10 for the Chairman: Episode 84

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] hello everyone welcome to another episode of 10 for the chairman this is where I take 10 questions from our subscribers and answer them to the best of my ability our subscribers are the subset of our community that contribute money every month to enable us to do enhanced community content so uh this show around the verse bug Smashers Ship Shape a lot of the video content we do as well as things like jump point which is uh a uh 40 to 70 page sort of behindth scenes digital magazine we do every month covers uh sort of how we build ships where the various steps from sort of initial concept all the way to sort of the final game model um you know how we think or design certain aspects

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   of the game systems or game mechanics um occasionally sort of behind the scenes of certain events we do as well as law about the universe like systems and companies and and finally we also have uh fiction in each one of the magazines and so it's a really great read I'd recommend checking that out um also for subscribers um we do kind of fun things like flare for the hangers as a thank you uh for enabling uh you know the sort of community uh content we do and a lot of the money that subscribers uh contribute and they lets us do it lets us have these cameras and uh people like Tom on the other side of it shooting me uh um so thank you um subscribers for doing that very much and as such I answer 10 questions and these actually will be the uh last 10 I will answer for a little while because I'm uh well by the time you see this I'm recording this

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   on Friday but we'll a on Monday uh I will be U flying through the air towards uh the UK where I'm uh going to spend the next uh s to eight weeks between UK and Germany uh we've got uh some uh pickup uh performance capture and motion capture stuff we're doing to finish out Squadron 42 uh some sort of VO stuff that we always knew we had to do once we had sort of the levels sort of fleshed in and we kind of knew sort of this is what the uh you know guards would say or you know this would be the sort of Radio Chat you would get uh so we're going to be doing that and then uh you know hunkering down with the teams in the UK and uh and Germany uh we got a lot of cool stuff that's up and coming uh this this year and uh lot to be done and um anyway I'm looking forward to it but sadly I won't be here in La so shooting

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   the time for the chairman uh will be on hold for a little bit and I'm pretty sure that we'll have various folks uh from the company feeling admirably with our various other 10 for the series stuff so um so but I'll be back don't worry about that all right so first uh question of the 10 questions is uh from Christopher 10006 which I would add as a very good name Christopher that is and he asked what can we expect for clothing options in the first implementation and will they have an effect on us EG bullet protection so at the beginning we're going to have uh some social items like clothes jackets trousers t-shirts plus you'll be able to buy some flight suit or armor sets and uh these will be sort of our very uh early stuff it's actually kind of some

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   of our Legacy art that you already know that you run around on so like a lot of times you know everyone's running around in the light Marine suit and then occasionally you can earn the medium Marine suit if you kill level five outlaw and um so those armor suits actually will not be uh in the they're not going to be in Squadron 42 and ultimately they're not in the final game because we've got a whole new sort of character uh Pipeline and Tech Pipeline with new shaders and all the rest stuff and so we're working on those assets and it's a whole Step Above um where the old stuff is but it's not all ready for everyone to use just yet so uh the old stuff's still pretty cool and uh so we'll be selling uh some of that for Alpha u in shops down on Art Corp and also actually have a couple of small smaller shops sitting in Port alisar at the very beginning for the very first implementation of persistence and shopping uh and the armor ones will give you a bit of protection um the new item

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   system 2.0 which I've uh talked about quite a few times uh will have a more sophisticated sort of armor like personal armor and helmet implementation with life support and all the rest stuff and that is actually in progress right now it won't be with the very first iteration of uh uh sort of persistence and shopping but probably a couple of releases later we'll be switching over all the personal items to uh sort of the new 2.0 system and that will enable us to have things that will you know potentially keep you warm or you know help uh you know absorb damage which you know kind of what armor does so uh longterm expect to see more of that uh at the beginning it'll be very sort of basic rudimentary stuff but um it's going to be exciting because it's the sort of first time that you'll be able to sort of customize your flight suit you're wearing like what social clothes

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   you're running around in um and uh it will persist and you know you earn some money killing some AI Pirates and you can spend some money buying a new shirt or whatever in put alisar down on Art Corp so that'll be cool all right next question comes from Vapor or O yora So Vapor O Apostrophe u r a hope I said that right um it seems to me there have been lots of Lessons Learned in online gaming over the last 15 years my question is have you been in discussion with former colleagues from your origin or Wilder wider a field and has this influenced your thinking on your development strategy for Star Citizen I asked because one of the truly enjoyable aspects of some of their games have been around player economy and socialization thinking Star Wars Galaxy particularly well yeah no absolutely I mean so when I

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   started this you know I uh you know obviously ultimar on Line's one of the sort of original granddaddies of MMOs it was started development when I was still at origin and I know a lot of the people that led it you know obviously uh Richard G La British star long uh and quite a few other folks too so um had a fair amount of discussions in the early days uh you know long time ago uh subscribed to Star Wars Galaxy and World of Warcraft and all the rest of them so yeah a lot of that sort of uh kind of a shaped sort of what I want to do with st it's essentially it's kind of like I look at what other things do and I go well I like that beard or I don't like this bit or I really would like this kind of experience and that's usually kind of why I make games is I sort of see something that I would like

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   a certain way and there isn't a game out there that sort of delivers that experience and so I go and make it which is really how St is and came about because I sort of felt like the technology was ready to sort of build this immersive world that I've always wanted to venture around in uh and I you know I have to say that the social aspects which I think you're asking about here is one of the things that's really compelling and even in uh what you can see right now and ort of the you know early stages of SC Alpha where you know really you can't you know we don't actually have that many systems of gameplay to support the social aspects but people are just doing it anyway so you know uh you know someone gets stranded out at a location and they'll go into the chat and say hey come rescue me and we we haven't we don't have any we are going to have support where you'll have a rescue Beacon and it'll show up on a map and you know you can pay people to pick you up and stuff like that but right now it's all sort of

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    completely informal emergent behavior that the that everyone that's playing is sort of doing so people are rescuing other people or people are like getting together and creating up ships and going off and getting involved in you know encounters and Adventures and uh it's it's really cool so we actually have you know a big focus of uh the world and system we're building is we're we're building play for people that want to play solo definitely right which is sort of that old Privateer model but but there's a huge focus on how we build game play that is that sort of group of friends experience where like you and your buddies are flying a constellation or um you know you're out there interacting with other players like someone needs help they need to be refueled or rearmed or saved out in space so um you know all these kind of things we are Building Systems to do that we have a pretty exciting um sort

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    of nextstage communications platform that will unify what we're doing on the web and also what will happen in the game it's still you know it's in the early stages and we're working on it so it's not going to debut right now but I definitely think that's going to be pretty cool where you'll be able to organize your your groups and chat groups and friends and organizations and and be you know not in the game or in the game and uh sort of have full presence in so chats are not the very rudimentary basic one that we have in the game now um it's just going to we're going to sort of basically unify it um well the platform so you could arrange you know on these sort of chat setups for you know in your groups and arrange groups and say hey let's get together for a game let's go adventuring together tonight at xpm or whatever and then later on you go in the game it's already

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    set up you set it off offline maybe on your uh you know PC or maybe on your mobile but it's all the same kind of sort of chat so you could even have someone playing a game and you can see say on your whatever your Android or iPhone uh and you could be chatting with some people that are playing a game in the same Chat thing and it's all and you'll see where they are and the star systems and so we're going to we're going to have a pretty cool uh you know there's a lot of focus anyway the upshot is that we're focusing a lot on social aspects getting people together I mean I definitely am always impressed every time we have an event because you know all these people say I you this is you know new best friend and I only met him through Star Citizen and you know really you know yes we're a computer game that we everyone sits in front of a computer and interacts but you're meeting real people on the other end and so we're thinking about how we can get people to

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    work together coordinate together to achieve things as well as just have you know the Lone Wolf gameplay and then of course we have sort of the bigger organization meta gameplay as well planned in there so I'm thinking one all of it's in which obviously you know takes time because it's wildly ambitious um it will be um I think socially probably you know our goal is to be uh you know something that people would look at and say that is how you implement uh sort of social engagement in your game and I think if you look at what we do with the you know the web side of things and how we do it on the community side that you can definitely see that that's sort of our objective um and you know those were some of the big takeaways that I thought were really cool you know the emergent Behavior and the social aspects that came out of ultr online um you know you see some of those in Eve um but also World of Warcraft I

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    mean there's vast amounts of people that you know made friends got together in World of Warcraft um that they would never met otherwise which is totally cool so um so yes we'll look at all those and use it to inform what we're going forward and doing next question comes from Aiden arachi who asks how are you or we will be hand Ling this situation we are exploring or hauling long Freight and it's late we log off since we are out in in space our ships will be dot dot dot question marked attacked comma safe till login or s o I'm guessing that means out of look instead of Sal as in h star well so we we so we basically uh said that uh if you have um beds aboard sort of the bigger ships and uh you're in a

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    sort of non-com area where you're not engaged in combat the someone not threatening you nearby if you go to the bed it's kind of like a save game otherwise you're going to have to sort of land at a space station or land down on a planet and then again it's sort of like a save checkpoint um so those are the places you're sort of allowed to save so we don't let you uh you know sort of save in the middle of a combat or Paris attacking you because that sort of defeats the purpose but if you're out in the void of space and nothing's around um you know you go to your bunk bed you know go go go to sleep uh and then you'll be able to log back and wake up and you'll still be out in that void of space cuz essentially at that point we'll uh take your ship away so people can't sort of attack you while you're asleep um so that that's sort of allowing you to do sort of a like the equivalent of a save checkpoint which is the same as if you land on a space

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    station and go and you know sleep in the sleeping quarters or go down a in a planetry landing location and kind of do the same um those are sort of the moments that okay you're at this point in your progress is safe but we don't let you do it while you're in conflict you don't let you do it you know in you know potentially we wouldn't let you do it in certain unsafe areas uh but there will be areas you can do that so you don't have to finish the trip you could save log in and then you log out and you'd still be back there now of course the prices of the Commodities that you may be hauling may have changed if you take too long to come back but that's kind of up to you at least your ship won't get taken or attacked okay next question comes from Smoke Stack who asks it was mentioned on a recent ter for the chairman that the new M prospector will possibly be able to carry cargo containers full of M

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    material to a hull class ship could a hull class ship possibly have the ability to carry a prospector in like a piggyback mode or that one or two people could carry out a Manning operation with just a hole and the prospector or will the prospector have the ability to take jump points on its own okay so the prospector will definitely have the ability to take jump points on its own it sort of is designed as a sort of more uh personal mining ship so you know we have the RSI around which is industrial scale which is kind of like the reclaimer industrial scale uh but the prospect is more sort of in the size range of a freelancer uh and it's specifically got sort of mining equipment uh for essentially you know uh laser Drilling and tractor beam and you know and tractor beaming up various sort of uh minerals and materials or ore and

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    stuff that you could find on the surface of planetoids or say off asteroids and stuff like that and uh you sort of pack up uh these sort of you know whatever you want to call them or containers uh and they'll sort of fill up and then those containers could be handed off to a bigger ship sort of like think of it as a you know containership sort of uh Paradigm where you know you see someone's Mining Co and then they load it into uh you know basically uh train um trucks and then they take the train goes off to uh you know like the coast and then they load it into a big container ship or a big coal ship and it goes across the ocean um so uh so those kind of things will will be available uh I'm not 100% sure on whether the prospector potentially could be attached to the the hole if it was it would only be the very bigger

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    holes we've talked about them potentially uh being able to ship um you know like almost like a a car carrier that you see um but it's still early we're going to be showing the prospector um well this week actually and um so hopefully you guys like it it's uh it's uh definitely feels very Mis it's kind of cool uh and I think it's going to be sort of pretty interesting gameplay so I'm kind of interested to seeing people sort of use that as uh going and you know doing non combat oriented stuff but of course then they'll be taking the the materials somewhere to sell and you can either hand them off or take them yourself and then maybe they'll be Pirates that'll be after you trying to You Know Jack you for the ore that you've got and then maybe you're going to have someone help and protect you and I think there's a lot of cool emergent gameplay that will come from that um so that's the answer on that one okay next

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    question comes from Alex Valentine who asks now that the constellation is roughly in line with where it should be can we expect to see it capable of deploying its Merlin in the Pu so the Merlin being deployed in the Pu is on our schedule we are working on it it sort of comes with some of the uh kind of bigger ship um stuff like we're doing the same stuff for the Idis where you can fly in Gladiators and land inside it uh and we're working on a spec you know um besides manually Landing there's sort of Auto some Auto Landing Manu modes cuz it's not as easy to land in a ship while it's moving as you would think uh and the same would be kind of for um the constellation so being able to have the mill and sort of duck in the back and then you get in and out so it's not going to be in the next release or two but um you know in the near future yes because it's it's on our road map and

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    it's really just a matter of uh uh getting to it and having some of the other fundamental stuff we've sort of been waiting till the full item system stuff is uh 2.0 cuz some of the people that will be doing that or working on that and this other thing which we call object containers which is basically a holder of a whole bunch of objects and they can be Russian dolls you can have another holder of a whole bunch of objects inside it an object containers sit inside zones and essentially that's that's our uh it's not a cry engine way it's a sort of new way of um uh streaming in like a say Port Port alasar is a good example that's a space station that will be an object container so a point of interest will be an object container uh but inside that you've got the space station and then say maybe each room or each um you know spoke or Hub on the space station could be a

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    separate object container so it gets rush and doed and then the Artist as they working on it the sort of modular fashion can save individual containers out and then load them all in and then the container itself holds the information for the objects inside it and has all the streaming information so it knows oh well I get within this range I start I need to start streaming in and of course containers inside something you don't need to start streaming them in until you're going to be maybe landed on it you can be able to walk inside and so it's it's the sort of tech fundamental Tech that is going to be running the Idris and the all the big ships because you know we've got basically huge floating FPS levels which you don't want to be rendering certainly and you don't even want to have streamed in until you actually will be seeing them or using them or interacting with them um and so uh that is uh uh that Tech has be in and then sort of the mill

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    and some other stuff happens um and it's mostly because the people working on on that Tech would also be the people that would be doing uh sort of the mill and docking and getting in and out uh stuff okay next question comes from Steve Hunter who asks I am curious about the Quantum Drive is it envisioned to have the Quantum Drive be steerable in the future to be able to change your heading while D traveling in Quantum Drive or is a Quantum Drive meant to be always in a straight line travel only no Quantum Drive is always meant to be straight line travel you are not you are traveling at such great SP such great speed that any sort of cost deviation would either have to be done incredibly slowly or you would basically return to jelly from the the kind of G forces that would be excerted because you know point2 the speed of light that's that's very fast um and so the idea is uh you know it's just a straight line shot so

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    you have to line up where you're going to go and that if any sort of uh large object gets in the way like a ship or you know a gravity well or anything like that um select your body you get pulled out of quantum drive because essentially it's a you know kind of sort of a p hand wavy science fiction for it is it's it sort of creates a gravity bubble around you that also helps accelerate you up to a really fast speed and then you do the opposite because um you know I mean even just going from you know I don't know two 3 4 500,000 meters per second 2 point2 speed of light in you know whatever it is a few seconds is you know incredible amount of uh acceleration so unless you were sort of in your own sort of gravity bubble um you would still be squashed it only works basically straight line um which you know kind of is cool

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    because then it sort of allows mer play if you know which direction um someone's flying uh you could track their um Quantum jump you could maybe radio ahead because don't forget that's uh at the speed of light instead of 2C and uh although youd have to be depending how far they're going uh you'd have to have a distance but then someone would know their trajectory and you could deploy say a uh you know an interdiction device which would kind of think is sort of like a gravity well that will sort of pull you out in the appropriate uh place and then interdict the person that's flying it so um there's a lot of kind of cool stuff and we're sort of playing with all those those aspects but it will definitely be straight line okay next question comes from ch1 gz who asks with the large number of controller options available what is going to be your own personal controller setup when it comes to

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    playing the final released versions of Star Citizen well there scitec hotas with that modular keyboard and the mouse absolutely they're that's totally cool it's themed uh we've actually spent a fair amount of time uh looking at prototypes and giving feedback and stuff like that like how it feels where the button is um kind of thinking about functionality so it is specifically designed for Star Citizen to have the best of all the worlds possible so you have you know the the you know the feel of controlling flight with a hotas um you know you got the keyboard obviously for sort of all the extra stuff and having a mouse for you know we running around doing some FPS stuff so that 100% will be mine it looks cool and uh it's you know functions well or at least the early technical prototypes do where you have to sort of finish the path of testing out the manufacturing prototype and all the rest

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    stuff but that is uh you know we're going to put on everyone's desk they're super cool um so that will be my want next question comes from uh CZ who asks will there be any other way to stop people from jumping away during combat other than using an EMP will we just have to hope to shoot their engines off and not destroy their ship or can we look forward to something some sort of tracker beam technology okay well I sort of discussed a little bit of this when we were talking about Quantum Drive um and uh you know we're thinking about several things uh like so the whole ability to interdict uh is um something that we're working on like all the ins and outs and the edge cases of it uh and yeah we do not want people to be able to jump away during com come out first of all they're going to have to be able to

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    get far enough away from whoever they're fighting to have enough separation to spin up the Quantum Drive they can't have anything that's blocking him or inside and you know we've talked about certain things like uh you know the power drain needed to actually do the jump uh you know may drop your Shields or whatever else it would make you vulnerable um if there's other people around trying to take you out we're also talking about when you come out of Quantum Drive say if you get interdicted you can't just instantly just go to cruise um you know your engines have to cool down and so there'll be a moment of uh vulnerability where you if you're getting interdicted you'll have to survive dve for a while before you can spin up to cruise to try and get away uh and then get far enough away then maybe you could Quantum Drive again that's kind of sort of the the the um the ideas and so one of the ideas of the of the interdiction is that you would deploy a

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    um kind of you know whatever we want to call it a gravity well uh generator which can be something that your ship deploys or you could deploy it as like kind of think of it as a you know putting a mine out there or something to you know or a hook to catch fish going by so um uh so definitely there is going to be plenty of ways to stop people jumping away so the gaml that you see right now in the mini puu will not be uh the actual uh final game play so we're working on the systems like everything we got a massive list of things to do and it's really just comes down to priorities um because you know we could have double the amount of game programmers and they probably would still be saying oh we don't have enough people um so but yes you you you there will be other ways to stop people from jumping next question comes from Jack Hollow who say with the star seon event

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    being held in La comment as expected and being announced as the first upcoming SC event can I assume that I've booked my rooms and tickets for gamescon in Germany for nothing and that SCSI will not be there this year whereas they were there for 2014 and 2015 so check no you don't have to assume that we are absolutely going to be there um I was actually looking at our um sort of uh well both our press booth and our game show uh floor Booth so we're going to have uh you know more of a presence on the the actual floor uh I think there's going to be sort of a couple of sort of popup social events that we're going to do there so the one thing we're just not doing this year is we're not doing the big um sort of feature reveal uh that we did the last couple of games cons in the

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    big venue um mostly just because uh that can be pretty big on Logistics and we've got a lot of things going on like obviously Squadron 42 that ones working hard on and a lot of features ey out for star seon uh we are going to be showing some pretty cool stuff um and it will be uh you know various stuff that we we have in development but we're going to sort of focus more on uh the sort of show floor doing some press stuff and then sort of some social sort of Pop of events where people get together and mingle and talk rather than a big full-on uh presentation like we did uh the last couple of years and that's mainly just for we've got you know a lot of stuff to get done and everyone's running uh kind of r because it's you know getting pulled a lot of things and you know the big games con events always sort of take a fair amount of focus uh but we are absolutely going to be there

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    I'll be there uh people like Aon will be there Brian Chambers will be there Community folks will be there um so I think uh we'll be there so don't worry about it and there'll be plenty of time to have uh some beers in the beer garden um all right so you didn't book your tickets in vain last question comes from tramps Nest who asks with the introduction of persistence and economy will you still be able to rent weapons with wre and use them in the Pu uh so no wre is only going to be a device used for um essentially electronic access which at the moment is Arena Commander but would also be star Marine when that comes online and if we have sort of a game mode for sat ball which also is down the line um versus the real sat ball because you're also going to be able to really race as well um in our pu universe but all anything in the Pu

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    universe will be in ueec so beginning it will be Alpha ueec which is sort of the you know kind of the you know temporary or the the Alpha version of our proper currency that we can reset now and then um you know because obviously there's going to be a whole bunch of experimentation and balance issues and all the rest of stuff uh and so you earn you'll earn Alpha U and you'll use that to buy things that will persist uh the wreck will be just the way it is in Arena Commander as it is right now uh and you'll probably be able to use Alpha U to buy and wreck you know sort of that meta bang you know in in one game it's sort of you know an exception how many levels down do you go um so there you go all right that's the last of the 10 questions I had from subscribers for this week like I said at the top of the show it'll be uh a little while before I'm back on this since I'm going over to

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    the UK and Germany for a um decent trink of time to deal with moap and pcap and sitting with the teams um so I'll miss doing this for a few weeks uh but when I come back I'll be doing them again and in the meantime there'll be a whole bunch of other folks sort of taking up the slack and they always do a great job and sometimes you get bored of me anyway so um but thank you everybody thank you the subscribers who contribute money to allow us to do this really appreciated thank you to everyone that's backed us and making us allowing us to make the game of this scale I mean I you know I say it every month but or every week every time we get on the show and anytime we ask me but without you guys we we couldn't be doing what we're doing we're building something wildly ambiti is that I am 100% confident that no other publisher or company or anyone uh

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    would be crazy enough to do uh the investment really honestly is too big for a PC game and a space game uh but we're doing it and I think we're going to make history because uh you know we're getting to build something of detail and complexity that you normally don't have the opportunity to do uh and it's all because of you guys so thank you very much and uh I will talk to you guys um in the hopefully not too distant future bye hey guys thanks for watching um temp for the chairman uh if you guys would like to uh see more episodes go here if you guys would like to subscribe to our YouTube channel and always keep up to date with all our video content go here and uh if you guys would like to watch episodes of R the verse go here please

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    and I will see you in the verse