10 For the Chairman Episode 29. July 14th, 2014

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   [Music] hello everyone welcome to another episode of temp for the chairman for those of you that haven't seen this before this is where I take 10 questions from the subscribers uh from our community uh for you who don't know who subscribers are that's the uh subset of our community that kick in money every month to allow us to do extra Community content like this time for the chairman around the verse uh we publish a you know 50 to 70 page magazine every month called jump point that has a lot of sort of more detail behind the scenes coverage um and we're doing other stuff for subscribers which is kind of fun but uh one of the perks of being subscribers you get to ask questions and I answer them as best I can so thank you to

2. 00:00:48

   subscribers for allowing us uh to do that um and uh before I start I was going to there was a couple of things that we got so I always think it's fun to show it off so uh one uh we had uh this rather cool poster that was sent in by Applejack of Ben uh playing Mr Big Shots it here we go back Mr big shot on the very first episode of round the verse which is a pretty damn cool poster picture and uh I get out the table now put that down and then um not necessarily a fan gift although I guess IMD are kind of fans but I thought this would be kind of cool to show because uh uh this is the vvus card and the kind of cool thing about it is is basically it's a its own fully water cooled uh closed loop uh setup on a card which is uh

3. 00:01:37

   that's pretty impressive Hardware so uh we'll get this plugged in and see how many polygons we can push around but yeah I mean look at that uh not you're not putting this in a in a micro case I'll tell you that um anyway thank you very much AMD as well so anyone else Nvidia you want to send me some cool cards I'm very happy to take them all right let's uh let's go to the questions so uh the first question uh comes from draxer who asks once the pist universe is officially released and the days of Alpha and beta testing are over will Arena Commander follow the rules of non FTL communication which effectively means you can only play Arena Commander matches against other players that are located on the same planet or space station as yourself that's a pretty good question uh I would say that we uh

4. 00:02:30

   uh hadn't really thought about that so um kind of a a gut reaction to that is that's an interesting concept uh you know normally I would think we would I mean we're planning to have Arena Commander uh well two things have sort of competition inside our universe and so that would actually be kind of cool you could have people could compete but you'd have to be you'd have to travel to this system for the the the tournament and and play there so that could be a possible cool uh game element that sort of is a game within a game and also playing inside our universe um but in general uh we were kind of thinking that Arena would just sort of allow you to um play with your friends or against other people in general around the universe uh and maybe fudge a little sort of uh FTL side but uh I'll take this under

5. 00:03:17

   consideration because it does have some uh cool mechanics it's just the downside is you don't really want to be stuck in a system where no one else is around that you can uh play around with or train with but um these will all be things that we will uh we'll play with when we get the persist Universe over running because I do like the idea of the game inside the game and then having it adhere to the rules of the Universe um okay next question comes from ostron who asks we've seen several law bits already about the different HUD manufacturers and their offerings and how ships are going to have unique Huds down the road I remember in win Commander Privateer you had to work your way up to a fully functional HUD IE color radar if so are the different Huds going to uh different capabilities uh so yes that is absolutely 100% yes um we're actually doing a pass right now to uh have the Huds between the Hornet and the

6. 00:04:06

   300i and the uh aora be different and and uh the other ships we'll bring in will also have their own sort of uh look and different of Hud and we're also going to have different functionality that the ships sort of targeting computers ship systems will bring in so uh you know a more bare bone ship will have a lot less um sort of heads up features than say a you know a dedicated uh dog fighter with a state-of-the-art technology uh so not all of that's there like right now you pretty much get the whole package but the idea would be for instance the Hornet could track multiple targets at once whereas an aurora can only track one target at once uh and you know some of the targeting stuff on a on a base ship uh wouldn't necessarily be on the uh you know the would be a sort of simple set and then you could buy

7. 00:04:56

   extra add-ons to add uh features to maybe track more taret targets uh to do different firing Solutions um all those kind of things cuz it'll let you customize uh the look and the functionality are two things that we have planned for the HUD so it's early days on that and it should be pretty cool long term uh next question comes from Villa oie who asks as you know when new MMOs get launched most of the time they are played by gold farmers and gold sellers and botting well maybe in this case U farmers and sellers they tend to affect the economy and many other things how are you going to approach this issue uh with the economy being so important to the persistent Universe we're pretty aware of sort of the G farmer gold seller and the botting side um you know it's one of the reasons why uh you know

8. 00:05:44

   the one form of Revenue that we were thinking the game would have besides um selling the initial package because we're not going to have sort of in-game uh like sort of uh subscriptions like you have typically on on like World of Warcraft or something uh is that you we would sell the you know ueec credits within a certain limited amount to players so you don't actually have to go and buy it from someone farming because that's always going to happen uh and uh we're sort of thinking of uh different ways that allow money transfers to happen in the game uh that hopefully uh potentially could sort of curtail a certain amount of uh the kind of gold farming and all that kind of stuff um I will say that you know in general it's pretty hard to clamp that down because uh you know people can always sort of

9. 00:06:33

   even sell an account if you prevent people from um you know sending money to someone else inside the game uh we haven't made all the full rules but um you know in our universe it will be like uh you know the real world so you just can't willy-nilly transfer money and transfer items and equipment to other people without having to uh you know pay some uh form of you know like in in the real world you know you have to transfer title and it cost you to transfer title on a car and if you give people PE something they have to pay taxes and so we have various things that uh are trying to be a like the real world in the persistent Universe design that will uh hopefully replicate some stuff that's in the real world uh and some of that may or may not help to reduce some of

10. 00:07:20

    the botting and the g farming uh I mean I think the biggest thing is if they can get it from a trusted Source IE us uh and that's all it's uh guarant guaranteed then you tend to uh go for that unless someone's radically undercutting you uh on prices and you know that's obviously something that we would uh try to go after because uh you know we don't want to have the game uh destroyed by someone saying here I'm going to sell you my account and I've got 20 billion credits in it I'll give it to you for $5 um those are all sort of things that would be sort of no NOS against our policies um but like I said it's early days so um we'll see we'll that you know it's a always a constant struggle I think no one's got a magic uh Silver Bullet For That but um we're aware and we've got quite a few people that have worked on some big MMOs and so there are some ideas and solutions but I don't want to share too many of them

11. 00:08:08

    because uh obviously you want to keep some of that on the uh uh in reserve okay next question comes from it who asks has there been any discussion amongst the developers about the possibility of attempting to create a format of third person gameplay when not in a ship that doesn't give a tactical Advantage uh our vision in combat over those who prefer first- person gameplay yeah I mean I mean so it's kind of interesting cuz you know in the engine right now we allow you to switch between first and third person mainly because uh we really think the ships look great and the characters look great and we like to show off the cool graphics um and that's kind of you know the focus has being you know if you want to be in combat doing action you want to be in first person because you get all this extra uh information via your HUD and all the rest of the stuff that you would get and the same would go on first person combat

12. 00:08:55

    like if you're in a combat suit you will get a HUD in your visor if you're uh and of course if you were sort of in third person you wouldn't get that and it would be much harder to aim etc etc and that's the same for flying around so I think I'm sort of leaning towards that direction so you can sort of you know admire your avatar and what clothes he's wearing and stuff like that um but we definitely want to make sure if you switch to third person you're not really getting a tactical Advantage I mean really for aiming and shooting both flying your ship and on foot uh needs to be in first person um so there you go uh next question comes from jazero who asks has any consideration been given supporting other headmount displays other than ocas Rift have you seen any of the new technologies such as Sony morphus and uh aant aant glyph I guess so I haven't seen that one obviously is this possible

13. 00:09:44

    to support the other devices within Star Citizen uh yes we haven't uh like so the Morpheus right now from my understanding is just for the PS4 if uh they let it be used on a PC then we would definitely look at uh supporting that uh there's already been some work that um has been done actually in cry engine to support that by krych I don't know what they have Gant glyph is but if it's cool we probably would I mean we've looked at some other stuff like uh uh sort of uh space glasses which is sort of a cool glass you can wear that has an overlay on top which may be something interesting for sort of an overlaid HUD setup uh but yeah we kind of want to support a bunch of uh sort of head maned displays and things also like track AR so that's all on our list of stuff to do um so um it all depends on what the text like and is it cool and also does it

14. 00:10:33

    sort of fit in with what we've done so you know if we're already doing ocus Rift support then things like sonus morphus Sony morphus is is is a an easier thing to support than doing it from scratch um so the answer is yes there has been some considerations we're not quite sure exactly the extent of it okay next question comes from Monroe Allens who asks will we get to select our home planets in the persistent Universe if we can will this give us a small reputation bonus to the locals or perhaps reduce prices on certain items on our home planet so what we we we're not going to start everybody on the same Planet because obviously that would be a problem with crowd so we're going to distribute people around the universe uh and uh we were thinking that potentially there was some stuff that could happen in Squadron 42 uh that would sort of indicate which way you would want to go or maybe when you muster out you sort of get an you

15. 00:11:22

    get a opportunity or an option to sort of head to one of X number of planets so you'll basically should be able to select your starting planet in the position Universe from a selection that we give you it won't be every single planet but it'll be some number of it and then uh at that point you'll eventure out and we'll try to distribute that around so everyone doesn't Clump into one area um okay next question comes from U who asks concerning ship variants how many of the ships will receive variant and how many will you leave for players to experiment Within game without set predetermined variance so generally the rule of thumb is that we tend to do variance on the more common ships so the you know the idea is just like you know like a three Series BMW is pretty common and it has you know the three you know it used to have anyway the 315 and the 325 and 330 and a diesel version and it's probably got a hybrid

16. 00:12:14

    version now or electric version so um for the common ships so things like the Aurora obviously the Hornet um the 300i the freelancer the constellation uh the cutless uh will all have variants and then a couple other ones like the a uh uh Mustang which is a meant to be a starter sh would probably have some variants and then some of the bigger ships uh the more unique ships won't necessarily have a variant or if they do have a variant it may be you know here's the military version here's the civilian version um so that's kind of our rule of thumb uh but it's not set in stone but we do think that the more common ships would probably have different variance for for different roles and then of course on top of that you can take the base hole and add on different equipment and items to sort of further customize it towards the role you want to play

17. 00:13:01

    when you're flying around in in space um okay so next question comes from Junu who ask with all the instancing that will be going on what is the expectation around loading times is there a Target amount of time to load instances that you're aiming for I'm assuming more memory will help with this the way we're building the system is uh you're not really you hopefully will not be able to P perceive the loading times per se because uh we're basically going to be streaming the data in and out so right now we don't so right now when you go into Arena mode it loads a level and loads up the stuff in a very traditional manner but one of the the the tech things that we have on our plate that's part of sort of the package that we're moving to uh full double Precision uh is also sort of the streaming of objects into the world so the way it's meant to

18. 00:13:50

    work is that when you're flying around in space in your worldview things just stream in and out all the time so you have no perception of like loading screens or loading time and and what we do is we sort of take advantage of say going into sort of uh the equivalent of warp space when we're in autopilot or landing on a planet where in those cases uh you know you're sort of in an automated flight and you can still move around your ship or look around but everything outside of you stars are blurring by and then we're we're basically dumping the old objects from the area you're leaving and streaming in the new objects into uh your local client machine and then once that's happened and after the predetermined time of travel in you know sort of warp space you'll you'll come out um so it won't it it won't feel as much uh it won't hopefully will not feel like a loading

19. 00:14:37

    screen it should all feel fairly seamless um so uh that's the way I think it will work I will recommend SSD uh they super cheap now makes all game experience in OS much better so I would uh I would go for that no matter what irrelevant um but uh we'll generally trying to uh stream everything instead of actually have separate uh loading uh screens or times um okay next question comes from L Renford who asked my question has to do with electronic warfare with inclusion of the crypted core of the Drake Herald info Runner and ongoing development of SE actions on Capital ships are there any plans for an electronic warfare meta game beyond the signature base system you spoke about in the past what will be the role of hacking so yes there is uh actually on a capital ship uh on some of the bigger ones we've actually

20. 00:15:26

    discussed as part of the capital ship um setup having one of the stations being sort of electronic warfare and potentially trying to hack or invade the other person's uh ship so we're actually actively looking at doing that uh and we'll probably have um maybe some of that like uh involved in sort of info running and the Drake Herald stuff um and we're certainly going to have sort of more Brute Force stuff like you know EMF and all that kind of stuff so um so yes the question would be there will be more beyond the signature system um so look to the Future when we have a much more detailed sort of info dump on the capital ships which will be uh down the road but I think you guys will enjoy that okay last question comes from Perry the cynic uh who asks hopefully not a cynical

21. 00:16:14

    question please explain the in-game rationale for the speed limit is it imposed by the flight control system or the physics engine isn't the notion of absolute speed and inherent contradiction to Newtonian physics what alternatives have you explored for getting the Doug fight F you want so the ingame rationale for well there's two right so there's a there's a practical rationale for the speed limit as in uh physics engines um break down when you get very large numbers which would include large speeds uh because they just don't have the Precision to to handle it now we're going to we're going to move cry physics over to 64 bit as part of our move to double Precision uh so that will help a little bit um and then there's a fun playwise when you're going so fast uh you know it's not that much fun dog

22. 00:17:03

    fighting soone just flash past you and they'll be gone and then you have to turn around and get on them again and uh that would take a long long time and that's kind of what would uh you know Future Real Warfare I think in space would mostly evolve completely around computers calculating everyone and who has the best uh computer and targeting solution would probably win the battle um but the in-game rationale for the speed limit and this also could apply to the real world now is that that if we assume that the ships are flown by humans and we assume that there isn't really any way of absorbing or counteracting the G forces that a human body experience under like extreme uh accelerations and and yes I know that in space you know Everything's Relative so if I'm just carrying on going at a you know even the speed of light it's not

23. 00:17:51

    going to affect me but the acceleration to get up to a high speed or the acceleration to how you're going this way and then you want to go exactly the opposite way way back and if you do that in a short period of time that's a lot of acceleration so the concept is if you're going to have real human beings fly and you don't have anything like sort of gravity absorb you know absorption Technologies then you probably would want to to limit your sort of dog fighting range speed down to a u a reasonable range maybe it wouldn't be as low as what we have but to a range that's small enough uh that would not allow the the pilot to make radical Maneuvers I.E going this in this direction and then quickly flip the other way uh in a very short period of time um without hurting or killing themselves uh and so that's kind of sort

24. 00:18:40

    of the in fictional stuff is that like the way the ship systems work is that when it knows that you're close to other ships and dog fighting or potentially just trying to avoid them on collision bases it keeps your speeds low because obviously at fast at fast speeds you can't also avoid collisions because uh to move a small amount of time the to move the distance you would have to do to avoid the Collision when you're traveling real fast creates would create a huge amount of acceleration over a short period of time which would probably kill the the the crew or the pylon on board and so the idea is that the the ifcs would limit the speeds to reasonable amounts when you're sort of doing extreme Maneuvers or you're close to other ships where you could have collisions and then when you're not it allows you to go up to you know I think our top warp speed is meant to be 0 2 uh speed of light which is pretty pretty damn fast um and then uh you know as you

25. 00:19:29

    got close to other ships and then you I wouldn't have the ability to be able to avoid them it would slow you down and bring you back down to a sort of sub you know uh you know sort of a kind of whatever maneuvering slash dug fighting speed uh so that's kind of the in-game fiction makes sense also in the practicality of the physics uh would it be limited to to uh the speeds we have probably not quite as low but the other thing we want to do is have it um low enough that you can get up close and you sort of really sort of appreciate and see that the ships get that sort of close uh dog fighting feel uh and it's really not that um close cuz I'm pretty sure if any of you playing multiplayer or even in the uh the sort of Vandal swarm modes you um well it's kind of you can collide with things pretty easy

26. 00:20:16

    coming towards you because the speed's deceptive so we're actually doing some other stuff to get across the sense of speed because you are traveling faster than I think a lot of people realize but we just need to have more of the space dust uh a bit more Shake as you're going faster narrow the field of view bit louder sound and I think you'll get a much better sensation or feeling of speed um even though you'll be kind of traveling we asess the same distance all right that's my last uh number 10 question uh for this uh today's temp for the chairman so thank you all for uh listening I wanted to thank all the subscribers for making this possible and also all the backers uh for backing Star Citizen uh we couldn't be making the game without you we couldn't have this huge team of people working across the world to build the most crazily ambitious space game possible um and

27. 00:21:06

    it's all down to you guys allowing us to do it at this level of scale and ambition so thank you very very much we're working really hard having a great time um working hard on getting Arena Commander up and working properly for you guys still got a ways to go um but uh thank you all and I'll talk to you next week goodbye h