10 for the Producers: Episode 02 (2014.12.29)

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] I'm Daren and I'm Travis and we are two producers from the Santa Monica California office of clad Imperium games uh here for another round of 10 for the producers yeah against uh All Odds we're back for a second episode so thanks I appreciate that and thank you to the subscribers for making all of this possible and thanks for inviting us back we we actually never thought we'd see episode two yeah uh so let's get some questions yeah let's do it uh so the first question comes from sanban TX given that our pledge amount continues to rise daily it seems our employee count has not uh can you give some insight into what else clut Imperium games would need employee wise uh and if

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   or not do we honestly need more we're always constantly hiring new people um we're we're interviewing a lot of fresh Talent um we've got a lot of candidates that we're looking at so uh we are trying to expand our Studios globally um we've just had a round of of new employees in our Austin office in our uh UK office uh we've got a few people who just started on here uh so we are active actively looking to grow um Travis is also kind of spearheading a lot of the the recruiting so you you Insight on that well yeah know it's uh I guess I don't know where the statistic comes from that our team's not growing in size cuz it is every day so uh you know we are constantly growing it's a huge game to make as to the point of like what particular positions we're really looking to hire for uh you know I can't speak for every Studio here in the Santa Monica office

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   we're really looking for gameplay Engineers we need a build engineer uh we need somebody else on the flash programming side to help out Zayn uh I need ship artists Tech designers a lot of which we're in the process of hiring right now so and producers and producers yeah that's uh yeah it could be 10 for the five producers at some point uh on top of that I mean I I've only been here what three and a half months now and even just within the first week I was no longer the rookie person we we've we've already hired quite a few people so uh to kinda with Travis yeah our our account has gone up recently quite a bit yeah I mean when I started he there was three people so we're at like 40 something now that's that's a high percentage of growth whatever that is not good at math if you would like to join the Star Citizen team um if you go

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   to the clad imperian games website and check out the uh job openings uh we are always looking for talented individuals so if you feel you have the the experience and the skill set to join us uh please visit to the site and apply so our next question comes to us from somebody whose name I don't even have to try to mess up uh sisar maybe uh how often do you have to go back and re-examine the processes used for design for example the ship pipeline has grown and changed greatly over the last two years and I imagine that other areas have also had to adapt as newer more efficient ideas and Technologies arise is design and production basically an Ever evolving thing in your world yeah absolutely that is totally your question yeah it's uh um every single day we come up with something that might be a better idea whether whether we can do it in time for say 1.0

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   which we're in the middle of fining right now or if we're going to have to put it off till a later date and what that later date is and what the time involved in researching the technology is but yeah I mean in the time that I took over the ship Pipeline and like late August beginning of September and since then we've added ship paint which involves a second UV set to all the ships which was a whole big thing that we had to go back and redo all these damage States the UK team right now at Foundry 42 is working on adding a new procedural damage system for ships uh so you basically can eliminate the 25 maybe the 50s maybe the 75% damage States and handle it all through uh procedural damage and that sounds really promising and cool but that will again impact the way that we go about making our ships so it's a a constantly evolving thing and then on the design

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   side I mean if you saw like the initial cutless release there's a lot of um I mean the cutless was done I think it was put in the hanger uh December of 2013 just in time for Christmas around this time last year um and that ship originally you know its design wasn't fully fleshed out the variants weren't fully fleshed out so one of the things that we've done is Foundry 42 is going through and doing the white box for all these and trying to figure out more of the logistical things like at the time we didn't have a lot of answers on what is a medbay how does a medbay work what is the bounty hunting how does that work how do you capture people how do you reclaim them uh you know not reclaim them for like resources but reclaim them is like turn them in um those things weren't answered the designs weren't in place and now that we have answers to those questions yeah we have to come back to the ships and look at them again with a critical eye and go

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   okay now that we've got what we think is a solid gameplay Loop do does the ships actually does the ship actually support that uh mechanically so yeah it's it's a constantly evolving thing um but all game development is like that right it's it's a constantly evolving iterative process so that's really I think part of the fun of being in game development is it's always changing it's always new there's always a an openness and a quest for new ideas and better ways to do things so it's it's yeah it's part of what's great about the job but even just as producers our day-to-day stuff is evaluated on a regular basis such as how do we handle certain types of emails um certain email groups how do we you know send our month our Weekly Newsletter or the weekly production report just trying to find ways to streamline every single thing we do so if you find a process that's

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   inefficient or at least could be iteratively improved um we are going to explore it I mean that that's pretty much what we do yeah yeah if you if you don't like change this would not be the gig for you uh this next one isn't really a question from Rogue token um it's just a request so he wants to see his high five on camera so uh Rogue this one's for you hope you liked it all righty our next question comes to us from viic in light of having a good stash of crowdfunding what resource other than time is currently bottlenecking the development process is it the same nature of bottlenecks as more normal game development process or are there unforeseen challenges due to the way SC is funded so this is actually a pretty good question um what resource other

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   than time is bottlenecking us and I would say it's to answer it in a certain way it's it's the gestation period so there's always that analogy in production of especially on things like engineering tasks right where you have so many people working in the same area it becomes less and less efficient or they can't work in the same area physically at the same time in the same code base uh we're seeing this a lot on our large World conversion there's ways that you can break it up but there are definitely ways in which one guy has to go through it all the way and it's more efficient if you do it that way so you always ask the question is like if one of those things where you know if you say have a woman who's pregnant and she will give birth in nine months if you add nine more women or you going to have a baby in one month and the answer is no so a lot of these things very similar to normal game development just take a certain amount of time for somebody to go through and

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    do uh in the nature of how SC is funded being different it actually it interestingly doesn't impact us that much I would say the openness and the iterative nature with the community impacts us much more um the the funding itself I mean we approach us like building a game right so the community aspect and the community involvement part has a lot bigger effect than how we're funded even though that is through the community um you know it is nice though to not have uh visits from you call them like corporate suits or whatever but the publisher um or notes from the publisher or especially notes from the leny who is uh giving you information on how you should respect their property cuz it's our property so that makes a lot more fun and it's one it's one of those things that and you mentioned the the

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    the pregnancy where there's a misperception that you know if we're running out of time just hire more programmers hire more artists that's going to make it go faster to kind of you know kind of give a real world example on your you know nine women pregnant um we're probably the worst two people to talk about pregn anyway yeah I I'm expecting uh but yeah there are some things where throwing more people or more money at it is just not the answer and and that's something that I think every game studio uh comes to that that Crossroad at some point where do we need to hire more people or uh is it just a matter of making sure people remaining focused on the task at hand to just streamline the efficiency a little more yeah and actually I mean you even see that in the time if you've been following the project for a long time with the you know the initial studio in Austin being very small I mean it's very

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    common in game development that at the early stages having a bunch of people with a bunch of ideas you know the too many cooks thing is not going to help so you kind of start small and then you grow and then once you get okay this is our plan for X now with our plan for X we can have four parallel teams working on X and these like very distrect swim Lanes now we can expand fourfold on X you know so it's it's an organic growth process uh this next one's from fuzer hi uh can you please explain the process of bug tracking and solving in detail uh what's the average time frame from reporting to solving bugs how many people are involved in the bug solving process Etc can you explain the systematics of QA to avoid bugs in the first place you kind of asked the right two people about that uh how it works is

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    uh we have our QA testers uh whether they're testing in game or we get uh bugs reported from from you in the community uh the bugs are then reported within our own uh bug tracking software uh from there uh the producers take a look at which developers have the bandwidth and uh what kind of what the nature of the bug is so if it's going to be for example a a HUD or a UI bug that chance are would go to Zayn so we as producers look at everybody's task Clow and assign those bugs out to each individual person and we Tred to get rough estimates of how long each one would take to resolve from those developers and that kind of help us builds out build out our our workload for that particular week or even month yeah no it's going to be kind of a bad answer to this question because uh it's contextual at least in regards to the part of how long does it take to fix

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    something right so um a very important part of the bug process is especially when we're in the fining process right now is triaging right so we get in issues reported by QA and maybe something's really important to one guy but it's not that important for the product overall so he marks it as critical we lower it to moderate or trivial in jira jira's are bug tracking software that we use uh and essentially if something depending on the priority and how long it's going to take to fix really informs the speed at which we're going to fix it so for example on AC 1.0 we're focusing very heavily on these new ships that we're introducing that you'll see very soon or have already seen depending on the error date of this episode and what's cool about that is a lot of the kind of more Legacy ship issues or things that we know we're going to go back and rework later we're not going to end up spending time on them so it's all about prioritization

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    and managing people's workloads against the milestones and releases that they have coming up so to answer the length question it might take 5 minutes to fix a bug but it might not get fixed for a week depending on somebody else's priorities right especially if we have something that's blocking uh us releasing the build so you know if you got into a ship and the client crashes um even if that was a a 5 minute fix obviously that's going to be a a higher priority than something like uh a gun is appearing slightly off yeah exactly so it's is constant managing of priorities what can we push back to the next build or next version or next update um given a limited time frame um like right now we're so close to the 1.0 release that we have to look at what bugs are are not going to be important enough to push back yeah and if you if you want to

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    impress your friends with like certain vernacular that may or may not be commonly known wnf will not fix means if you get a bug and you look at it and go n not high enough priority to fix for this release wnf kick it off to the next version uh if you get something that's you know tough to reproduce and you can see somebody spending 16 hours on it because it's like oh we had eight players and 20% of the time when I think I was kind of doing this it maybe crashed uh CNR low priority so cannot produce low priority get me better Repro steps we'll look into it otherwise we're not going to waste the time on it for now so our next question comes from gorm with the growing clamor for Bigger Better Batter capital and multi crude ships should we expect Sig to continue introducing additional smaller and mediumsized ships for those players who because of choice or circumstance don't want to or can't play the bigger ships

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    do you feel the curtain lineup of starter and mediumsized ships is sufficient well the simple answer is you know in the long run that's going to be informed by the design but in the near term I think we've talked about on some of the Pledge goals the ships like the Mis Reliant the AG just Bulldog so there are a fair number of you would say even individual or two-seater or three-seater Ships coming along and once we start filling out the persistent universe and filling it out with all the different roles that we want to have and the ships that service those roles and the paths of scale in those roles then yeah we may find gaps we need to fill we may find and new I mean it's kind of similar to what Darion said I think previously where once you start playing the game more and more and you have more and more of the system fleshed out you start to see where your weaknesses are and where

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    where you need to augment it with more ships and um you know the ships are are in service of the design of the game so it's really heavily dependent on the design this next one's from princeps tragon uh great Roman reference on that one so in 10 for the chairman episode 46 uh Chris Roberts talked about having uh toilet shower bed eating facilities uh and how important they would be to have so will there be any good single seat ships that have a toilet shower bed eating facility so they remain uh viable ship to use in the verse this question's actually already been answered in game uh several of our single seat ships already have uh bedding facilities for example the the Mustang beta has a a full bed and was is it a full kitchen yeah it has a little like lounge with

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    some throw pillows a kitchen uh little little toilet action so yeah you got your your it's like your vanan your your forever alone ship right there with a full luxury Suite of of of items yeah so you can bu yourself man the ship sit on your couch and just Cruise yeah that was pretty easy our next question comes from Buzz Kling onon hey guys great show last week with the new modular ship system coming have the old upgrade slots been replaced by the new system or are they used more for system system upgrades like CPU sensors and cooling this is actually a good thing you asked this question um there may it sounds like from the question there may be a little bit a misconception about the modular system if you remember back to say the cutless and the uh they call

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    it cutless gate something like that um anyways what the modular the idea behind the modular system is you can already swap out coolers uh avionics motherboards I mean that's something the system already supports so the additional functionality of the modularity system is to swap out whole internal blocks right so the the inard of the ship um without saying too much about the variant for upcoming ships you know what this allows you to do is say if you have something that's a cargo bay you can maybe on a variant it's a medical Bay or maybe on another VAR well use the cutless example and maybe on another variant it's for transporting prisoners um with a modular system what it allows you to do is basically if the ship's designed right and the internal architecture is

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    designed right you can remove out the cargo bay and swap it for the prisoner transport part and then if you have larger and larger ships like say up to an Idris or a javelin or a whole sea or something like that or a Carrick for example had its little modular bits you can start removing whole rooms and replacing them with other rooms so you can further customize the role and capability that your ship can perform so it's not so much about items it's about whole parts of the not parts of the ship but rooms of the ship parts of the ship that can support uh you know multiple items inside of them or gameplay inside them so that's the idea uh another facet of that is going back to the the motherboard and CPU of a of a ship's computer uh there's going to be modularity to a certain degree on those such as a a motherboard that can handle

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    greater data throughput or uh certain apps that you can get for the computer that can um lock onto more targets or has uh faster locking speed or maybe have better infrared Spectrum signature detection yeah and and what he's saying is completely true one of the things that we actually have set up on all the ships right now are a separate targeting computer a separate avionics computer a separate a separate CPU and the CPU can best be thought of as your your power plant for your ship but for the data pipe so of the three pipes that we have on the ship it's the data pipe which is powered by the CPU the power pipe that's powered by the power plant and the heat pipe which is not really powered by anything but it is provided into by weapons and anything else you have attached to the ship engines Etc so yes uh for example in 1.0 you'll see that the Willis Ops custom targeting computer

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    for example allows you to do dock more simultaneous Targets in your uh oh zay's going to kill me if I don't get this right target overview context pain uh so you know decreased missile lock times it's all these different kinds of behaviors that uh that fall out of that system now it's something that um we have not we on the item manufacturing and design side have not done a great job of showing off that system very well you'll start to see it in 1.0 but as we start adding more and more options and uh and items and components it'll become much more a part of everyday gameplay uh this next question comes from our old friend beer for the beer God in past statements about the move to 64-bit it has been said that much of the cry engine code base uh has to be modified in order to support the change how will this affect being able to

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    receive updates from krych to the engine or will the changes be pushed back to krych so uh this is where the the skills of producer come in if if we don't know the answer we go and find it uh so we actually uh sought the answers from a few of our our cry guys Sean Tracy uh Paul reyell and James Wright uh so i' I've got that answer for you guys here so um forgive me for reading for it but I think you guys find it pretty informative uh so so Sean actually wanted to say he actually thought it was a really good question uh and an abute observation that uh changing many of the base implementations of data types like uh quat T yeah Matrix 44 34 and uh even double Precision integers uh make

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    integration significantly harder and timec consuming no doubt so uh in some cases it actually be automated uh which can help mitigate it but the the toughest times will be when uh when and if krych introduces a new feature that specifically uses uh data types and we have to update that feature completely uh so uh Sean also goes on uh and James go on to say that our our 64-bit change is actually a very targeted change of all World space positions and transforms uh uh it is not a blanket and blatant 64-bit change uh so while it does raise the difficulty of taking integration from krych it's not impossible um in fact before we completed our first integration from our large World Branch to our main branch uh every integration uh the large world

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    team took was like taking um an integration from krych in in many ways so we we have had a lot of practice at the point so on the krych front it it's basically quite far away from the base engine at this point and once the uh 64-bit switch is done it'll be even further but this is not in commmon with games that start with an engine licenses middleware the point of most of this middleware is that you will end up customizing to your game's needs and let's just say that the technical needs for Star citizens are Beyond those of any game that's been done using this engine so that information comes from Paul Randell who our lead engine programmer Sean Tracy who's our cry engine Tech director and also from James Wright who's actually the guy heading up the 64-bit conversion for a lot of the the world space transforms so our next

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    question comes from M Cod I have recently watched some TED Talks videos about space face and they said that there's an actual sound radio waves I think to Stars galaxies black holes Etc will there be some kind of radio receiver dish or something that will allow us to listen to The Magnificent sound of these celestial bodies I know there probably would not be a lot of functionality for this but it would still be awesome to have although maybe you could listen in for sounds to find hidden systems for exploration or hidden ships like sonar and Subs I you know I actually have not heard of this that's pretty cool um I will have to go looked that up o ooh o yeah I you looked it up yes oh actually no no no no no well not that I looked it up um being an an avid amateur cosmologist uh well different from a cosmetologist yes okay

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    okay every astral body emits sound so when we landed the Rosetta on the comet recently yeah yeah do you remember hearing that did you see that thing where they were recording sound from the actual Comet itself no you can actually look up online for astral body sounds things like Jupiter Saturn they all emit certain sound patterns you can actually listen to that some of it I think I want to say something sped up or slow down I can't remember is it like is he right is like radio frequencies like okay if I'm if I don't want to misrepresent it or misstate it but I want to say yes okay uh on top of that well you have why oh that's why Radio based uh astronomy is so radio tesc radio telescope we can listen to sounds from like pulsars uh everything gives off if I remember

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    correctly some form of radio like somewhere on a spectrum there's little waves and amplitudes happening frequencies and stuff yeah that's that's cool it's how we listen to some of the most distant objects in our our universe is basically picking up what those what those sound patterns are and they're really cool to listen to so as far as functionality in the game it would be a cool vanity thing I don't see yeah picturing a ship with like a giant radar dish you're listening for a jump point or something yeah H in the shape of a giant ear just yeah exactly I just think of like an old man with like one of those you know giant yeah ear GES yeah actually I just thought about something did you ever read the book or see the movie contact yeah yeah so did you read the book no so the movie

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    actually had almost nothing to do with the book where the movie was about religion versus science the novel itself which is why it's my favorite Carl Sega novel was about transcendental numbers numbers like Pi how there's no and it's a Perpetual number that never has the same pattern repeating once but in the novel if you went far down enough into those numbers they actually started seeing patterns emerge which where they got the plans for that giant structure so how do you have something that's so fundamental to the loop raw laws of the universe have a pattern for designs of a space tunnel and a spaceship while that was a lot of creative license and there's no actual pattern found in those numbers right it would be interesting as a hidden EAS EG in the game like you listen to certain sound patterns long enough your computer will

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    start processing it you finally start hidden messages yeah I can you left you left the light on in your oven yeah I could already see like we go to Citizen con though and we have like some guy with an epic beard and uncut fingernails he's I I figured it out I've been sitting here for four years my wife has left me but it it's finally all made sense so we tried to attempt to answer a a pretty technical question about cry engine and given that it's way above at least our heads we wanted to provide you a decent enough answer from our engineers and programmers so we're going to take to the far spectrum and answer a much more casual question here so this comes from Lester 14 because he is incredibly vexed by this why do you park on a driveway and why do you drive on a

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    Parkway do you know the answer to this one no I don't actually look at the word we mhm oh leads to leads to correct okay so Parkway was originally designed or the term comes from driving through a park where driveway it was originally something that you drove through as they started building more houses throughout a neighborhood right the driveway was something you drove through to get to location so the the driveway and the parkway term isn't necessarily what what you're doing at that moment even though you drive through Parkway it's the thing that leads to that does that make sense so when you leave your driveway that's that's putting you onto the driveway mhm so it's not actually a contradiction all right guys well uh

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    thank you very much for tuning in I am Travis and I am Darion and that has been 10 for the producers episode 2 we made it to the big 20 they did not kill us on our pilot so uh maybe we'll see you again maybe not but until next time thank you very much to our subscribers for making this possible uh thank you to anybody who's watching and and we hope you enjoyed getting some questions answered I can't imagine they'd want us back again no probably not but we thought that last time too yeah no it's it's just to Total Cutting Room floor material just wait till Chris sees it