Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Spectrum and LA Studio Update

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   hello and welcome to around the verse our weekly in-depth look at the development of Star Citizen I'm Sandy Gardner and joining me once again is game director Chris Roberts yep hey py uh good to be here for another ATV it is good to have you back and first off we wanted to quickly say congratulations to the team for getting the alpha 2.6.1 live and into the hands of all of our backers yes well done to the team uh there were a ton of great upd dates that have gone into this patch including New Balance changes to ships and weapons and map updates in Star Marine but the biggest accomplishment was the introduction of regional servers and the single player Mega map I know there's a lot of people in Europe and Australia quite happy that they have much lower pings than they used to do playing the game very cool and 2.6.1 wasn't the only thing to go live last week our new

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   communication platform Spectrum was rolled out as well you can sign in right now to chat with devs and fellow players and use the much improved forums there yes they are very very cool uh and along with the patch release we've updated the production schedule to show how our estimates lined up with our actual deliveries uh comparing the two gives some interesed insight to how we plan our scheduling and obviously this has be an ongoing thing we'll be doing for each oncoming patch and last but not least we have one more exciting thing that we'll be introducing this week tomorrow we'll be launching the concept sale for the Anvil hurricane yeah so this fighter is going to be a great addition to the lineup uh it's one of my favorite um designs we have right now so developed originally for the second tarian war this two seeder puts a heavy focus on Firepower that's all I'll say for now because I don't want to

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   spoil too much before you get to see the cool brochure tomorrow and it is very cool but make sure you stick around for an exclusive first look at the hurricane end of the show first up though let's go now to this week's Studio update to hear the latest developments from the Los Angeles team hey everyone I'm Eric tyon Davis Senior producer here in Los Angeles as many of you know the LA office houses several disciplines working across multiple aspects of Star Citizen so we wanted to give you a quick update on the progress we've been making one of our biggest teams is the technical content team led by the great Sean Tracy members of his team span across three time zones and if you were to describe that team the function of that team on a t-shirt it'd reads something like solving problems you didn't know you had in ways you wouldn't understand so to understand those solve

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   problems here's some of the things that they did to start a portion of the team is working with engineering on the new damage system as we've shown in the past some ships are already using the new damage system which create much more random and organic damage effects via procedurally generated materials and an internal skeleton that appears when the the metal just melts away we've also been working on the uh adding the physics driven destructible Behavior to our item system 2.0 initially this just meant converting the exist existing functionality into the new item 2.0 health and damage system however this work is much more than just a port networking persistence and VFX functionality will be improved and it also extends destructibility to broader class of entities including props members of the tech content team also work with animation to implement the

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   introduction of f Idols for Pilots of All Ships now no more death stairs when flying over to save someone from Korea additionally Tech content developed tool for marking up zones that are used by the renderer to hide and show different areas on a character mesh when layered pieces of clothing and armor are equipped so basically if your character is wearing a shirt and then you put a jacket on the Zone calling tells a render to hide and ignore any part of the shirt that is out of sight one of tech content's many contributions to the powerful feature was to create a tool that automatically zones and splits any number of assets regardless of topology this allows us to quickly implement the Zone calling feature onto an already massive database of character art in a fraction of the time so in a nutshell as opposed to manually updating existing

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   armor and clothing to work with this new feature this tool will automate that process and save us a lot of Dev time now our Tech design team has been working on many different elements of the game and one of their many tools to help everyone visualize expected gameplay is to develop prototypes of upcoming features and gameplay recently we've had two prototypes come out of tech design the first was based off of Chris's initial vision for the interaction system which in a nutshell is the intera interface by which players will be able to control and manipulate various objects in the game World such as ships control panels weapons and a whole lot more once they roughed out that system they worked with programming and UI to ensure that the Prototype functionality was not only clear on what we're trying to achieve but actually possible and the second prototype was

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   how the player controls the properties of items to manage their signals generated by entities like spaceships for example how the power is managed to Shields weapons and thrusters which allow us to manage our emissions and engage in a kind of a stealthy gameplay the foundational work of this prototype will allow us to change properties of these items so that we can determine how upgrading will be desirable and fixes our previously limited system which we were unable to balance and provide a design a much more direct way to implement gameplay via simple numerical values they're also deep into the setup of the Drake cutless black Buccaneer and the rework of the RSI Aurora as well as another ship we can't quite discuss yet and lastly they're taking a pass at updating our ship stats page on the website to bring all the information about our ships up to the most current

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   specs as part of this change we plan on providing regular updates about any changes to each of our ships going forward now over on the engineering side uh the team has been working on instance properties which allow designers to modify any part of an entity component in editor or in game with this feature designers do not have to create tons of similar entity templates for our game they just need to expose some parameters which the designer can then modify inside the editor this will save asset storage space and really reduce the number of entity components but at the same time allow for much more variations and obviously with the ultimate aim to create seamless transitions through our entire universe the engineering team is making progress on object container streaming by changing some of our core engine code which will radically

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   increase the amount of content we can put in the game all at once without sacrificing any performance for example we're currently replacing the old prefab system in the hanger and shops with an object container in the preparation for this expected streaming on the radar front we've added an extra timer value to the object data bank which will be used to specify how much time an entry can remain as an echo contact as well as implementing the metadata component interface which is an entity component that can be attached to any entity to make them radar detectable we've also added an object Data Bank linking and unlinking feature so that entities will inherit Data Bank datab bank entries from their parent this will allow an player to inherit information from the ship he or she is currently sitting in and then we're also working on new

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    scanner gameplay tied into the new radar system that build on the mechanic of revealing more or hidden information on radar objects we're really excited about this Edition because it will have a lot of potential elements to scanning another ship and will be instrumental in the internal eternal struggle between Smugglers and law enforcement for example lastly the engineering team is working on lighting states to provide a little bit more context when uh it comes to space stations ship interiors and other sorts of man or alien-made environments we want the lights to be able to have various Altered States to reflect certain situations like low power or emergency lockdown while we currently have a way to accomplish this using layer switching it has its downsides such as requiring duplicate lights for each state and having no options for transition animations we're therefore developing a new entity called

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    a light group that will take control of these lights that are assigned to it with its own internal State machine the Light Group will be able to modify its lights depending on the current state for example switching from a normal light state to an emergency light state and then back you can think of it as the ultimate light switch now over on the character side we've moved further down the pipeline on many of our new outfits specifically in Squadron 42 we have lots of Deb crew who work a variety of jobs and some of them need to work on the exterior of ships in the vacuum of space this de crew outfit is coming along nicely and is firmly in the high poly modeling phase also you've seen the Explorer spacit recently in the newsletter and on our previous updates and it's moving along nicely as well the the team is finalizing texturing and has already been sent to rigging which will

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    allow us to get it tested in game in the very near future and last but not least we're working very hard on the heavy armor class for both marine and Outlaw we now have the 3D concept for the heavy Outlaw going through rounds of feedback and once that concept's approved it'll move right on into the high poly modeling phase while the heavy Marine is in engine and headed over to the rigging team then onto the final implementation well that wraps us up for the LA Studio update thank you very much for your support and see you again soon thanks for the update Eric I think a lot of people are going to be excited about the plans for the ship page now that we're in better position to provide more accurate stats to everyone yes more accurate stats is always good uh what got me excited though was the design of our player interaction system for item 2.0 that has now gone into production

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    it's going to open up a whole universe of gameplay possibilities taking our initial grabby hands idea and incorporating it with the inner thought system has created a ton of new options for designers to begin exploring from looting to shopping to hanging out at the bar should be a lot of fun very very cool and speaking of hanging out next up we take an in-depth look at our new chat and Community platform Spectrum so let's head to Montreal to hear from our web development partner turbulent on the tech it took to bring this new system online Star season is a lot of things and it's aiming to be a lot of things it's uh a space simulator it's a shooter it's a a full-blown Universe you can play in first person it's a lot of stuff at the same time and a really important

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    part and crucial part in this is the role playing thing uh that for me is what draw like draws me the most to the project is uh the fact that people get can get immersed and play however they want in with any ship they want any setting they want and explore this whole thing and choosing like a career and the path and uh basically living however they want in that universe so if we wanted to do a communication platform for that game we needed to have something that would reduce a lot of the friction uh that would that would happen naturally between the players and the tools that they would use to communicate so when we launched the crowdfunding campaign in 2012 we started with a traditional website and traditional forums and a service called chat roll and these systems worked pretty well for us in the beginning they're very

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    traditional they're things people are comfortable with and for the size of our Community it made perfect sense for us to do that over time on the platform we've replaced or we've improved different pieces of these tools for instance we replaced a chat roll uh there was a point where we outgrew chat roll we would have more people in chat than it could support and it was sort of chaotic so we built our own chat system based on xmpp and that's on the service today still on the platform today in fact um we also talked a lot over the last several years about upgrading our forums to be more modern forums and in fact we've talked about a variety of things like building our own Forum engines having orgs uh allowing orgs to have their own Forums on our site um

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    these are all major undertakings because we have you know more than 30,000 organizations and so if we allow every or to have their own forums that means that you're you now have to support 30,000 different Forum instances and so we went to Chris with the plan to build a new Forum engine that we could replicate to all of the orgs because most Forum engine will allow us to do one instance but we needed it to do 40,000 instances of forums and so uh we came to Chris with this plan we designed a for engine uh to be modern uh you know new ways to basically see threads with trending uh replies that and notifications live updates it was a very nice concept but it was still just a forum engine so we needed to have a platform that would actually be part of

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    the project itself part of the game I think the key word became that we wanted this application to be available both in and out of game to cover for everything that's out of game because that's a real big part of your gaming experience today is talking with your friends uh you know setting up your game parties uh organizing with your organizations calendars and meetups and so we wanted to build a framework that will allow us to build that into the game the organization system has been around for a while now uh it's been actually 3 years I think and first of all it has an amazing response ever since it got out we saw the number of organizations created was amazing but also the amount of involvement that players were showing with those just a simple set of of tools that you could create your own presence

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    for organization and have a homepage that you could Define have text you could put in and have your own brand and stuff um that's just a a really simple set of tools and people did amazing things with that and now we with Spectrum we've given that whole new set of tools to uh cultivate that presence and actually cultivate your the spirit of your organizations right now when you play the game you start in a website you have your own inventory and that feeds into the game so that's one uh one way that it interacts but then Spectrum fits in there in that it is uh your your presence as a player in Star Citizen wherever you are whether you're playing or not um that also gets fed by data from the organization system so the organization system has been out for years now it's been I think three years

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    and people really uh took to that when it got out because it was the first time that it could actually role play into the universe of the game and uh we were Amazed by how many first of all the number like how many organizations were created but also like the implication of some players to sticking to Ro and having their own entity and their own identity in their organizations and having that uh Define who they are in the game even when they play giving all of those organizations uh an outlet to have their own forums and chat systems was a lot of pressure on us because it meant that we were not just releasing something to replace uh the original fors in chat of star citiz and we were actually launching not one but 30,000 Forum engines and chats and the opportunity for each of them to be customized

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    whichever way their owners wanted want them to be and so when we pitched it to Chris as a first iteration he literally told us to think bigger uh that we should expand on that and just try to fix communication as a whole instead of just trying to replicate the form engine so uh Beno and I continued to brainstorm and come up with different ideas and found uh by looking at a a lot of different systems that are out there like uh Discord is popular reddit's very popular things like stack Overflow things like other Forum engines uh we decided that we could tackle the challenge of building our own system that integrates all of these things and we started to design an application that would be unique to Star Citizen that could bridge this Gap uh between the web

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    uh experience that you get and the in-game experience that you're going to get when the game is fully integrated one of the cool features that comes with the Louisa Spectrum is social tools that add and improve to the user experience an example of that is moderation tools that allow organizations to better manage and organize their communities you know the team really stepped up uh but quickly realized that this was going to be a gigantic Challenge and not just a standard you know uh development effort that it would require many uh design Cycles many ux design cycles and at the same time Technology Innovation to be able to really you know to be able to ship it in a time that's you know respectable [Music]

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    and so as we got pretty much done with the design aspect of the project we realized not only What the how big the scope was but uh we realized that it was going to be a huge technological challenge to get there and so that's when you know we all met up together and we just like all right let's build this thing and then we kept on trucking from there so the first roadblox that we encountered was was that we didn't have the technology to build that and so we really needed to extend the r platform to include a lot of real-time services that were going to be needed to power you know lobbies real-time forums channels uh and you know soon voice lobbies but all of this needs to be built in a generic way but now that we have this technology we were able to step Stone to the next one other types of Rogue blocks that we encountered a giant one was uh the technologically the

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    technological stack for the actual application itself and so we knew it it had to be a web- based application uh now there are many many options on what type of framework we can use to build an app like that and so we set out to do a lot of research to figure out which stack we're going to use this includes you know what rendering technology we're going to use inside the the browser what kind of communication layer we're going to use and so we ended up uh choosing uh react as a base platform which is a framework from Facebook it's open source um that's our Baseline for the application we also use the uh library that we're big fans of called Redux that gives us a way to manage state inside the application that's really streamlined and so we started to move out everything into react um and we built the entire thing with it and uh it became a Hallmark in the in the team

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    here and this is this was an expertise that we sort of had internally but that we really need needed to expand on and so a lot of the team members that joined the Spectrum team were uh you know initially not very proficient in this technology but then really learn quickly uh based on L's work uh in order to really facilitate uh getting the rest of the features online so we were able to basically Silo that up between developers and so you know like people would focus on a specific set of features build it out without interfering with the others and then bring that into the main line so we could iterate quickly and so that was a really big big win because building traditional apps uh you know Chima 5 apps like we did in the past like the original RSI platform would not have scaled to this kind of of functionality and state transition and so we're really

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    happy about that and so other types of roadblocks that we hit was on the server side and so the there's a special use case for a web application that's different when you think about uh online connections and so we're the spectrum is using websocket connections for everything which is a way for us to get real-time updates on the on the client uh and so one of the major roadblocks we H really early was the fact that our let's say you're you compare the game to Spectrum in game you're going to have only one connection per account or per character right and so the uh the way the servers manage it is that you're connected once on Spectrum though you can have multiple connections and so you can have multiple tabs open you know you can have one tab open in the game open one tab open in your browser one on your phone and so you're connected multiple places and so we have to we have all

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    this class of problems that come from that uh like which connection is active which connection connection is inactive um you know are you the same user you know are you disconnected and now when you add the concept of presence to that that becomes fairly complex because then you can be online on a tab you know away on another one and so we have to basically brainstorm multiple versions of our presence system in order to re uh get to something that's pretty comfortable which is you have user control uh uh on certain present statuses but other statuses are automatically toggled for example online away and playing are automatically toggled by the by the system um across your connections and so are you also offline right so if you go if all your connections go offline then you're offline but then if you're reconnected

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    from your mobile then you're online right and so there's the this whole differentiation between online offline and then presence details that come in and so our first iteration of our prototype was very very simple and we had a single threaded presence system that was over there but then we quickly realized when we started having multiple connections and that you know this was not going to scale and so we had to bring other engineers in to basically build the proper presence Service uh which also turns out to be the first Contact point that we had with the game which was really exciting for us because then we were able to get the your presentence status from the game whether you're in menus and starine and Arena commander and your hanger uh into the into spectrum and so you know you're online and then you go online in the game and then it changes and that for us was like a super kickass moment because it's like wow you know now we're bridging this Gap and that's the vision

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    for this application right and that's the first wall that we're you know breaking down between the game and spectrum and and it's not going to be the last and so this whole whole roadblock of the present system was a major one but we're we're glad we tackled it this way because now we have a lot of flexibility in how we display presence and that's going to be a core piece of element for moving forward and so the the way we engag with the community for uh testing Spectrum was interesting and I think it's something that we're going to redo quite a bit we really want to make this a bit different in this process we have the chance of working on a component of the game which is not directly related to the story or lore and so I think we can share a lot more of our development like we've already been sharing with you guys the the type of technologies that we're using and we plan on keeping doing that in the future

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    but the way we engage with the community is that we we went to PTU uh fairly early in the process uh back in December and our initial goal was to go at this frantic pace of releasing our build every week uh to the community on PTU and so that's what we set up to do in December and we did that uh and so but not only did we want to ship builds and you know build notes and whatever which is standard but we also wanted to be there with the players on PTU talk about spectrum and you know be involved in the testing you know because sometimes there you need this like personal connection with players in order to understand what the problem is if there's a design issue if there's an actual bug right and so this frantic Pace we kept it for you know up to the launch in February and so

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    we're really happy about that because it gives it gave us uh this proximity with players that allowed us to change the app entirely like the you can ask any members of the evocati group Spectrum version 01 and version 03 you know what's the difference it's pretty major because we've made we've listened to feedback quite a bit initially to be able to fix it's all in small details which is uh which is you know there's broad strokes but a lot of small details got adjusted that were a big deal and so we're really happy about that proximity and we want to continue to do that after of course on the live service we can go as fast uh but we still plan to do an update a month uh even more if we can but you know as long as there is no breaking change we're good but uh we really want to keep that momentum going and so that you guys can see that how fast spectrum is progressing uh since we

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    don't have any you know special you know hide this feature thing right and so we can talk openly about what's coming up there's a lot next for spectrum but uh in the short to immediate term we we we're reviewing feedback we're looking at what you guys are telling us about the release uh we know we have a lot of things to adjust like the launch was pretty hectic but it was good uh but now we have you know technology changes to make in the short term we're going to adjust I think spend a lot of time on the form part of the of U of spectrum to make it uh reach a little feature parody uh with the old forms so we want to you know Spruce it up a bit additionally we're Reviving The Asad Dev section that you may remember from the forums it allows backers to ask question questions to developers in real time so they can gather more information about what's up and coming or specifics about U systems

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    we've already announced um we're really excited about it because Spectrum allows us to do this initiative and we have some new and exciting stuff coming up in the future there's a lot more functionality to come with respect to presence um more we call it rich presence to actually know uh to a very detailed level where you are in the game that would allow us to do more things around um parties and grouping and location awareness we could have location aware chat lobbies and location aware uh other location Weare Services one of my favorite Parts about spectrum is that it brings a lot of my favorite features from things like Reddit Discord and a few others and brings them all into one place that's easily accessible by the entire Star Citizen Community there's also a few modifications we want to make in how the Sorting works as you

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    guys know Spectrum supports like classic style sorting and you know more Reddit style sorting and so we want to keep this Duality and give you guys the power to do that within your ORS uh but we want to increase the feature set on that front so expect like a bunch of short updates to forums moving forward uh our big ticket items and in the what's next category is obviously mobile app and so we currently support mobile but we want to have a real native experience on mobile and so we're going to be working on on mobile ports but if you allow yourself to dream much much further than that you you can also Imagine stuff like uh a complete communication system with voice where you could have a um uh let's imagine you're in a in a in your ship you're Manning your ship with a couple of friends you have actually two

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    communication channels that you can switch between uh one that is for people who actually Manning the ship and having an actual role in the ship and another one is like a PA system blaring information to people who are not just Manning the ship but also like uh the not the crew itself but passengers or borders and um you could like switch switch between the two uh during the game and and and coordinate with your friends to counter that attack that is occurring right now uh ultimately Spectrum will replace our current forums which are very traditional you know functional but very traditional forums it will replace our xmpp chat and it will give Orcs their own forums to work with as well so we will we have achieved our initial goal already with the Laing

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    spectrum of giving every or their own private Forum to deal with having a live chat and having all of these modern functions built in so I uh if you guys haven't tried it already I I you know invite you to come online and on spectrum and give it a shot if you see anybody from turbulent online feel free to reach out to them and talk to them about Spectrum now don't flood them but you can ask questions I mean we have this policy that we want to be super open about this development and so any questions you have or ideas that you have bringing to us and you know we'll try to do what we can with it seeing where spectrum's headed I think you can really see how much it's going to bring to the game what we have right now is just the beginning uh we'll be adding a lot more functionality uh like bringing across the full organization setup uh to Spectrum a

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    wider variety of Fred Styles adding VI integrating closely with the game so you can see not only which of your friends are online but where and what they are doing as long as they actually put that option on cu you know we got to respect your privacy um going from chatting online to connecting with your friends in game on the same platform is going to redefine how players connect with Star Citizen and each other so I'm really excited by what it's going to bring I am too because staying connected with all of you is very important to us and it's a big reason why we create such a wide variety of behind the-scenes content every week that's it for this episode of ATV we'd like to thank all of our subscribers for giving us this level of community involvement yeah thank you very much for all of that and even though we say this every week it stays just as true we would not be able to build a game as wonderfully complex and

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    immersive as Star Citizen if it was not for our community of backers so thank you very much thank you very much and we would like to invite all of you to join us tomorrow at 12 Pacific for the latest Star Citizen happy hour stream for some live gameplay as well as something very special yeah this week's guest will be character art director Josh irman uh who will be creating a new creature concept live on the stream so good luck to him for that uh we and while taking suggestions from the chat it's not something you're going to want to miss coming up now as promised is the exclusive premiere of the brand new Anvil hurricane going on sale tomorrow yeah so take a look and we'll see you around the verse he

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    thank you for watching so if you want to keep up with the latest and greatest and staff citizen of Squadron 42's development please follow us on our social media channels see you soon