of the studios and I report into the - Jones here and I oversee most of the network operations or all of the network operations between studios and you know facilitate all the IT Help Desk and all that fun stuff now I do want I want to do a
00:02:32
clarification there when you say net the network stuff you're talking about the interoffice communication between our five Studios not the gameplay network as people have seen with Clive Johnson and stuff on other our TVs and ATVs and stuff yeah exactly hey Hassan - oh man who aren't even what do you do for star citizen my name is Hassan and I'm the senior IT manager I'm basically looking after the IT department in Europe we've got a studio in Frankfurt we got one in Winslow and we've got a small satellite studio in Darby basic my job is just to make sure everything's working it's a very succinct description and then of course
00:03:24
no stranger to reverse the verse for going back to the earliest episodes of reverse the verse Dennis tell us who you are and what you do for star citizen yeah I'm Dennis Daniel I'm the IT mentor here in LA and basically just oversee all the IT operations here on you know LA and the west coast and just make sure that everybody here is happy and getting their jobs done you know and then listen to these guys and you know having them tell me what to do all right so you know we always every good every time we do an RTP we collect some questions from spectrum ahead of time and of course will be collecting questions live from the chat to help guide the type of topics that we can talk about and whatnot why don't you give us a little rundown of what your day-to-day responsibilities are like what's a
00:04:13
typical day like for you Hassan if I've got a phone call saying something's broken before I get in and go through tickets make sure you know anything a blocker critical he needs to be completed get that done first just making sure the other guys under my in my team have things to do and basically making sure they're doing a good job right how about you Paul no get in check to see if anything's alerting and then go through the calendar what's coming up for the day sometimes I'll have a call
00:05:05
with this on to kind of sync up with what's going on in Europe I've still do quite a bit of the network engineering so you know running maintenance on our perforce servers and that kind of stuff as well you said alerting what kind of alerts are we talking about usually it's disk full alerts the amount of data that we can that we consume is just ridiculous and so we're constantly you know adding storage to servers because it just grows so quickly how about you Dennis yeah we're pretty much here in LA we're pretty much downstream
00:05:52
from everybody else you know because Germany pretty much starts off the day and they get a full workday and then UK you know and they're almost done with done with their day and Austin's pretty much in the middle of their day so we try to pick up on a lot of the tasks that you know they've already started that they need us to do and then we kind of close out the evening so sometimes some of our work comes down as we're trying to reorganize and reorient for Germany to pick up the next day so we're helping you know the artist teams and the engineering teams basically be ready to hand off all their materials and the projects are working on to Germany and start the day over and what people don't understand is that you know CID is a 24-hour outfit I mean everybody in this room is pretty much on call 24/7 so if something happens we either you know
00:06:40
if it's something we can do remote we do it from there and then if not then you know we have to drive into the office and do it and then outside of that the one unique group that pretty much we house here is pretty much GBP and and the narrative and you know like this show so we try to get jared additional support if he needs it and also the GBP team that runs a lot of the other content you know that's coming up so we're we're a little bit more whoops that was me that your text that's my text emergency that's his Big Trouble in Little China it's tombstone Oh was it okay okay I was still Kurt Russell yeah so that's that's what we do so a lot of times we just what these guys need finished up when we try to finish it for him for the next day
00:07:26
Mike Dennis makes a made a great point that I'd like to put to you about the the the the work day here is not eight hours long it's it starts in Germany and extends the UK and extends to Austin and extends to LA and then starts back up again what's your day-to-day like you're overseeing that kind of handoff well yeah it's it takes a while to get used to it kind of just doesn't stop we have a little window for me my time zone it's between about midnight and two o'clock right when it's quiet and we don't you know the other thing is they talk these guys here talk about the things that they do but a lot of it what we do is
00:08:15
responding responding to emerging issues or you know system down or communication failure or some kind of server not responsive things like this and we don't have an internal knock yeah like a 24/7 team that responds to those types of things so for now I'm it and so if anything happens in one of the other time zones or maybe they get a you know the camp they can't publish a bill or they can't they can't see a particular network share or something if it's bad enough I'll get the call and then that means I typically because because I a pretty good idea of who who could solve what at what time zone the quickest and so I start dialing out and and waking people up and so so that's
00:09:03
kind of how we handle the this around the clock type thing and I think some day we're going to expand that but you know it takes a lot of people to be able to man a 24/7 so the guys here I mean this team in particular really does spend a lot of extra hours you know we have our normal time that we come into the office but I can I can tell you that there's not very many times during the day even on weekends that I can't send out a message and one or more of these guys will be right there on it and able to respond to an issue now besides your day to day we talked about you know regular kind of day-to-day stuff every year one or more of you has to step outside the regular
00:09:53
day-to-day and help with something called citizencon and then that that's where I get that's where I get most of the that my my interaction with you guys either citizencon or the big games complements we've done the past PAX East PAX South our events each one of you have been the the forefront point person on one of our major events at some point and talk to me a little bit about what that experience is like let's start with let's start with you Paul my my first experience at cloud Imperium was I started about a month before we did the pax Australia event and part of my role is that I've I am at all of the public events so I got you know phrase we like
00:10:49
to use here is drinking from the fire hose so my introduction to see IG was okay get everything ready and ship it all off to Australia to do an event out there and I was like what's an event but it's it's probably one of the most rewarding experiences in my career because each event has its own separate challenges and just being able to show up and know that you know I've got the the one of the best support teams available to really you know come in and just to to describe the situation is we generally
00:11:37
get access to the event space the day before and so we have to come in and set up you know recently we've been doing a whole lot of multiplayer demos so that's a 24 PC LAN plus we've got demo machines that you know for play demos but also the onstage demo machines we have to network all of that and then we generally have to have a well always have to have a method of getting the latest updates the latest updated builds one of the I don't know insider information about the events is we're
00:12:26
usually getting new builds right up to about an hour before the event start I don't think that's a secret and you know when because it's aren't punctual you know we don't know and when we start exactly on time but that's because he's a disaster and we ended on time - first time we ever ended on time sorry but yeah and the reason we do that is it's a very you know clear message from Chris is that you know we want to show the best stuff that we can and so we the whole team the whole company really
00:13:13
kills itself to get everything in and working so that we can show off this stuff too the fans and the backers and so you know there's been a couple of shows where they were literally typing up the the PowerPoint five minutes before he was going on you know and everything that he was supposed to be exactly and so it's just a very frenetic and but you know having the the team that we have you know I it allows me a lot of confidence to know that when our event planner says hey you're only gonna have a day ahead of time to set up at this venue I'm like okay that's that's fine
00:14:01
because I know that you know the team on this call has all done it before plus many of our other staffers have all been part of the the events at some point and it's it's like a commando strike team you know we come in lay everything out get it all working and then just start rolling builds and getting everybody going right I want to get I want to start getting to the to the community questions here real quick but I don't want to before we leave this topic real quick Hassan if you had to pick your favorite or craziest Gamescom memory what would it be games company and none of the security guards would allow me to go out because would set the
00:14:50
fire alarm off I vowed I'd never do a games come after that and yeah I've been there overnight walked around walked around the whole venue by myself in for security guards behind me what do you my reboot episode right you know did you guys like drive like the golf carts around and as you know he's a big venue and I was huge you can clock up a lot of miles and kilometers just going from one side view to the other but yeah one of the years I said that well the year after that after he thought he'd never do he was out doing it again and sharing a room with me and on the flight over I
00:15:40
had sat next to some some person that had a very bad cold or flu or something and I was in just a bad state the whole time and I really feel for Hassan because I was coughing all night I neither of us got any sleep but about the size of the venue I've had a Fitbit at the time and on the last games column that we did I it said I walk 18 miles in one day just going around in the bin you Dennis you've done to citizen cons here in LA yeah yeah we did one in 2014 2016 I think I'll try to make this quick but I think one of the the craziest things we did is that it was in 2014 and you
00:16:31
know we didn't have a big setup like everybody else but we didn't didn't have access to the venue the night before or anything like that all the same day that yeah and I think you and and Shaun Tracy was tweaking the build and there was a door that just wouldn't work and you know but we needed the system at the venue so I called and you know one of the head producers at the time I said that somebody just hit Sean Tracy over the head knock him out grab the system get in the car and get over here it's LA traffic you're not gonna make it in less than an hour and so they did literally because poor Sean was up like for 24 hours trying to solve this one door issue and and you know they threw him the car through the system in the car they had to build on it because the
00:17:19
network wasn't fast enough to transfer it and as he was driving over there he like like woke up from sleeping in the car because he hadn't slept he slept for 20 minutes because I don't want to fix it I know how to fix the building save the show so we called his buddy in Austin who made a quick fix and then we barely got the system there in time and got it all hooked up and got to work but that show started on time that 14 2014 started on time and but it was just nerve-racking because we had nothing you know I mean Chris horse talking but there was nothing for him to show that he was talking about and that was in Jared I'd like to talk I'd like to talk that there's I was gonna say you you were there at the biggest distinct honor of all time last year well I
00:18:07
wanted to go back way back deep in history they did one in Boston 2013 Pakistan and that one was kind of famous because it started so late and I think I may have told the story before but it it's so fun the everybody's out here chanting you know we want Chris and you know trying to get the thing to start and we were we had similar problems right the build something was wrong and the build wouldn't run wouldn't connect to the server or something and so it was getting so late that Chris actually started coming out and talking and like we usually do we have those black like tablecloths over the tables right to make them look a little nicer than just a bunch of tables with legs and what people don't know is that we had a server engineer underneath that table
00:18:55
hidden behind underneath that that tablecloth he was coating the fix while Chris was talking and so so the minute the compiled finished on a local he was able to you know Chris was able to start logging in well in the meantime while that's happening we're in the back copying the fixes out to the rest of the demo machines while Chris is loading up the game so hopefully we can get it done in time it did start late but that's kind of the beginning of of it and then everybody I remember kind of just expected them to be late yeah I but I hadn't planned on offering a story here but ever I think everybody knows my my most favorite famous event story is probably red one and you know it's we learned a good lesson that day that
00:19:43
Chris needs a monitor on stage where he can see all of the all of the all of the machines we didn't have that that year and from the years before and what was happening that that year was you know I'm up in the eagle's nest I'm up in this it was it was literally an eagle's nest it was built up on scaffolding above the stage and I'm up there with all the video feeds calling the shot was a 10 a 10 person demo our biggest demo we've done it we've done at that time and Chris has everybody's positioning memorized like he knows where every single player is there's supposed to be at every single moment in that demo and it was the most amazing thing I've ever seen but what he couldn't see was that the demo units were crashing you know they were somebody was blue screening somebody was somebody's Hornet was caught in a flat spin and couldn't get out and he's calling the shots he's calling the shots down there from memory
00:20:32
without being it was he's like go to red one go to go to blue to over and I'm like and I'm up there like no I'm not putting a blue screen to death up on screen because Chris is telling me to do it so so up and I'm up there and I'm like I'm like but he's on stage telling people Jerrod red one girl I'm like no I'm not giving you a red one he's blue screen he's stuck in the thing and and and it was it he got it we didn't have a way to communicate I mean we learned a lot on that show now he's got an earwig now he's got it monitors like that but it was it was a it was comforting afterwards he goes let's run it again and Jared you just look through the column and the thing was done I like I threw my head sit down I ran down you know fans are flocking Chris whatever I cut through every fan and I just got to Chris and I thought I'm undead it's like he'd you know what's going on he looked
00:21:22
at me he goes with the poor that were the builds having problems yes so so you made the right call on me we were in LA watching you know you know we were celebrating you know and and so we had a drinking game every time Chris at red when we take a shot so halfway through it we were we're actually one thing about the Dennis reminded me of is that one of the challenges we always face is that most of the places that we have these events are theaters that don't have really if they have an internet
00:22:09
connection it's like a it's not much better than dial-up because it's it's generally for their their POS systems or their to their manager to get email and so one of the the big challenges in fact the one of the years we had a solution that ended up evolving into the differential patcher because we couldn't pull the we couldn't get the builds pulled over the the connection fast enough and one of our network engineers Mike Pickett started you know figuring out how to do these differential pushes so that we weren't trying to download a whole 40
00:22:58
gig build over a 20 Meg 21 right and so it's a it's really well interesting to me how you know solutions that we come up with for events and and just inter inter studio traffic get evolved to the point where they're actually being used in the game is just don't normally see that yeah I think what most people don't know is like how much we actually work on on the event outside of you know what our daily tasks here there's a lot to do here to keep people system's up but you know we're a team of like you know seven or eight guys depending on what era you're talking about sometimes even the low as
00:23:46
five or six but we ran all the technical back-end for every show and you know and it's and it's an intense you know and and and rewarding but that's a huge part of what we do I will have to remind - on that after that second Gamescom you we're leaving is like i'ma put in my vacation request next year for next year one and it a week later a year ahead of time he had his vacation request sending us on he wasn't out he wasn't out it doesn't matter what you request Mike did Tyler bring you your quantum questions crown yeah he's so proud of this crown you know it's just a he just he every place I go he brings me this to to point out that I'm the champion but you know it's kind of a
00:24:35
silly it's just a paper thing he made it but he's really proud of it so I always display it with you know and show everybody I'm happy with this thing but it's just it's kind of janky I mean it should at least be gold alright so let's get into some of the backer questions remember guys you submit your questions for consideration by pressing your question with the word question in capital S run by brackets well that'll help us pull it out from all the regular conversation we've already got a couple that we've been collecting throughout the show the most voted up question on the spectrum thread was one that didn't surprise me a lot of star citizens are our tech heads are people who build their own computers the number one voted question was what is the current standard dev PC for for c IG what's that
00:25:24
what are we looking at stats wise who wants to grab it so it it used to be all me you know everybody contributes to this but where we setup a new build for citizencon you know we try to keep our builds really current like the really high end gaming PC builds Chris is pretty specific about making sure that we have really high end stuff because we want to you know we're developing for gamers so anyway for sitting in con we wanted to put our best foot forward and so we ended up going with the 8086 k and that thing has a 5 gigahertz turbo boost the build came out great so it's a you know it's a six core 5 gigahertz I think
00:26:14
we have 32 gigs of RAM it's Asus tough motherboard and it's of course got our you know all-in-one water cooling solution and intel gave us octane drive so that made the boot really fast anyway the thing is that build came out so good that as developers started coming in you prep you know the day before the show they show up and then they'll sit down we'll set up a few machines for them to - to work you know do the last-minute preps and things and they're like saying whoa what is this thing we you know you have to give me the spec we'll send it to song Hasan I want a machine like this build exactly like this for when I get back because the game hasn't run better so you know in fact with that build we
00:27:03
haven't even really had to worry about the you know super high end having the greatest video card so we have a good mix of a lot of different video cards because the bill is just really stable underneath in it of course the game is improved but that that so I hope that answers the question of our kind of basic spec I will say though that we don't do all machines that way so we do have a good mix of the different video cards we try to have a decent smattering of different motherboards and configurations so that we can have some semblance of compatibility testing especially within the QA department will put a lot of different configurations together for QA and often times they'll ask us can you swap this out because you know we're
00:27:51
getting a lot of community complaints about this particular setup we'd like to set that up so we can verify and get better information to the devs one of the other questions that came through says what are some of the unique infrastructure problems you deal with pushing large game builds across the world all day long pushing large game builds across the world storage latency its latency is the biggest hit because going from Austin to the UK and and Frankfurt the the latency I mean there's it's it's a physics issue you can't get faster than the speed of light and so just the that latency causes a lot of issues for us there's a lot of
00:28:43
different technologies that we've tried that don't react well to high latency connections and so that that whole process of getting the builds out to the studios is again something that came from the gamescom slashes and connivance it's it's the precursor to the differential patcher we developed it internally the the copy built system where when the build is finished here in Austin it sends it out to the other studios but it does it in a differential packaging to where each studio is only downloading the things that have changed since the
00:29:33
previous build on a binary level which gives us a lot better speed at sending that kind of data across and then once we had that completely finished and refined with the copy billet they they took that and morphed it into the differential patcher and you know bandwidth does it we have a lot of bandwidth but in these distance problems aren't solved by bandwidth yeah another thing I will add I mean for anybody who really wants to geek out you know we we also when we when we move birds across long distance we cache them much like a proxy server methodology so so that way the first person that pulls that differential the next person doesn't have to pull it over distance they pull
00:30:21
it from their local which means it's much faster it be like lamb speed for them and so you know combination of solutions we just keep refining keep improving but it what it does has done is you know it's like I've said before every challenge that we get and we eventually solve it we think wow this is going to give us real leg you know some real Headroom so now they're not going to bother us about that again one a minute that you give them this new solution then suddenly oh what that means that now instead of doing eight builds a day we can do 24 builds a day and so suddenly you're back up against the same thing and we continue to tune so so much of what you guys do is quite frankly making it possible for everybody
00:31:11
else to make star citizen it's it's I said five studios around the world coordination with you know with what you know we've had a lot of third-party developers over the years I mean lots of communication basically it's primarily possible by but by what you guys do what kind of you mentioned earlier how you part of your day you come in you look for alerts you look at ticket system SAS on you support our largest studio there in the Manchester office are the Wintle office I'm trying to think of what I'm trying to get out here what is it like it's okay just tell he's a God he's literally an IT guard I don't
00:32:03
know how the same question how many but no I guess as you know we're the staff here the very capable of self managing but with 250 art people it does come to the wire with you know managing or trying to fix different problems at the same time for you know 250 are people but the team is growing we're up to three people in there in the UK in the whims of studio and we've got two or one and a half in the Frankfurt studio and we're ever-expanding but yeah as things get as things developed more and people ask for more more requests and asking
00:32:53
for more information yeah it's coming to the point I've got white here now I thought I'd I wouldn't get any white hair go on to gray but my hair is going why it's wrong I'm getting there yep it's a good fun don't get me wrong and that keeps me going and that pressure and that challenge it keeps the fire I like to Hassan's horn for him that studio has really had explosive growth in the last year year and a half and it kind of caught us by surprise and just the fact because up until you know last week Hassan was supporting
00:33:44
that whole studio with just him and other IT guy there Kyle and the amount of it's difficult to describe him the load the workload that they have had to deal with but we've gotten a an extra help desk guy in there Nathan and we've got two more slots open out there to try to get him a lot a lot more support because 250 people four four three staff support staff is quite a bit and the thing is ever-growing is also yeah that's right that's what I want to follow up on you said growth the UK
00:34:32
offices expanded tremendously over the last couple years but it's not just the UK office the the de office is expanded Austin's going through an expansion right now Mike you've been here you've been here for a long time talk to me about how you support you know the the this the the studio the addition of the the the the Darby office even what's it like how things changed from when you started to now as we just continue to grow and we continue to expand to bring these two games to life well it's yeah I guess when I got here I was the only one company was much smaller we were just building out the LA studio and shortly after that we got the UK office it in those early days it was not it was not easy we didn't have
00:35:22
really very much and so it was like I said it was just me of course there was a lot less people so you know we we put it around and sometimes we'd hire some contractors help out a little bit but we very quickly grew the team one of the things that we figured out was that with a company growing this fast we have to get real with our infrastructure and the hardware especially where it comes to network connectivity connecting the studios firewalls switches things of this nature really to build out a robust network it didn't take very long for the company to not be very happy about down times so we what we started doing was we built a standardized this is this is your basic package of the minimum gear
00:36:12
that you need to for a studio to hook in right so that so that you can make it part of the mesh and so when when other Studios started coming online it was easier than to say here's your basis what are your other requirements we'll add to it and so Paul was a big help with that with his experience in network and network engineering of design Mike helped a lot a lot of you know kind of a coordinated effort as everybody came together but then what that meant was we started establishing these like systems so it really becomes really a matter of delivery time planning the time to get the equipment in and then another big one is ISPs especially when you talk about different countries sometimes it takes a really long time to establish
00:37:01
that fiber network presence but once we usually have everything lined up s-- and and pre-programmed so once we hook in that network they pretty much come online and nowadays with the systems that we have in place that Paul has been talking about a little bit it's a lot easier than that even it's really just a matter of I mean we even have smaller subset packages so like for example if if we want to do like you could even set up this is a extreme example but you can even set up a citizen card as a mini studio so we'll hook up the security tunnels we'll hook up all the networks so that that way we can deliver you the build packages but also any other kind of normal communication it really
00:37:48
helps the devs that way so that when they sit down they can just log in they don't have to worry about things like VPN clients and and this and that so I guess if that gives you kind of an idea of how we do it at least in overview of course if you let me I can go in a lot more detail but I think that is a pretty good idea yeah that that crash cart kind of thing that we did that's that's what the Darby Studios started with is that we had come up with this design for for one of the public events to where we could have just anywhere just boom set up here's a quick mini studio and the Darby studio started off pretty much just as a remote mocap shoot and so we sent it down there and you know when
00:38:40
when they actually leased the space and turned it into a studio we we had very little to do to you know upgrade it to make it part of a long-term group is basically buying an extra infrastructure switch and that was it so we work global operation of course but every studio has some unique aspects to it as far as what it what they what they focus on unique challenges things that like Dennis mentions GBP is one of the things that OP that operates almost primarily here in UK and you can hear like a la any support what are some of the unique challenges that that you there I don't
00:39:28
want such challenges what are some of the unique aspects of your job in each individual studio start with us on GBP I think the UK is just a purely a developer development studio where we just you know a team of artists team of programmers just concentrating on developing the game most of the time whereas Osteen what to get whereas Austin are the back end or basically they deal with the build system and whatnot so basically the whole infrastructure starts from Austin and uniquely the UK studio is the one where we got the most developers
00:40:18
developing the games yeah we started off with each studio kind of having its own niche kind of thing where you know LA was video Austin was you know core operations and de was mainly you know game engine and and internals and UK was mainly art and and some design and some programming but just the scale of the UK office now I mean they do everything their mocap was the other thing that was mainly UK but yeah that's that's not so much the case anymore where each studio has people in every discipline of the game making process but yeah I would say
00:41:10
the just the fact that most of the the tech comes out of Austin where you know we've got the the build system we've got our source control system all that's housed here in Austin one of the questions that Chad says are you a Cisco Palo Alto or Ford in it for is it this fortunate I think or the net type of guy where Cisco Cisco infrastructure Cisco firewalls all that fun stuff the Chinese companies question kemp's it says as your department hiring yes we have we beat two network engineers to senior
00:42:02
systems engineers and then most likely when another helpdesk here or there I I would add that we're those are the ones that we're about to post or have had posted and then you know took them down for a while but we're pretty much open to anything and so I think anybody who's interested in this kind of stuff especially with a game company it's different it's not you know IT support in in in this company is different than any other game company I've been in and of course it's way different than your typical IT and your typical institutions banks insurance companies and things like that this is fast-paced you you really when he said fire hose it's that's a silly
00:42:51
thing but you really do learn fast and the challenges are different but yeah everything from you know all skill sets junior to senior one of the things that we're one of our sis system engineer positions should have a focus on Linux and this is just because a lot of our support infrastructure and servers you know good 50% of it runs on Linux so I just I just want to encourage everybody if you're got an interest you should you should send in that resume we're looking at all of them we can't you know obviously we can't take everybody but but you know can't hurt to try one of the phrases that we hear a lot over the course of development and
00:43:40
we've done hundreds of broadcasts over start student development we hear the term perforce a lot to talk to me a little bit about what perforce is and why we use it as opposed to others CVS is like git or something like that so perforce is a revision control system that it's a document repository in it in instance where if you think of it like a library you check out a file to edit and then you check that back in and so and it keeps track of all the revisions so if you check out a file and update a
00:44:29
paragraph and then you submit it then that's version 2 of that and if you decide you know I really like that previous version you can check out revision 1 and make that the current active so in development of course instead of you know documents and stories it's all code and scripts and and artwork and and stuff like that the the main reason we use perforce well it's a it's a really robust system but most of our our senior developers I've been in the industry for 25 years now
00:45:18
and back then perforce was by far the best revision control you could use in games sourcesafe and and CVS for something there was a that were problematic let's say and so I think that's one of the reasons why perforce has remained one of the the de facto standards in in the game industry at least for revision control get is absolutely a very good system for that but you know we were fully embedded in in perforce and trying to convert to get would be very a very monumental task and
00:46:10
the developers being in the game industry and perforce being the standard it would be a big jump for them to make that trend knowledge we do have specific small applications where we use other source control systems like it so you know it's like outside the game reasons right you may use it for control and configuration Shinzon certain infrastructure and things we can you know so we'll specialize that use case yeah we're not exclude anything like if it is the best solution for what we're trying to do we use get perforce is the primary repository for source code and and everything we need to build the game
00:46:58
goes in it goes in through perforce one of the questions of the shacking through have you tried turning CID on and off again what's your and we we've we've all worked places before see I geez I don't think I'm telling you tales out of school that CI G is a pretty unique place to to work what's your what's your what's your fondest memory of work of working for CI G at this point one of the things that you're most proud of as far as our worldwide distributed development keep making this massive beast move make any move I I think I think that one of the biggest things for
00:47:49
me is the amount of support the amount of infrastructure the amount of work that this IT team does with a small number of people and the size of this company to me that's that's probably one of the biggest achievements there's a lot of little things that we could talk about but we run on a really thin crew and that's because we have very experienced people you know I'm talking about a culmination of a lot of different experience not just game companies but from all over the place and so it means that we can work so well together you know they whether they say you know you start something and the other person just pick it up like they could read your mind or whatever we're
00:48:38
we're constantly doing things making process and policy so that users are able to support themselves when possible if they can't they come to us and then we can be quick about it solve a problem so I think that to me that's a big deal I'm sure some others might have some pretty good ideas well for me the my most memorable experience was in Australia that the pax Australia because it was when I really dropped the scope of what we're doing we I mean I I had worked with Chris back at in the origin days on Wing Commander and so you know and I've been in the game industry
00:49:28
a long time so I'm not I'm not a stranger to there being fans of a game but when I got to the Australia venue and they they said okay well here's your team of volunteers that are gonna help you set up and I'm like what do you mean like oh these are backers that have you know they've volunteered to help with the operations of setting up and and whatnot and I was like what do you I mean they've already bought the game and they're they're volunteering their time and and you know energy and everything and they're like yeah and and the enthusiasm that they put in I mean I've
00:50:18
worked in places where paid employees didn't have that amount of enthusiasm to to you know that they had and just the the scope of you know that this is a game that people it it's not just a game to them you know and every event we go to there's you know volunteers and and even just backers that come up and say you know this is this is going to be an awesome thing and that and then also the the amount of openness that we have since we are you know crowd funded or Packard we are very open with all of our development and that was a big change
00:51:11
for me because traditionally in the game industry you know you may be working on a game for two years and nobody's heard of it because the company has even announced that they're working on it yet and they want to have a big splash at the Christmas sale time of here's this game that we've been working on whereas here you know we're we're just open to everything having backers come on studio tours you know that's just all these things that were never a factor in in my career previously is just awe-inspiring sometimes we we were before we started the show we were telling the story we were telling each other the stories of
00:51:59
our first days and I don't know as though I'm trying to remember having trouble yet you had a pretty funny first day story well let's see he just reminded me of it yeah but what I actually want to go back to is like like you know for me like my most exciting day was it was basically I was a back of the game I heard of the game you know I immediately back because the idea was just phenomenal and I knew Chris from back in the early days when he played Wing Commander or when he made it as a fan not as a person and you know I put my resume and I was like you know there isn't there's almost no way that that I'm gonna get picked out of I'm sure hundreds of people that are applying for it and I got a phone call from John Erskine and we had a great talk and I was like why he's really interested and
00:52:46
he said well I want you to talk to our new technical guys like Mike Jones I'm like oh yeah I saw Mike Jones on on the show and and so so he set up the call for the next day and you know we started off with a little bit of technical you know talk about my experience that you know Carl's jr. headquarters and stuff like that but what it was is that within three minutes I knew Mike Jones was all in on the project because we left all the technical stuff behind and we just started talking about how passionate we are for what this vision was and what to to make what we could do to make it and I was like you know I was
00:53:35
expecting a little bit more corporate organized talk but you know what really fired me up was was Mike's passion for the game and I was like oh my god he's just like me he's he's a total fan and his passion is so powerful that you know this guy is gonna make this game happen regardless you know and I got just so fired up and I hope I made it through the process but you know that being a big fan of the game back in those days 2012 into 13 I was like so I you know and Mike finally you know and it was a long process because there was a lot going on you know LA was just kind of getting up and running you know Mike had only been there for about you know about you know three or four months and he was reshaping you know the IT department did
00:54:25
take everything off and try to expand it and you know and he he called me up and said that I was hired and it was just you know I just blew my mind you know to go from somebody who was so excited about a project and then find somebody who was that passionate and dedicated to the dream of the game that we're making is running the entire technical part that he wanted me along with the ride at that point I said you know regardless you know I'm I give you a solemn promise that I'm gonna work here and give my all until this game is finished that's what we're doing to this day five years later we gonna keep going until we're done dad that's why I'm here is your annual review this month is that what I swore a
00:55:14
blood oath to like you know Mike Jones over there is there's no way I'm I'm going I'm all-in you know and that's the passion that this core team you know basically brings with it every single day and that's how I know this game is gonna get done because these guys will not stop because these guys are gonna do it it's crazy it's the best ID team I've ever worked with in my entire life and I've been doing this for thirty years which is crazy so all right well with that we're actually out of time already before we let you go is there anything you want you guys want the community to know about about your work about the about your efforts here for your for starters and anything yeah you you you you want out there I can't really I don't think they there's anything you didn't cover
00:56:02
but I will say Jared you do a fine job thanks for hosting us here yeah yeah I'm here one day I want to meet his son in person that's all he's gonna fly out this yard that's right you've actually never met her son Madison yes he's like he's like my brother but yeah and we talk actually a lot and stuff like that and yeah one of these days we got to get together but hopefully when we get a chance to expand the team a little bit more than you know those guys you do a lot of groundwork I also want to do a shout out to the John John Goldstein John Goldstein yeah John goat seems is the person he's our system admin here in LA and I just want to say is that you know because you know our team is so you know small I sent John out to citizencon this last year for the big one in Austin and he did an amazing
00:56:51
job he was working like 20 hours straight for like a week and a half to build all the systems that help everybody in Austin get ready for that so he's a really hard worker and we're really happy to have my board so and Moritz and Chris in our Frankfort studio mmm-hmm here with us today but and don't forget carl and kyle your pal colin Nathan and UK Chris graves here Oh Chris Graham yeah yeah Chris graves good old Chris graves he was like the first one started he actually moved down from Canada so that shows you will will take him from anywhere yeah best of that Mike all right guys thank you so much for for taking the time to be here
00:57:38
III know heaven havin the IT crew on as I guess it might might seem kind of strange to folks but I you guys have a special place in my heart and I wanted I've been wanting to take some time to showcase your work and showcase your contribution to the project for some time so thank you for giving me the opportunity to do that of course we do have a couple promotions going on this week you find out all about them on the Roberts space industries comm website we got we got a screen shot promotion for Saint Patrick's / Stella Fortuna and then of course we have a couple unique ship promotions going on as well at the same time so check those out for reverse the verse I'm jarred that's Dennis that's Mike that's Paul and that was Hassan we'll see you next week everybody all right thank you guys thanks thanks for watching for the latest and
00:58:41
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.