10 for the Chairman: Episode 53 (2015.02.16)

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 uh for those that you haven't watched this before this is where I take 10 questions from the community um more specifically the subscribers um who generously uh contribute money every month to allow us to do enhanced Community content so this show around the verse um you know meet the devs uh sort of behind the scenes at cig video pieces the jump Point magazine we do which is 50 to 70 Pages uh a month uh with pretty in depth behind the scenes of how we built a certain ship or worked on a level or some of the game mechanics we worked uh on and um and sort of other community uh content and background stuff that we do so even uh

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   some of our live event kind of stuff um you know we sell tickets for the Live Events but that only covers actually a a portion of of some of um what we uh spend on sort of the community ability putting together things for sort of Our Town Hall so everyone can ask questions uh and so a lot of uh the organizational work of that is done by our amazing Community team um that um is built to uh to interact and help facilitate interaction with with you guys out there with everybody actually um you know developing the game on the you know coding doing the art designing levels and stuff so so thank you guys for uh enabling us to um really sort of push uh the uh interaction uh the day-to-day interaction with you guys I had gave a speech at dice um about a week or so ago about this um uh where I sort of made an

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   passion plea in very short 20 minutes which is unusual for me uh to the industry saying that you know if you focus on uh your community and embracing them there's a lot more you get from um your community rather than you know yes okay you've letting us make the game which is completely awesome and and thank you so much for but also just you know the ideas the interaction the feedback all that just makes a better game and uh so it's a it's a great way to develop a game we're having the time of our life I'm having the time of life making this game so thank you all for that and back to the original thing thank you for the subscribers for helping a certain aspect of that happen every week one of which is this show which is 10 for the chairman where I take 10 questions asked by subscribers and answer them to the best of my ability um so having said that uh let's get to the first question which is uh zadam who says you mentioned the

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   reputation is tied to the owner not the pilot we know an organization can own ships can a player use the org own ships to do Dirty deeds and as long as the players aren't identified um hidden org members in Brackets uh will their personal reputations not take a hit so definitely the owner of the ship is going to be the one that would uh take the biggest hit on reputation if you sort of do bad things like attack another ship uh when you know in in so much as the uh details of the implementation of that like is there a way that some of that rolls off to people that are identified on the ships um we haven't fully fleshed that out I mean we're obviously going to try and make it so it can't be abused uh but it would be sort of realistic um so you know if you're you know running around in a certain organization ship and

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   plundering uh the trade Lanes with it then definitely that organization is going to take some heat for it and then potentially there maybe some blowback on individuals that would be uh flying on it but the actual you know exact rules of how much the individual versus how much the sort of organization would be exposed is uh you know that hasn't been sort of defined and probably would be sort of fleshed out in our sort of alpha stage on the persistent Universe uh which we're going to be rolling out the earliest part of that um by the end of this year for you guys all right next question comes from dark owners who ask if I loan out my ships to a friend from or my organization will they be able to switch out the weapons and other components for their own items on their account yes I I think they actually would be able to switch out um it does bring up a good question CU I don't think we've uh really thought about well

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   okay what happens if I lend you my ship and you switch out some of the items on it for items you own what happens to my items well um so I would assume that what would happen if we did that my items would basically stay uh where the weapons were shipped at were were were basically switched out and then when you give it back to your um friend uh then the items would get put back on it and you get back of the ship uh the way it was sent to you um I would assume that's kind of how we would implement it uh but that aspect of the lending the ship and what you do with the components hasn't been uh hasn't been fully fleshed out on the rule set yet and that would be something we would obviously have to figure out the details for um okay next question comes from K cravener who asks will positionist

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   Universe missions such as attacking a pirate Outpost scale to the number of players who accept this Mission if so will the scale also take into consideration others who happen to be in the area during the attack uh well it sort of depends on the kind of mission that you're going to be uh accepting so um we definitely are going to have some scaling in the sort of dynamic missions that we have that will be based on uh several factors one which would be based on um you know your skill level and a few other factors including the number of um uh people in your group so if you're flying around with three or four of your friends and uh you accept a mission to um go after some Pirates potentially an engagement with the Pirates there may be more pirates in that engagement uh encounter than would be if it was just a solo mission that you were expecting so there's some

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   amount of scaling some wouldn't necessarily scale so we may have some encounters that are just big encounters and you'll have to get a group together to win uh some will be sort of small encounters which will really be you know simple to do and won't pay much and so you do it by yourself obviously you get all the payment if you do it with a few friends you'll split it it'll be easy but you'll split it so um the functionality is there and it is part of the whole sort of dynamic Mission design it's just it will be sort of on a case-by Case basis depending on sort of the template and the enounter and kind of what we think is appropriate um okay next question comes from Shri uh who asked if I'm a LW binding uee Citizen and stumble across a shipwreck in space should I have any reservations about salvaging the wreck and selling anything that I'm able to obtain from a legal perspective no I mean I think in general if you come across a wreck in space um especially depending on the situation because

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   there'll definitely be cases where we'll sort of uh you know there'll be two kinds there'll be the sort of the you know a players being attacked and you happen to be in that instant area and they all have their wreck and perhaps you could salvage some stuff from there and there potentially could be uh some sort of uh you know uh timer or or timeout thing on that because you don't want people abusing it where someone attacks someone and then someone that's their friend and says oh I just found this uh I found all this cargo floating in space uh but you know after a certain period of time uh then you know it sort of be like it's open uh for Salvage and there definitely will also be um you know wreck ships that will be spawned as potential encounters that you can salvage from and that will be perfectly fine to salvage uh so we sort of we'll have to handle it we'll we'll handle it with some level of sort of um you know

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    wreckage left over from counters that are simulated on the universe simulation that happens on our big universe server and that will sort of Spawn ships that are sitting there that perhaps they'll have goods and items that you can sell Salvage and you'll be fine in doing that and then there'll be some Salvage that will be available because of player versus player combat or even player versus AI combat that you come across and those will be sort of uh have uh generally will be okay to do but there'll be some level of uh of uh guard against people sort of abusing the system um by pretending not to know the guy that attacked them and uh you know legally obtaining the goods um so um I hope that anwers the question okay next question comes from llads who asks in regards to the Universe instances if I were stalking someone over multiple solar systems how are we ensured that we will be instance with that person every

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    time okay well so in that particular case this is the whole idea of the person of interest um denos so like when you're tracking someone and you you can Mark someone through your Moby glass um you note them as a person of interest so you know there's there's different categories there's a person of interest uh there's your friends there's your enemies your friends and enemies are sort of the the you dependent on like organizations who your friends list is uh you know who the enemies of your friends who the enemies of your organizations are but a person of interest is the way the game will track someone you're interested in so that's part of the uh matchmaking criteria when it's putting you into an area or an instance it looks around and and and looks at who's there and goes oh well uh you know oh this person's a person of interest for for Chris so okay I will want to put Chris into this instance and

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    that's how you sort of get to keep with them and track them as they move across instance to instance to go against sism that carries down also onto the planets as well as into space um and there was kind of a write up of that in uh sort of the whole sort of multiplayer and instancing um post that I uh wrote uh quite a long time ago at the beginning of the uh the campaign but that's that's still the fundamental uh design um we think it will work pretty well um you know we're still obviously working out some of the sort of balancing on the instance side and how many people we can get into one instance and so how many slots we' reserve for friends uh enemies uh people of interest um but uh but uh I think the design is pretty solid so I think it'll work well um okay next question comes from raging Simeon who asks will large ships like the

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    javelin Bengal or even bigger behave similar to the space stations and exist in all instances at once or will they get matched into a single instances somehow well it sort of depends um but the very biggest ones that you can fight over and take over uh potentially will be um sort of persistent uh and therefore will not be instance in multiple Dimensions essentially which is kind of what happens uh when you instance um so like if you own a Bengal um it can only exist in one instance now uh so it can't have like a version of that Bengal across four different instances with four different groups of people attacking all at once it'll only be one instance where the Bengal's in and uh you know there will probably be some uh kind of fictional rules that uh handle um people sort of arriving out

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    that ship and being able to fight over it in the same way that we're going to do for space space stations and and asteroid bases um so it'll be similar to space stations um but like I said space stations don't exist in all instances they space stations just exist in one instance but that in but that that instance can't be sort of copied so you you can't have like so the difference is like if you're in orbit around Earth or something in or Earth you can you know we potentially will have thousands of people in orbit around Earth transition down to earth you know leaving Earth to go out to space uh well we obviously can't have thousands of people in one instance so in that particular case you know say if we had 100 people per instance that we could manage which you know was we're nowhere close to right now but we are working on being able to have a lot more people in the instance um and we had a thousand players there would be 10 instances of sort of like

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    space the space around Earth and maybe they won't necessarily all be in exactly the same location maybe they'll be placed around Earth in different places but basically when people are in orbit they'll be in these different instances and then they can go down to earth and come out to Earth but they're never going to be able to see all the thousand people that are around them and the people they see in orbit around Earth will be based on who their friends who their enemies who the people Persons of Interest are which is sort of that that specific design now in the case of a space station or something persistent like a Bengal carrier um there would not be a Bengal in every one of those 10 instances there would only be one of those instances that would have the Bengal in or one of those instances that would have a space station if it was a space station you could take over and that um you know so that would would only ever be 100 people or something that could be on board it or attacking it or you know approaching it at the

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    same time and then there would just be a dynamic that would sort of manage uh whether you can enter that instance or not based on how many open slots there are um uh so that I hope that answers the question there um next question comes from uh fog adus or fogus I don't know the best way to say that um who asked how will NPC ships deal with jump points will the AI fly the jump Point like a player Ward or will an NPC ship just automatically transverse the jump point with a small dice roll that results in a jump Point accident so generally uh the MP AI if you're not seeing them do stuff a lot of the AI will sort of have its resolution happen at a higher level so what we do is on the Universe um simulation which runs on a separate service and uh server it like simulates

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    you know 20 million AI agents but you know these AI agents aren't uh running around at you know the Fidelity that we're running around in the actual game so you know that's much more like I don't know think of it like a civilization game or something like that where we have all these agents and they've got their turns and you know okay I'm trading okay I need a mission for uh 100 tons of goods to come to my factory that goes out some other a agent takes it okay they go okay I'm going to fly from uh this plan Planet a to Planet B to deliver the goods along the way uh there'll maybe some pirates in that area of space they get close enough the universe simulation would say oh you're close enough they would have some simple combat resolution of what's happening there now all of that if you're not around to see it that's what's happening in the background it's been sort of simulated a sort of very higher turn level basis but what's happening as that this is H as this is happening on the

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    universe server is the universe server is taking sort of snapshots of all this action basically um procedurally building them into uh what we're calling sort of encounter templates and uh based on that as you're flying around so if I was flying around in that particular case where there's a ship flying from planet a to Planet B that's taking some goods and some Pirates are attacking it um you know the the universe server has said well okay if you're in this area of space there's a 60% chance that you will see a transport ship of this particular type taking this Goods traveling from this point to this point and there is a 40% chance that it will be attacked by a pirate of uh you know this Armament and this type of ship and then when you're flying around in that area of space I get to that space when I get out of my um you know I'm plotting my uh Quantum

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    Quantum uh Drive sort of path um it plots it oh it's going to cross this this encounter area we're calling it sort of an encounter Cube Coss an encounter Cube and then the system goes well this is what the universe server is saying is happening at this very moment in this area of space uh let's roll a dice oh yeah we just saw the uh okay we we we roll a dice yep you're going to see one of these transports oh we roll a dice you're going to see one of these parrots and it's going to pull you out of quantum space and that and counter will be happening right in front of you and then as you fight with them say you save the transport and you kill the pirate that would go back up to the universe server where the pirate would then you the the the game server side which is the high fidelity simulation side that's happening on on the Star Citizen you know like what kind of the equivalent of what you're seeing in an arena Commander um would communicate back up through the various server

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    levels the solar system level system server to the universe server and it would go up the chain and it would say hey pirate was killed here that pirate would be knocked off on the big 20 million AI simulation and so next time now when there it does it sweep through the system again to sort of tell the solar system uh server and the basic Game servers what the snapshot of what's happening in that area space now now there wouldn't be a pirate there because it got killed by you and it went back up to there and so it says Nope there's only a 60% chance you're going to see a transport ship going from here to here so essentially what happens is the full sort of like like longterm of the big picture simulation of people going about daily uh jobs and objectives and long-term objectives all happening on the universe simulation uh and then you're sort of seeing a snapshot of it um down on your side which is sort of

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    what we call the game server side which is sort of the High Fidelity simulation and your actions go back up to the the universe server and change things up there and the universe server is always pushing stuff down telling you on the game server and the solar system level what you will see at that one place or instance going around it's kind of a random it's not 100% answering about the jump Point thing but but I guess the point I'm making is that a lot of the actions that are happening sort of are simulated on a sort of uh for AI if you're not seeing them directly then it would be sort of simulated on a here's a chance of making the jump here's a chance and they that won't be actually flying the jump unless you're actually there so what happens is when things are spawned and it's happening you will see them actually do the actions if not it's sort of resolved in a sort of uh less granular way back on the universe server um but it's actually a you know uh the

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    design that we're using is actually a really uh nice design because it's a kind of fuzzy logic between the universe and the what you what the players see because it doesn't have to be tied one to one but players absolutely will have an effect of what's happening in the universe and running around in space when you're running around a system getting into counters it's going to dynamically be changing because the universe server is always pushing down data basically dynamically building these sort of encounters for you based on what it's seeing in its snapshot of the universe and world um so it's actually uh a system uh that I think is going to work really really well it's something that uh uh you know Tony actually did a lot of work on coming up with some of the basic foundations of it and uh I'm pretty excited because there's a lot of possibility for a

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    really cool living breathing Dynamic universe and we've got a lot of other stuff to talk about that we ar necessarily sharing yet about the different levels of sort of the AI uh that will persist uh for you or persist globally um that there'll really be characters uh you know there'll be personalities I mean we talked about it quite a way along Longo death of a Spaceman but um you know it's it's it's the next level I mean I know you know a lot shadow of midor and the Nemesis system getting a lot of talk but the sort of stuff that we've got going for this is like a whole another level and I think people are it's anyway it's going to make a really immersive living world and it's going to be very cool um all right next question comes from the Hound will we be able to capture notorious NPC bounties Planet side or will we have to attack them in space um well okay so this kind of talks into a little bit of

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    what I was talking in that sort of the NPC uh levels uh and no you will not have to just capture them in space there will be opportunities to capture them on Planet Side on space stations in space it will sort of all depend on the kind of encounter template that we set up and sort of where the AI exists and what we sort of let you do I mean so to be clear with everyone because of the simulation of how we're going about the universe it's uh you know 90 % AI to about 10% players is sort of what we think would be a really good balance so that allow the players to have impact in areas uh but not completely disable you know destabilize the whole system um but that also means that in general 90% of the people that you're going to encounter will be other NPCs they will not necessarily always be other players there'll be certain areas that will set

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    up that will sort of attract players versus players and a lot more player stuff going on but there's definitely as you fly around you'll be seeing loads of transport ships and Pirates and you know whatever else cruise liners all that that will just be a living breathing Universe with uh with NPCs and we're going to have that extended so it's not just about space it's also you'll sort of see the the results of you know people going about their daily lives or missions or trading down on the ground too and so when it extends to sort of going after a sort of big boss NPC that you're got to go after a bounty um you know there may be a multi-part mission where you chase him in space then he lands down on the planet you land down on the planet you've got to chase them down to a you know a certain area and you have a gunfight with them down a I don't know in a shady back Alleyway I mean all those things will be possible and they're part of the sort of dynamic

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    uh mission system that we're building um that allows us to sort of string different um sort of encounter modules together and also stack them so you can sort of have a simpler encounter model module that has more like detail that comes on top depending on the situation and then they will have the various missions or encounters have inputs and outputs and so they can trigger another sort of encounter emission that follows on after it so it's going to allow for a sort of very sort of dynamic um uh experience and it's not it won't be it won't hopefully it won't feel uh like overly scripted it will actually because we're doing the the idea is each one of these sort of modules are actually fairly basic but the way they sort of dynamically add themselves or connect themselves together will make the game itself um sort of feel like it's

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    reacting to you and and what you do do um the action changes out there in in in space or on the ground next question comes from Leo who asks we saw pictures of the Mig glass placed on the left forearm will it be possible for me to choose the right forearm for my mobiglass if I want um well that's a good question I think that um what we're probably going to do is um you know stick it I would guess mostly to the left I mean I know this is the case of while if I'm left-handed versus right-handed uh so I would say if we support um left-handed versus right-handed then we would probably shift it over to the other arm but right now we're not supporting that uh not saying that won't be a couldn't be something that would happen longer term but would be way too many animation sets and all the rest of the stuff to support now so generally when you project it we would like have it project in front of you so you can interact but you should

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    also remember that it's not always going to have to go that like you'll have a contact lens that has the augmented reality aspects of things so you can sort of just see things and then you basically are bringing it up to sort of do the equivalent of your web browsing or what you'll be doing on your PDA so this is really kind of the equivalent of bringing up my iPhone and doing this oh I'll buy this thing now I'll do that but so so imagine the Mobi glass being very much like kind of you got an iPhone but now you've also got like a you know Google Glass or you've got like a eyepiece that will sort of do augmented reality around the world for you but you know you you you know you bring up your iPhone to actually do the transactions or say yes I'll buy this or no I won't buy this kind of thing and that's kind of kind of happen but in our case this will be sort of the Mobi glass which we'll project up there and you know maybe we even have a version of this that's not a Hol projection it's like a you know simple old school sort of

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    tablet thing if you got a more primitive version uh I don't know but that would all be possible in kind of the sort of system that we're we're working on um okay last question of the 10 comes from mandul who asks back in the early days there was talk of multiple game packages being able to be turned into NPCs that you could use as crew there was mention in the town hall that there there will not be permanently hirable NPCs does this mean that things have changed or am I still going to be able to have my NPC crew without having to pay their wages all the time multiple game packages are absolutely going to allow you to turn them into different characters uh you can Define your characters if you're not playing your character and it's appropriate for that character to say for instance be crew for you and you've defined them so like I'm a Star Wars fan and I've got my you know San Holo

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    charact uh you know Holo character not San Holo San Han Solo character and my chewy character right uh and I've got my two characters defined and they both live on terror and I decide okay I'm Logan now I'm controlling um hand solo uh and I get into my Millennium Falcon I can uh have checa as my MPC co-pilot now I could long on the next time and be controlling chewbaca and have Han Solo as my NPC but in the case of whenever someone's playing like you have some NPCs that are kind of uh playing roles on your ship they just you have to there'll be a running cost to that it won't be like fully free because you know it doesn't matter if you have a you know all the crew of The Serenity well they all wanted their share of the spoils um so that would sort of that

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    would be the equivalent of sort of a a running cost that you would have to have on your NPCs we haven't specifically thought up the Dynamics of how that would necessarily work so maybe there would be something that we would change when it would be player owned characters versus ones you would just hire out in the uh you know sort of the tdd area um but that's kind of the concept of the player owned ones is that you can like have have three or four different characters that you've customized in different ways and you can play any one of your characters you want and the ones you aren't playing you could maybe have as crew on uh your ships um so I hope that answer that wasn't a full answer on the wage issue um because General NPCs you will pay the wage potential exception for a character that you own although you'd have to sort of think the logic of it because you know chewy still likes to get his share of

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    the of the spoils when they when they do a run um okay that's the last uh question in ter for the chairman thank you guys for uh listening um hopefully some of my answers were uh informative and useful for you um you know having a great time uh we're working hard on the uh you know FPS module that will be coming out uh towards the end of next month and we'll be showing at PAX East uh we're also working on elements of the planet side and social module so everyone's got heads down and we're doing some uh stuff on Arena Commander that I think everyone's going to be quite happy with uh the that will also be released next month um so IT addresses some of the uh some of the uh things that people would like addressed um and yeah this is a big year so we're ramping up to do uh all the performance and motion capture shooting for squadron 42 which we will start doing towards the end of March and then April uh and the

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    beginning of May and uh you know um lots of work lots of fun it's great having all you guys support us and I will see you next week 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 around the verse go here please and I will see you in the verse