Around the Verse: Episode 1.14 (2014.09.18)

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:02

   [Music] hey everybody Welcome to episode 14 of around the verse I am Sandy Gardner and there is no Ben Lesnik here as you can see cuz we are trying something different we are going to have rotating hosts so it could be will it could be James it could be Ben not sure Arena v.9 launched and it was 14 gigs of change so we hope you are enjoying the leaderboards the racing mode the co-op and lots more other goodies the M50 commercial was also released and I thought it was super cool I'm assuming

2. 00:00:51

   that you've all seen it but if you haven't please check out the link below in the show notes an updated Arena Commander manual is also available the team worked hard on a 13.0.25 three million Mark which means we release the independent Arbiters Guild I'm not sure who's putting put their hand up for that but I am certainly not subscribers were given the locker from Another Universe and I hear there's some kind of Easter egg in there so I should go check that out citizen

3. 00:01:40

   Con tickets have sold out and we look forward to seeing you guys there is going to be 400 of us total and about a hundred devs including press also Jessica has organized a cool photo booth and Ben is putting some cool green screens in the backdrop so that'll be fun now it's time for news from around the verse [Applause] Arena Commander this week we kicked off the push to V 1.0 this is a really big step in the game so have some patience with us before that we put out patch 13.1 which will add lots of customization and a lot of other fixes we finished working on the breathing manager which I spoke to the devs and

4. 00:02:27

   that's breath sounds that react to G4 forces and we began integrating the Mustang Alpha and its variant we worked on the concept for the signature and missile systems right now I am also working on a custom Star Citizen hotas that takes about 12 months from start to finish so I hope to keep you guys informed on the progress of that Squadron 42 major focus on the landing System including a focus on fighter landing gear working on zerog interaction including grabbing surfaces shuin gray boxing on the refinery landing area and Gantry arm which I had to ask what that was apparently it's some automatic arm that goes and grabs things and comes back that's persistent Universe planetary traffic control system art is building everything from

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   combat drones to decorative sculptures from the terror Landing Zone lots of work with the team at Moon collider to get our AI roadmap for the Pu right yeah those guys are a very talented team of three they're like geniuses I've like spoken to them I'm like what what are you saying and we're working on the very first live demo of the Pu expect more information on that soon lot of focus on nailing down the ship components pipeline building guns missiles engines scanners and more finished the concept of the final Mustang variant which I'm quite excited about that kicked off the development of the Anvil carck concept here in Santa Monica with our very own gmmick and we sat down to plan out the Avenger variant I know you all harass me about that I don't know about anybody

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   else but I get harassed about that so we we are working on the Avenger variants and more information soon on the release of those so I bet you guys are as curious as I am because there's so many posts that go up on the forums let's go over to William to see who the most valuable post is hey everybody I'm lead moderator will here to bring you this week's MVP this week's MVP goes to to darken for his Trader guide he's collected all the information from the galactic guides and created an informative and easy to regraft so thank you very much darkin you're this week's MVP but before we go I'd like to remind you that we're still looking for signatures for the Lego Hornet if you haven't stopped by and supported please do we'd really appreciate it thank you and we'll catch you guys next week thank you William I

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   learned something new all the time and it's good to see that the forums are not exploding because of our nice moderator volunteers and William now let's go over to Foundry 42 in the UK and see how they handle bugs and now bug smashes British Edition brought to you by cig okay hi everyone uh we're the QA team at Foundry 42 and we're just going to talk a little bit about what we do generally there's some bugs that you just literally start the game up and it'll crash or start a game mode it'll crash quite relatively boring kind of things but very important nevertheless and there's other ones such as you know when you try and respawn in last damage states that the 300 I have been played with recently where you literally can't but then you can carry on controlling sh

8. 00:05:40

   ship and flying around look at everyone else and fly through geometry and then there's other ones where you can literally eject and become invincible and you can go and stand on people's cockpits and start doing squats right there getting your leg game on and Andy's very good at this you do you love your your Bonnet squats I you talk about that instance that captur the core when he stood on top of your actual cockpit and was staring down at you yeah deadly eyes that amazing I loved it but I genuinely find an issue what we'll do is we'll try to reproduce it so like um we'll sort of sit there and say right what caused this what what particular thing that we did would have made this happen so in the case of like uh with a 300 eye when you could try and eject but it wouldn't happen you get stuck in it like without

9. 00:06:28

   issue it was very much so why was that happening and then I think one of you guys figured out once the engine goes off that's that's what triggers it so we sort of we have to narrow down what what happens to get these bugs to occur and then we'll report them and they'll get it sent out to the team and fixed the biggest challenge that were because we weren't used to this at all in our previous jobs was like pure multiplayer network testing trying to get everyone to do the same thing at the same time and reproduce stuff is quite a challenge you've got to we're always on headsets like communicating with each other uh second by second can get frustrating at times Danny come over here bang a lot of it is just trial and error like you might not get it every time but you do enough reils that you can say that you know a percentage that it's going to happen and it's just as much

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    information can give to the devs sometimes they'll send some back looking for more information so then we'll go back in and try and get as much information as we can um that big issue with the rubber banding that took us like two weeks to kind of do continuous testing um that Network testing was the worst we got gradually better and better the rubber banding then it did take up a lot of our time to kind of it was one of those instances where like the whole company had to kind of work together on that one cuz it was not just us it we had all the tools guys we had just a bunch of people giving us new things to test usus in Texas well openet as well everyone was hammering this bug and it just lingered for so long but then we got to the to the root of it it all got fixed up in the end but it was one of those instances where like no matter what we tried to do it was just hanging around but then I don't know probably

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    making games is everyone s of sort of assumes it's like making a house you know but it's more like making a house of cards where you you take one card out and that's it it'll all come crumbling down yeah and that that's one of the problems we have with these deadlines of course where we're saying you know two weeks till the next deadline and then we'll miss it obviously but the reason will be like we had this bug and it just didn't go away for the longest time and yeah there's not a lot we can really do it's great because the smallest change can affect the game so much so just one small texture change on a Model could cause a ripple effect on other areas and it'll just be a massive game wide bug then all right thanks for watching guys we're UK QA uh I hope you've enjoyed what you've seen of what we do and some of the bugs we found and uh yeah hopefully we'll see you again at some point soon see you later by bye he

12. 00:08:53

    everyone welcome back to bug Smashers today we have a special crash in the editor bug bashes uh this was a bug where if you start shooting all of a sudden you'll just blow up and lead a call stack into where the lights get released uh it was kind of a confusing one but our Graphics programmer Oka was able to narrow it down and I'll show you how he did it hey everyone I I'm inside the editor and we're going to try to see if we can track down that bug luy we have some information that if you get in your Hornet here and you start shooting you will crash so let's hop into the game wait for everything to boot up

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    shaders are compiling so you'll see things pop in it's normal for Dev builds and you get some fun funky effects you guys will never see this but we do anytime we update our shaders all right so let's shoot oh that was quick crashed pretty much instantly all right let's take a look so we're crashing whenever we are clearing out a light so when the light is dissipating it's trying to clear out all its resources and inside the Shader seems to be complete garbage and the pointer is trashed not a fun bug CU this doesn't really

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    tell us anything of why we're crashing lucky for us um our Graphics programmer Oka has already traced down the problem OK and what he has found is in this little block of code um this this new stuff that we added to basically add lens flares onto particles uh you we could we use this for all sorts of things for muzzle flashes to Shield impact so you have like a nice bright spat that pops up and it seems anytime you add these muzzle flashes to a light your chances of crashing increase and the reason why if we use this little come on compile I have this little code here provided by OAB which

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    will actually show The Ref count of lens flares from the particle and we're going to see something quite interesting Del that AI pop in the game all right so let's stay in first person and shoot a little bit once the HUD there we go oh happened too fast but if you noticed I'm sure you guys could rewind it or go slow on the very top left there was a little ref count pointer let me explain what a ref count is is first of all let's pretend that I tell some part of the engine that I have created this cup now I created this cup and I send it on its way hoping that

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    it's it's still going to be there sometime later I come by and I grab the cup except there's nothing in the cup this time well the game will just crash at this point because I believe there's a cup there I tried to get the cup and there was no cup so boom crashed that was the thing you saw ear so we have to tell the game hey I created this cup trust me add a ref count until I say I'm done with this and what that will do is this cup will stay in existence until I'm actually done with it so when I go to grab the cup it's still there now when I'm actually really done with the cup I could release the ref count then that cup will still be there until the ref count is zero and then it'll delete it and that's why in this little drop

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    resource thing the Shader is actually returning a garbage value it's because it's deleted that object already but we haven't held a ref counter to it so we never told the engine that we still want this around yet we believed it was still around and oka's little code in the particle render was keeping track of said rep count so you saw a number on the top left that was at like I I saw eight but it was probably higher and it just immediately went down to zero and then that's when you crashed uh since our muzzles on each of the guns are creating a lens flare so that's four guns on the Hornet we were going down four ref counts every time we shot so if it started at 16 in 4 seconds we

18. 00:13:48

    immediately at zero deleted it and you tried to access that you know Shader um pointer crash so all the simple fix was once he tracked down that this was crashing was to tell the Shader that we want to add a ref count to the flash get out of here to call [Laughter] me well comment and you can see his little comment that he added here and so we're making sure that cup's still around until we're done with it then we release the ref count and then it'll get deleted whenever the ref count zero uh from my understanding OK was able to track this down just by

19. 00:14:37

    narrowing it down to what's causing this and how Behavior so you would get into a ship shoot and notice maybe this ship was crashing more than the other why well because this particular gun spawns a particular particle that would crash the game okay why is that particle crashing oh it's creating a lens flare and then from there he deducted oh we're creating the lens flare but never adding a ref problem yay invisible projectiles cuz shaders are compiling come on shaders I want to see there they go hey we're not crashing anymore oh except I crashed into a ship there you go all

20. 00:15:27

    fixed all right as you saw in the editor we were crashing because uh the lens flares weren't keeping a ref count and so they were just getting destroyed and then someone tried to access the memory oh my God we don't exist crash somewhere far away um you know the lens flares were added to particles by us because we wanted the artists to have a little bit more Fidelity and you know special effects you know hitting laser or shooting off muzzle flashes to hitting Shields and having like you know the lens flare inact and it looks cool um but we run into fun little problems as we add this Tech inside as you can see this lens flare thing is was an issue even in you know the public release it just hasn't affected you guys yet and it just started affecting us now

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    so we decided to fix it and Oka basically added a rep count and that basically says Hey trust me engine I am using this flare and do not delete it without this um you will create it and who knows someone may delete it and then you try to access it holy crap boom I just crashed like far away elsewhere and what made matters worse uh this was happening on a separate thread from the main thread so you were crashing on a completely different thread and trying to debug that is just a nightmare luckily enough Oka put down some you know debug text to see what was going on and realized it was just a simple ref count he had added to the Shader problem solved and we're good to go and maybe this will solve some crashes that you

22. 00:17:04

    guys have been having good bad and now back at the LA office James had a chance to chat with germick Bas about ship connecting thanks boss I'm here with Concept artist gmach bassine gmach how you doing doing great man how are you glad to have you here what's going on with your eye I got into a bar fight but you should see the other guy all right you want to get in some questions yeah let's do it so question one comes from mongel what do you consider your personal art style how do you try to incorporate it into your concept work I would say my personal art style is more of a simple clean less is more type of approach to concept art uh my background is actually in architecture and um I I have both my bachelor's and master's degrees in architecture and worked in the field for

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    oh congrats over six years and um I made the switch to concept art but while in architecture I uh I design mostly modern style buildings and uh you know there more of a less is more approach and I think that really translates over to my concept art I'm not one to put extra gble on projects just to fill the blank space I like to leave the blank space to help tell the story of the of the ship or whatever I'm working on because it can't be loud all the time it has to have those softer moments to show the bigger moments exactly and I like to make sure that everything I design has a purpose and not just put random stuff here and there you know every move I make every design Move I Make needs to have a reason for it and a story for it and uh yeah so that's that's how I like to go about my concept work so if your

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    backgrounds in architecture are you are you looking forward to getting into more environmental stuff or CU you're doing ships right now mostly yeah no I mean I as a concept artist I consider myself a more hard surface and environment artist here um at Cloud Imperium I'm doing all hard surface stuff for the um ships I'm you know designing all the ships and uh it relates a lot to architecture architecture is a lot about surface and form and uh space which is all you know concepted and needed for the design of these ships so um it relates a lot to what I'm doing now and and uh yeah I'm really grateful to have that background all right next question comes from azreel dominov how did you start your career as a concept artist and how did

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    you come to work at cig well kind of already answer kind of similar but yeah so I I started as a architectural designer and um around 2010 I kind of stumbled upon concept concept art through a friend architectural friend and I just fell in love with it right away I I really enjoyed seeing what people were creating for other worlds and madeup vehicles weapons characters it was just so much awesome stuff out there and I knew that that's kind of what I wanted to do with the future of my career so so I worked really hard on making the switch I um I work nights and weekends while I had a full-time job as an architect um working on my entertainment portfolio and just trying to learn and study and get better and it was actually around four years ago that

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    I met David hobbins at a conference he was presenting his work and I was in the crowd you know total nerd in the front row just like oh my God that's so awesome everyone's a hins nerd yeah and uh I really liked his work his approach and I felt like his design aesthetic was really similar to what I you know wanted to achieve and so I struck up with a a conversation with him after the the he presented and um he was really nice he took a look at my work gave me some nice advice and he told me that if I wanted to keep in touch you know send him some stuff get critiques he gave me his email address and we started emailing back and forth um every once in a while and then uh slowly things like grew grew we became better friends we would grab coffee every once in a while do Sky

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    Skype chats and um took you under his wing yeah kind of I mean it was really cool of him to do that and it you know basically going from somebody that I didn't know to like a really nice kind of Mentor type person and um one day he gave me the call and was like ask uh Cloud Imperium is looking to hire and um because of him I got the job nice yeah no that's another one for hob yeah he's a great guy all right next question this comes from cry Ops as someone who has a ton of concept ideas myself what is your inspiration and can you sleep at night while working on a concept for a ship my my inspiration I think my best inspiration comes from my uh my daily activities or my life experiences I've traveled the world I've

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    been to India Spain I used to be a big skateboarder I'm a big soccer player so it it comes a lot from just going and experiencing life and um and having those like key memories that you know um ignite or or you know awaken your thought while you're trying to start a new project um I do collect a lot of image reference from things like nature or construction vehicles military vehicles weapons all these things before I'm starting a project but just collecting reference images you know does kind of give some uh Insight on what you want to do but it's more about the experience and going out and experiencing the world and meeting some strange people or skateboarding through

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    Barcelona you know these types of things when you you see architecture in person or you experience a building or you have a near-death car accident experience type of things these are the type of things that influence my concept art the most oh that's crazy next question from Roger Wilco I didn't spell that I didn't say that right but thanks buddy do you have any advice for tngs or modding teams when it comes to seeking a concept artist willing to work for free or in contingency I think if you approach it as willing to work for free they might be turned off by that but a good way to go about it is to find a concept artist that you really like um if they're new in their career you know straight out of school or even still in school they'd be

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    more willing to work on a group project that um everybody can benefit from you know a lot of concept artists are doing concept art in 2D uh with these nice paintings or sketches and and they really want to see their work in 3D or they want to see their work animated they want to see a cool you know in-game model and so if if you have a team that's uh able to produce really high quality work I'm sure you won't have a hard time getting a concept artist to join you but you you definitely got to show them that the hard work they're going to put in is going to be paid off um by the hard work you all are going to put in with the goal to win the competition or or you know make a cool ship and then you all can share it on their website and I think that's a reward enough to get some um new and upand cominging amazing concept artists

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    to join your team last question comes from Almighty joygasm a lot of really interesting names today how much does a ship you've imagined Changed by the time it reaches the end of the pipeline after factoring other design or balance requirements and input from other colleagues have any of your dream ships still managed to hold up to your dreams by the end of the process yeah um that's a great question you know I think here at Cloud Imperium we have a really good pipeline for ship building um in the concept Department we do all our Concepts in 3D um I use Maya for example and um I really like to use 3D to get in to figure out the full design of the ship make sure the character can Comfort comfortably walk through design the ship from every angle and really figure things out um and then

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    I pass that ship on Down the Line say to the 3D modeling team um and they already have a 3D my 3D geometry to work off of so that's going to help keep a lot of the quality the same um and keep a lot of the concept art intact MH um they're not like taking a 2d concept artwork and guessing how things look in 3D they already have a 3D base to build off of and then they do an amazing job making my Concepts look even better um and then when it's passed around to the rest of the team as well you know there are some changes that happen but there's changes that need to be made and uh I haven't been disappointed yet you know the constellation Phoenix which is one of my favorite ships I've worked on so far is if you look at the concept art and the

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    finished ship it's almost I would say 90% accurate to what I created and it's it just got better than what I made so you know everybody's doing a great job and and I think that we have a really great pipeline a great team of people working here and and making these dream these dream Ships Come True awesome well I heard you made a special skin for a Mustang yep that's true you want to check that out sure all right roll it and you can win that by going to the

34. 00:26:49

    forums answering the contest this week's contest toing a signed print out of the ATV skin Mustang is give us your dream Mustang commercial in one paragraph or less we'll choose a winner by next week and announce the winner on ATV next week well gmck thanks again for coming man you got it man now let's go to the bar all right let's do it back to you Sandy we really love germick that's all I can say plans for PAX Australia what are they well we have quite a few plans including a fan inspired Barbecue on the Friday October 31st Halloween the actual party that you've all been asking about is on Saturday November 1st starts at 7:00 p.m. finishes around mid tonight or 1:00 a.m. or maybe 2 a.m. if there's a lot of posters signing again or photo booth or something tickets are $20 a pop and there's 1,400 tickets the tickets

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    are a little more expensive than Gamescom only because Australia is a very very long way to come and see you guys uh we're looking forward to it though but it is a 14-hour flight so the flights are a little more expensive than going to Germany believe it or not um also we are going to be in the Logitech booth booth for 4 days again we have a recruitment booth and thank you to our volunteers who are going to be running the booth giving out pamphlets inspiring new fans to join showing off part of the game we hope to have maybe like a looping trailer some Arena Commander some other things that are coming playing in the background these events wouldn't be possible without you guys so we thank you very much for making these things happen tickets will go on sale tomorrow Friday at some staggered times mostly Australian friendly as we're

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    assuming that it's mostly Australians going going however for some Europeans or some Americans or some other parts of the world who would like to go we hope that everybody who wants to go gets a ticket last chance to pick up an M50 or a 350r before the sale ends on Monday and of course big surprise our art sneak peek check this out be sure to tune in next week when we will be unveiling a new ship concept that is pretty cool and also a new host and with hopefully some new artwork

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    rather than Chris Roberts looking over my shoulder making me nervous so I hope I did all right in this episode thank you everybody and we'll see you next week on around the verse n