Star Citizen: Full CitizenCon 2016 Presentation

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   foreign good afternoon to everyone here if you're here at the show and you happen to see Nick Elms after the show please buy him a drink [Applause] good afternoon to everyone online or good evening or good morning tomorrow I think that about covers everybody seeing as we have everybody across the globe um thank you all for joining us here and welcome to citizencon 2016. citizencon is essentially a celebration

2. 00:00:56

   of all of you together essentially all of us and what a shared group of people with like-minded people can achieve the seemingly impossible we make it possible so here is a video that highlights our journey so far thank you my name is Chris Roberts and I would like to build a universe with you before even the campaign before even Chris's GDC announcement he had had this idea of like wanting to create a place because he knew that there was going to be a long time in development from the crowdfunding to the actual release of the game and so you know foundationally very early on wanted a place for the

3. 00:01:46

   backers and the fans of space sims to be able to get together and talk and share stories about games that they love and talk about stuff that the Haven you know Define kindred spirits who share the same love stresses of the community means I mean pretty much everything to me that was why I got involved in this project um and it's it's what energizes me uh everyone I work with I think everyone in the company I really always wanted to build a game that sort of put me in one of these worlds and lent me a bench but I wanted it to be in a way that I sort of went around and really felt like I was in the world and so up until then that was sort of the things that I sort of felt had been missing from a lot of games Chris happens really big vision for a big world and so while he was still creating that we were creating the community website and we were interacting with all of you guys and it

4. 00:02:33

   just kept building and building the community that Star Citizen has developed over the past four years has devoted thousands of hours into making sure that Star Citizen becomes the best game it can possibly be really proves what we can achieve without a publisher you've got that brilliant like immediate communication like back and forth the backers and the subscribers are with us other than I'm studio with us but we really feel that they're with us and it's been fantastic you know it shapes shapes what we're doing every day you know people look at it take note of it and everybody's opinion matters we read the forums we read the comments and those that feedback is also felt just from them playing it's giving us a tremendous amount of information you're sort of sharing stuff almost daily and getting feedback and you're riffing off what people are sort of responding to and I think there's an

5. 00:03:21

   energy that comes with it you know they're waiting for cool stuff from you their hopes and dreams are with you and and you kind of want to not let them down we just want to make the best game we can we want to make something which has never been made before and we're not prepared to compromise that vision is the fourth citizen con since we launched in 2012 and it's quite a great opportunity to reflect for a second how far we have come we started out with a dozen people Chris Sandy myself Ben and a few other volunteers after adding Los Angeles and Austin really ramping it up in 13 we added Manchester in 14 we added Frankfurt in 15 and now we are at 360 developers and and support staff in all these locations all thanks to the community have been giving us this

6. 00:04:08

   incredible opportunity I'm not aware of any other area whether it's in games or elsewhere where this has been done and where an organization like this could be built strictly on the basis of this fan and community support and it's just absolutely great we do events with the community all the time backers are there they're they're hanging out with us they're telling us how excited they are about what they've just played how excited they are about work we've just done how excited they are about work that they've seen part way in development right that's all stuff that that the team gets energized and pumped up about the Gamescom this year on the on the show floor in the convention we had hundreds of thousands of people over the course of the week come and and see us and we're exposed to that and we had people

7. 00:04:55

   lining up for two hours at times just to play uh play Arena commander see what was already a playable in the game there's people all around the country and the world that I would not have had the luxury of meeting and befriending if it wasn't for Star Citizen as I followed the game as I brought it into my streaming career and got to meet the community all they just kind of kept snowballing to me Star Citizen means freedom freedom from Publishers freedom and gameplay freedom for many to live in an online Universe they have been wanting for decades test watering it's a fantastic community and that really is what this is about we're just a small slice of the greater star citizens Community once I started being able to walk around I think they started to really recognize the possibilities of what what was happening Star Citizen is

8. 00:05:45

   a chance to finally get to be an astronaut without having to be good at math I decided to try out um and I played one-handed so I have to use voice tagged and it took me a while to get used to it but um eventually like by the fifth or sixth lap I was getting the hang of it and it was really enjoyable so I'm really happy that I'm so citizen a lot of people like me to enjoy the game we gotta do a 20-minute dog fight until he was too damaged and I ended up chasing this guy to about three different comrades where he went to port olazar and since he was a neutral zone the only way to get the kill I want blades out and went for the ram actually took off in a few different ships and flew to the backside of a moon and it was actually kind of cool seeing the dark side of the moon but also when

9. 00:06:32

   we cruised around and we slowly saw the sun just coming across the Horizon and to me that was kind of a really beautiful moment typically in development us devs were locked in room for building for years right without much visibility without much feedback on really what we're doing with Star Citizen we're so open with the community and and forward-facing they see what we do to get that feedback from people to get the appreciation of the work and the effort that we're putting in that in return drives the team they show us the good and the bad in gaming development and we never really seen that before and they continue to push the boundaries on gaming the freedom was not publisher and setting goals and deadlines it means

10. 00:07:24

    that we can concentrate on what we think means the most to the fans we're always striving to build new tools so that the community can communicate and share their feedback and ideas so that we can incorporate into the game future council is a tool that we created to allow our community to not just submit bugs but ultimately make Star Citizen better with the scope and the size of this game we don't just value the bugs submitted from our backers we need them sometimes they even show up with the Martin Bug Smasher event welcome to bug Smashers ready to smash the bug let's get started all of us are about this game know that cig and Chris are doing something special here because the community supports us we're able to make these excellent shows like around the verse welcome to episode 100 of around the verse just as a little highlight for you guys we're going to take a brief look at the Bengal it's the

11. 00:08:11

    first ship that Chris revealed for squadron 42. there's lawmakers Etc just to show you not just how we're making this game but kind of dig a little bit more inside of what it takes one of our favorite fan video editors a gentleman named years 100 created the Imagine trailer he took all of our videos he cut them together in new and exciting ways it's one of my favorite ways that the community has influenced not just the development of our game but the development of our game presentation welcome to the next great Starship the next great Starship was a show that we together because they actually want to get involved and make a ship for Star citizens so these great pieces that not only got integrate it into our game but also into our team we have some of the guys from next great Starship are actually on our team today continue

12. 00:09:00

    globe on every spatial PC that goes in Star Citizen Star Citizen is a dream that thousands and thousands of people across the world share the most immersive and diverse space game ever created a game that can change the way we think about gaming in general everyone has given their thoughts everyone has given their ideas and everyone is so friendly I would like to thank all of you guys everyone potential backers backers fans everyone for the incredible amount of support because we couldn't have done it without you I want to thank the community you have you have made this job so rewarding you have made Star citizens so much better when when Star Citizen launches properly like you know someone consider a commercial release we're actually by the time we get there we we know we're going to have millions of people there excited

13. 00:09:48

    to play and be part of it and I think that's a massive benefit of being open and and you know doing what we do Star Citizen is and always will be more than a triple A game so much more please raise your hand if you have made at least one heartfelt connection with another human being while being part of this project in any shape or form please give up give up for one memory on Star Citizen that has absolutely made your day I am a Star Citizen I am a Star Citizen I'm a Star Citizen I'm a Star Citizen I'm Star Citizen we are star citizens I am a Star Citizen and I am proud to call myself a Star Citizen

14. 00:10:49

    it's amazing journey that we've been on and it's only going to continue that reminds me from last year and I had a bit of a rough time and I also had a bit of a rough time this year and I would personally like to thank I'm gonna cry again God damn it I would personally like to thank all of the community because if it weren't for you all I don't know how I could do my job hey guys it's I think I've mentioned this before

15. 00:11:38

    but it is the first Gaming Community that I've ever been a part of and I'm biased to say that it's the best gaming Community ever okay and now my mind's gone completely blank um I would like to give a shout out to Rico for creating barcitizen.sc I remember earlier in the year Alexis and I sat around and I said you know I really want to you know because there's a you know a thousand people here but we have hundreds of thousands of fans all over the world in every single country and so Alexis and I came up with bar Citizen and we kind of had to make it select because you know we had so many and Frankfurt give it up for Frankfurt

16. 00:12:25

    they had like 200 and something people respond so we had to do three bar citizens um so Rico has created bar citizen.sc within three weeks we've already had 27 bar citizens around the world uh some of them going on tonight so if you'd like to attend one of those or host your own so that everybody around the world can hang out together and then check that out ah no just okay sorry in other community news the referral program that we launched last year we've actually had two fans who have um got 1042 new backers into the game and both of them receive a million mile

17. 00:13:19

    high club that they can invite their friends to the first one I think we mentioned him last year at the live stream his name is alphacast and he's from France and then the other one shimmy is from the USA so give it up for those two before I hand over to Chris I would like to thank all of our volunteers we're our volunteers can you raise your hands all of our streamers who have been streaming for the past three days where are you and then an appreciation for all of our

18. 00:14:07

    staff who have been working around the clock um Chris uh you know would come home pretty much most nights this week at three o'clock in the morning and I'd ask him how it's going so and um yes exactly so Props to all of our staffs and our contractors from around the world your support you know and support from all of you fans basically encourages us to keep raising the bar and so now without further Ado I would like to introduce Chris Roberts so uh

19. 00:15:00

    really I should applaud you I mean we made that video for you guys because that is genuinely the way that everybody at any one of our Studios and everyone that is at the partners like Behavior or turbulent feel because we would not be here we would not have the opportunity of building the game we are pushing the boundaries we are without everyone that's in this community in this room that's in the community around the world so you know I gotta I got very I mean I'm a Star Citizen and thank you guys so much because you guys are [ __ ] awesome uh I love you guys and I'm pretty sure everyone else is working with on this

20. 00:15:47

    game loves you guys so you you are our secret sauce you are what makes us go uh you you make it easy to work hard because you know there's a massive amount of people out there that love and are excited by what you're doing and that is if anyone does anything creative or actually doing anything that is really important and and you give us that so thank you so so so much for that so as a as a as a bit of a reflection because you know I look back I mean sometimes you're so busy working and you know just what are we doing tomorrow what are we doing tomorrow you don't ever get a chance to go and say you know what it's amazing what we've achieved already during the past four years and you know what we're

21. 00:16:37

    going to do in the future is going to be even better but I mean just I look back on it and you know I look at that video and I go you know this is incredible I mean we have such an amazing Community we've built so many there's so many connections being built there's a lot of I mean people are playing games now they're streaming now with I mean it's just a fraction of what's gonna be the final game but you know I keep like reading stuff online and seeing these YouTube videos and seeing twitch streams and I'm going wow that looks that looks cool and I can't believe that all these people like spent you know an hour trying to find someone stranded on the far side of a moon somewhere or an asteroid field and and generally like most gaming communities tend to sort of like shoot each other and troll each other and I know we have a little bit of that in our community but I I think I would say more often than not we have a community that helps each other out and

22. 00:17:25

    you know they help each other play the game understand the game I mean they do it much better you guys do a much better job than us in terms of actually like uh educating on how to play the game we're going to get better at that uh but we're busy building sort of some of the core techs and everything but because of you guys we've sort of grown so looking back at it if you take a look at it here I mean this is sort of a timeline we thought it'd be interesting to lay out uh you know obviously we launched four years ago tomorrow uh you know back in October of 2012. I look a little younger there by the way uh it's a little bit like the US Presidency I think you sort of aged a lot as you get into it um and so you know it you know obviously we we we by the money but then you've got to get the officers and start hiring people so our first office opened in January of 2013 in Austin and I think we started with 11 or 12 or 13 people uh

23. 00:18:16

    then we off open the LA offices in April of that year where we had I think about five or six people uh we managed to get the hangar module out in 2013 which was actually quite achievement considering we were still just opening offices and had a very small number of people uh but that was you know the games car net uh you know 2013 which I think was would always be a very special memory for me because it was a sort of first event with all you guys in person and uh it was pretty amazing uh but you know at the end of uh 2013 uh we had 48 people which is a lot less than we have now let's see if it moves I know Eric hey I don't want to stop eating

24. 00:19:04

    yeah red one there you go um okay uh so you know and then uh we're lucky enough to have uh my brother and some other uh key uh you know uh old friend I mean I have you know Nick Elms who is working on uh this uh presentation uh who's our creative director of foundry42 uh so Nick and myself and my brother and Phil Miller all grew up together and then there's a few other key members of Foundry 42 they're here that we've known for years we worked on starlands together so uh you know for instance Derek senior and later on Paul Jones and they're all here around the audience so bye get a drink with them later on um but uh but we opened we're very lucky to have them come aboard in January and it was mostly because of your guys support that we felt I felt comfortable

25. 00:19:51

    enough to go to my brother who was you know he was at Travelers Tales making Lego games doing really well and they all had very safe secure jobs in big Corporate America and uh I said hey you want to come and do something of it more risky but potentially more fun and you know they said well there's only so many years you can make Lego games and they were lucky enough to get him aboard um and uh so you know we worked really hard to get the arena Commander out that year which was a combination between the UK team coming on board and the US teams working on it uh and by the end of uh you know 2014 we had 161 people so that's a pretty from 48 to 161 is pretty big and we got 1.0 out by December of um that year which had a whole bunch of ships in the you know I said the Doug Bank model was out in the middle of June

26. 00:20:39

    um and we um started to do the first performance capture of soundary 42 in April of 2015 let's see if this will advance now oops hang on well that's that's the TV screen it's not advancing for Stuff what's going on we go all right they've Advanced it I think I think they're advancing it up in the booth and I'm not advancing it um I don't know why the advanced key is not working but the switch these screen key works for some reason um so anyway and then uh in 2015 besides shooting 242 we got the Frankfurt office um and you know they've made massive contributions you are actually going to see a lot of some of the core work they've done we've got an incredibly talented team there we have Brian

27. 00:21:27

    Chambers representing from Frankfurt here so if you if you see him with his uh you know kind of rocker hair hanging out he's he's as cool in person as he looks um and uh you know uh we got 2.0 out at the end of last year which was a huge milestone because that had the 64-bit large World multi-crew ships and a lot of the uh the beginnings of the core Tech that's going to pass out citizen the end of last year we had 258 people again because of uh you guys uh and interesting enough we you know Manchester um so our family 42 officers become the biggest and still uh ends up being then of June of this year we got um 2.4 out which is the first uh iteration of

28. 00:22:15

    susses and Alpha that has some level of persistence and that is just going to increase as we go on so you know your character will keep and and keep his items and and eventually sort of get wear and tear and grow old and all the rest of stuff so that'll be very cool and we launched a 2.5 which had sort of an extra sort of spawning area Grim hex which I hear a lot of people camp out in and shoot people when they they try to get out of it at the moment in August uh so you know you got Outlaw and and and good guys all right let me try to see if this is gonna move Eric can you advance that please help me save me there you go uh so so the uh today we have uh you know 363 people which is an amazing amount I

29. 00:23:07

    know uh um so there's the numbers split between the places this is all because of you we you know we are entirely crowdfunded um and it's your guys enthusiasm and support and everyone out there that's watching this and everyone that's back in the game um that are enabling us to basically build this game of definitely my dreams I think most of the developers work out and I'm pretty confident your guys dreams in a way that we're unfettered and we're trying to just go for it I mean you know to to quote Shayla Booth which I'm just do it ah so anyway uh sorry I saw that video recently when we were getting our uh citizen card stuff and I thought it was quite amusing yeah I I'll reveal I won't do the rest of this stuff where you get

30. 00:23:56

    kind of a bit crazy and look around but um anyway uh but that's uh that's because of you guys and I think that um you know I said that when I started this the community is the core of what makes statuses and go it's what makes us special it's in the DNA from the very very beginning of the project uh you saw in the video you know Dave Haddock who's been with us from the very beginning before we even announced Star Citizen of Squadron 42 we started with a website which was basically hey you know if you love space games you love PC games uh you know at that time no one was paying any attention that no one cared about it you know now obviously you know if you take a look everyone's doing it it's it's trendy now it's you're a triple A game it's hella doing a Call of Duty that's set in space so uh you know it's it's like we've become mainstream but

31. 00:24:43

    back then there wasn't and we said you know and that I it was basically just I missed this kind of game I love it that's the game I used to make and I sort of felt like well that was the whole impetus of Star Citizen and we and and we started with saying well you know it's about the people and I look back on it and I looked at what I saw with WC news and the fact that it was still a community that you know was passionate about Wing Commander long long after the last real wink commander game had sort of come out I mean it's you know it's sort of a dormant property sitting at EA and I was like you know I love this stuff I think other people love this stuff and we started with a site and you know we had 30 000 people sign up before we had even announced uh Star Citizen and you know 10 000 on the first day which was amazing but that the key was that the DNA of the project started with the community and from day one we've

32. 00:25:32

    always tried to do that and I think if you look at why we've where we are and where what we're able to do I think that is 100 due to the community and so one of segue for that would be here oh that's finally Sunday one unless Eric's really good at hitting a button when I hit a button you guys have always been in the community right you make what makes it special and it's it's a very different way I think to make games and we've always focused on creating tools to do that so you know like even where we couldn't have friends or you're getting together necessary in the game we created organizations for the website and ways that people can be discussing our forums and chatting and all the rest of stuff and it's important to us to have the ability for you to not only interact in the game but also

33. 00:26:20

    interact outside the game and create connections and I think you could see from the video and I know you guys all have stories I mean I'm amazed I see everyone with their organization everyone's got their own organization custom share and and you know and they get their own get-togethers and you know there's deep lore and history behind a lot of stuff and I mean I'm just blown away by it and it's and I think it's fantastic and I think it's really key so for us it's very important to put the tools in the hands for you guys Eric I'm pressing a button make me look good no no that's not the right one right back all right okay so um I guess there's in the the the the I thought I had one more card here but I

34. 00:27:09

    don't um you you can tell that the PowerPoint crashed that's why we were a bit late here we were trying to get this done I didn't do a proper run through um but um so I'm gonna I'm going to hand you over please you know I think I had a lot of questions say it Gamescom about what's happening with organizations 2.0 and there's a lot of different uh stuff so we we've actually thought about it long and hard and we sort of decided that even though we'd said we were going to do this thing in typical style season fashion we need to do this thing and we want to make sure that we give you guys tools in in such a way that um you'll be able to interact and

35. 00:27:57

    communicate in game out of game uh in in a sort of fluid way that is very indicative of today's modern uh internet age so I'm going to hand you over to John Erskine who's our VP of online operations and Publishing and Benoit who is the chief technical officer of um turbulent who you know are amazing they build our web platform they're already they're up nominated for an award for the Adobe Cutting Edge award and you guys should all vote for them but I'm going to hand you over to him and they're gonna they're gonna tell you about uh what we have in the works for you guys uh on the community front here we go well hey it's it's really a thrill to be

36. 00:28:44

    here with you today it's exciting to be at uh another citizen con event we're going to switch over to some other slides here and I'm going to tell you a little bit about what we've been doing on the platform side I'm going to continue with the theme that we've begun here today to talk about engagement and sharing if we look at the vision that we have on our platform as Chris mentioned this is something that's been core to the concept of Star Citizen even before the project was formally announced we want to share this experience with you and we want to share content to you and we want to get feedback from you and so this idea of connecting with our

37. 00:29:35

    community and then allowing communities to connect with each other is literally the core of Star Citizen and I have to tell you personally it's it's really amazing to work with someone like Chris who understands this in the core of his DNA because I have worked at other companies where you'd have to pitch these kinds of ideas to somebody who might be kind of skeptical really with Chris a lot of times it's the other way around we may sort of come with some ideas and he'll say well guys I just I don't think you're thinking big enough here so I'm going to share an example of that with you today our goal from the platform is to be able for you to experience the game you need

38. 00:30:26

    to be able to do basic things like get the game and buy the game and download the game and Patch the game but we also want you to be able to connect with other people both inside the game itself but also in the real world because as we as we look at how technology has moved today there's there's less of a distinction between the virtual world and the real world and every day those walls are coming down further and further so that's really a core Vision that we have on the platform so we've had the opportunity already to build some really cool and revolutionary tools on our platform and we've shared them with the community of Star Citizen we have some traditional things like

39. 00:31:13

    forums you know forums have been around for a long time we've been able to build some things that we believe Advanced traditional things like you know most online games have some sort of Guild and grouping system and we have our organization system I think it's Unique that we release the organization system so early in the development process and people were able to create organizations almost three years ago I believe maybe two and a half years ago and as I have some stats on the next slide but we have an amazing number of people an amazing number of organizations already we've been able to build things like the community Hub so it's easy to share content on our site we've been able to do things in the game like having the rental system and being able to use your UEC to do things in the

40. 00:32:03

    game and we've been able to do some things that are really unique like the issue Council where people are able to actually actively participate in the process of reporting bugs and verifying bugs and prioritizing bugs and doing all that and and I know from talking with other developers they're very jealous of the system because first of all they don't have the technical piece and second most people don't have fans who care enough to actually be that involved so I think that's a very revolutionary tool that we've already built so thank you for your involvement theorem we we had some stats in the video but I'll come back to a couple of these to talk about engagement you know on our forums today which are pretty traditional forums we've had almost half

41. 00:32:51

    a million unique threads we've had seven million people actually write a comment to those threads and 300 million views of those threads those are just those are incredible numbers it's a huge community and it's a huge amount of Engagement and in the organization system as you can see we have more than forty thousand or almost more than forty thousand organizations today which is staggering and almost 200 000 unique people are members of organizations and many people are members of more than one organization so it's a it's very very interesting it's a very very very powerful message that people are incredibly engaged in the tools that we've built so um you know last year at citizen con we announced and launched the star map which was yeah super cool and uh like I said that was a good

42. 00:33:42

    example of how um we sort of gave people an opportunity to vote on things that they thought were the biggest priority and um we had some ideas about what we wanted to build and uh star map wasn't necessarily at the top of our list but it was at the top of your list and so we changed some of our priorities around and we came up with a plan and then we found out that we weren't thinking big enough so uh we made something that's very very revolutionary to be able to have such an amazing tool on the web to explore the game universe and in such visual Fidelity and so after we launched the star map Benoit and I started looking more at our roadmap and our priorities to decide what we should do next and we had some ideas about an evolutionary advancement to some of the systems that

43. 00:34:32

    we have today and in January we presented some of our plans to Chris we really like the plans and we talked about it more with Chris and he said well I don't think you're thinking nearly big enough and so we went away and we sort of digested this feedback and uh Benoit and I started to think well with with this much blank canvas what would we do and so I'm thrilled to turn it over to Benoit today and he's going to tell you what we've been working on since the second Pitch to Chris hello

44. 00:35:24

    this is the second time Chris does this to me and I need to come in front of you guys to show you what we're working on I'm pretty excited to be able to show you uh what we came up with based on you're not thinking big enough statement and so uh when we presented orgs 2.1 to Chris which was basically a new form system for your your guild we quickly saw that the feature said that we needed needed to be way bigger than just a traditional form engine also we didn't want to just build a form engine for the sake of it which is you know it's still a pretty whole old medium so we want it to basically start Reinventing that you can switch and so we came up with Spectrum uh the name was coined just as naturally as

45. 00:36:13

    that because we felt that it would represented the uh that it was already in the lower and so it was the perfect way to sort of name this tool and so what spectrum is um is a real-time web application that offers all Community Communications and Star Citizen that's the high level now to present it I need to deepen into it now this is the result of almost a year of work and labor of love from the turbulent team who has been iterating and iterating on that looking at what's already there and this is what we came up with and so it's modeled modeled after contemporary communication platforms I'm sure you guys use many of those and so we did not start to reinvent things from the ground up we really took something and tried to make it as usable as

46. 00:37:01

    possible based on what existed we used modern Technologies to build it that means we did not go the Classic route of building an application in a low-level language we went with web technologies that can help you on the desktop that can allow for Rapid development which was already a groundbreaking moment uh to be able to change the stack and go faster and then when we pitched the idea it came really quickly that this tool could become also solve a major problem in the game which was how do we differentiate between in fiction and out of fiction we want to bring you guys like your friends at work you want to be able to talk to him how do we refer differentiate between that and somebody's actually in the game and so Spectrum becomes a natural conduit for that now

47. 00:37:50

    focus on usability it's the in-game uis will always be focused on being diegetic and super sci-fi-ish now in order to make the real world stuff really works then we need something that's more usable material design and needs to focus on that first and community and that was the sticking point is that we since the beginning the vision from Chris was always that you don't need to run your guild off-site you don't need to run your organization off site and use offside tool we can offer all of these tools in the platform and so you can just hit the ground running we want you to be able to have your home in the Spectrum as your organization and be able to customize it and so the first part of the module um is off course chat and so if we're

48. 00:38:39

    gonna hit chat running we're not going to build a standard chat like we did a few years ago for the live chat module we need a rich chat we need an application that's real time we need a chat where you can embed Medias from external sites or from RSI sources we need you to be able to react to comments and words that are being written by your friends or by your by your co-workers or anybody you're playing a game with and so just on the chat level we really wanted to get something that was Modern and usable now in terms of form engine we needed forums we knew we needed that we didn't want to abandon this medium which was so crucial to building this community and so but we wanted to modernize it and so in the same application we're

49. 00:39:28

    going to bring you guys some brand new forms now what you're looking at now and we'll I'll show you a bit later is the light team and this is part of why we wanted to focus on usability first because if we make everything dark it's really difficult to use and it gets a strain on on people using it so there is an option to keep it light and that's what I'm showing here and so the Forum engine is also real time when new threads come up you're going to see notifications come in uh we it's a brand modern take on this on on how forms can be rapid and fast and not the old school model that we've had now to go further than that we need more types of discussions in form we need to be able to have q and A's we need to be able to have live threads on live topics that are happening now and of course classic threads which will just you know stay there forever

50. 00:40:19

    and so what is Spectrum well first it's private messaging and chat and forms and so we needed to solve private messaging because I'm sure you guys have used the private messaging on the forums currently everybody's pretty much in agreement there we need a private messaging solution and so Spectrum implements that we needed presence and so to be able to tell online if your friends are in the or even just in Spectrum so we needed to be able to have presence displayed on there notifications and alert so if you're watching a thread you wrote a thread somebody mentions you need to be to know about that that encourages this flow of information across the board and so notifications were core to that of course all of these features

51. 00:41:07

    they're awesome but they need to be sandboxed and so for each of your orgs in Spectrum you will have access to all those features and so as you build up your organization you'll have access directly to features to build your own chat lobbies your own forums your own notifications based on that and so you'll be able to switch context create a group with your friends access it in there create a Lobby and boom you're done hike the ground running and so what is Spectrum well it's all of these things it's real time it's modern chat modern forums it's private group messaging online presence notifications and alerts and namespaces and this is the core of what this new app is it's also voice because we need to have

52. 00:41:54

    Voice transmission and so you can advance more and so on The Voice part we needed to be able to carry voice outside of the game because as you everybody knows and you have experience playing games you want voice to be carried by an external program and not by the game client because when the game client has an issue well you need to be able to talk to your friends and say I'm rebooting the game and so spectrum is going to be your Lifeline for that but of course Chris wasn't gonna settle with that we can't have none specialized voice in Star Citizen and so Spectrum will be able to send voice datagrams to the game and have it be spatialized and treated inside the game for additional treatment and immersion and so that's gonna be the ultimate goal

53. 00:42:45

    and so when you put all these pieces together you get an interface that looks a bit like this you've got your top-notch sidebar party system voice channels voice chat notifications all into one and so this is what the the dark team looks like we can switch to the light team in a pinch and so you'll be able to swap back and forth whenever you want and so that's the Baseline of the interface you can see that we've kept it really you know we use modern stuff and that shows through the technology we're using now of course this needs to go everywhere so it's a web app it's a desktop application and like Chris likes to say spectrum is the launcher and it's also going to be available on

54. 00:43:36

    mobile and tablets because you know you need to be able to keep up with your friends when they're in the game and you're at work [Laughter] now in terms of game integration this platform is similar to other platforms that exist the the advantage that we have is that we can go deeper with game integration specialized voice is one example but there's more examples to that friends and contact will be standardized in Spectrum so you can manipulate them from there we can have Rich Game presence that means you're not just online you're on part alisar that's a big difference so you'll be able to see statuses from the game straight in the Spectrum UI party management is where we ultimately want to be able to get so that during the day you're planning out you know a game session you create your party

55. 00:44:23

    inside the Spectrum get your friends in you've got your chat lobbies your voice lobbies already set up for your party when you get uh to your house at night to play you just boom join the party it's already created and it's ready to go and so location aware lobbies will allow us to basically have you know live voice lobbies and chat lobbies that are uh based on in-game locations so just by being in a location we'll create this Dynamic Lobby and you'll be able to use it um you can see Spectrum as the real world arm to the universe that Chris is building and so when game events occur and you need to be notified on your mobile or whatever Spectrum will be the transmission for those and be so you'll be able to receive them this way

56. 00:45:10

    there's going to be also Spectrum will be available inside an overlay on the game so you'll be able to see who's talking voice change your voice channels open the full spectrum UI and chat with your friends directly from the game [Music] and so it really becomes the in and out Universe communication bridge for the and so now this was cool I showed you some screens talked a bit about it but I'd like to show you where we're at we're not ready to ship just yet but I can demo the interface uh that we have on our development environment that we call future because we're hipsters like that and uh and uh you'll see that it's all generated with uh you know text from

57. 00:45:58

    Alice in Wonderland because it's our our test generator generates form threads and channels and all that stuff but I can just show you a bit where we are uh and where we're going to be there in a few weeks I hope one two one two okay so this um what I'm showing off here is just a live super Dev interface for a spectrum and so right now I'm logged in as me Afghan access to chat lobbies now hopefully the internet is still up on this Mac and I can still reach it yes all right and so this is live chat now I only have the light theme on this version but for every chat lobbies that I can visit I have I can bookmark them

58. 00:46:46

    directly in the left bar the left bar will be the way you can track all types of content whether it's a Lobby whether it's a thread so in this case I'm looking at the chat Lobby I can have rich embeds in it I can have uh different user interfaces I can send private messages straight from this interface directly I can react now you can imagine that right now we only have these default icons but we're going to have some cool icons coming up and obviously as part of the customization that we plan you guys will be able to upload your own sheets of emojis and emoticons and change your own upvote icons to customize um and so I can from this Lobby this is pretty cool I can jump to my Planet Express org and then there you go I'm inside it but the key here is that the

59. 00:47:35

    left sidebar allows me to balance between RSI Community items like the recruitment chat for example or the general forums of my org and so I've just need to bookmark them on the left and that's it I get access to them now going down to these threads I can just jump to any thread really and then this is the form engine it's a lot more modern uh We've you know uh it's way faster too because it's real time so when new reply comes up I get a notifications for it I can upvote I can react on any of those but also what's pretty cool is that we've flattened the list into a single list so there's no more paging going from page to page just scroll down the list and one thing that's that's pretty cool is if we look at Lee and Jacoby here who's answered Mr Carey I can Mouse over

60. 00:48:23

    it and I see his reply and then oh what did he say I can click on I can just jump straight to it and navigate inside the thread dynamically this way giving us a lot more control in terms of editing features when you reply or um or comment on any of those replies like I can just jump here this is a bar that's directly within I can keep on browsing while I'm editing the editing feature is based on blocks and so I can add different blocks and move them around and compose my own and so this is pretty cool because it's not just text and markdown funky markdown I can actually insert the blocks and move them and publish and of course when I do publish if I was watching the thread then I will get sorry about that I will get a notification for it directly and

61. 00:49:11

    so the notification panel becomes my follow button and so I can just follow that I can also bookmark a thread and so then it shows up in my left bar so you can imagine you know big catamari going out and I want to follow that I just put notifications on bookmark it and then it'll actually show up on the left and light up when new replies are coming in um private messaging of course I was chatting with John earlier so it's right here I can actually check this out and then I'm right in there I get my notifications for my private messaging uh and settings and so this is the state of spectrum right now this is where we're going uh we're a few weeks out from this first release which will already allow you to create chat lobbies and forums and full control over that

62. 00:49:59

    and then if I can jump back to the presentation right over here here's what we're thinking about okay so this soon trademark in this case is pretty close uh we're thinking before the end of the year we want to have this first release out because we want this in your hands so you can tell us what you like or dislike about it and that's typical Star Citizen we need your feedback to be able to compile what we like about the interface that we thought for you guys and uh the other one and and if it's good or not so in this software release so it's browser only but it's going to have forms and chat notifications private messaging and Friends one thing that I did not show but I can just jump back is search so search is one thing that we wanted to have directly embedded in it and so all

63. 00:50:47

    your communities will be searchable right away and so you'll be able to jump the threads or chats that have been logged that's one thing I want to say to moderators Community moderators that are looking at me right now going like it's all logged and searchable public channels are all the org stuff is yours and so um in the next update after that is we want to hook it up directly with the game presence so you can already see when your friends are playing the game and that will create the first Bridge with the game so that everything is connected and the customization options I uh named like being able to add your custom emojis your custom upvote buttons uh that will be in that first that second release and then after that we're moving to a six to eight week cycle for all of the remaining functions so launcher in-game overlay voice support

64. 00:51:35

    and mobile and so we're going to be working on Spectrum quite a bit and this is only the beginning because as you can see you can already imagine how we can bring down the organization system management in it or add more features to it and so this this is going to become a really important tool that you'll have since you'll have the installer and you'll have the launcher you'll have Spectrum installed and so that's it that's what I want to show you guys s were shattered

65. 00:52:45

    we have not forgotten United in the face of the Vandal threat we have dedicated ourselves to creating the universe we have always wanted safe and secure uee for all thanks to your continued support in the sale of war bonds the uee is proud to announce the militia mobilization

66. 00:53:35

    initiative authorizing the sale of certain military grade ships to ensure that civilian militias are properly equipped to defend the empire in times of need we will ensure a brighter future for our children at the Forefront of that effort is rsi's newest ship the Polaris combining devastating Firepower and Searing speed the Polaris class Corvette is effective against a wide variety of aggressors and scenarios from delivering humanitarian Aid to Tactical operations the polaris's ability will make it an essential part of any Fleet for years to come but the Polaris is only the tip of the spear for this Grand initiative

67. 00:54:25

    a full line of other ships are now available for a limited time and to support faster mobilization and operational effectiveness Fleet formations are being offered in discounted pre-design ship teams so stand in solidarity with the brave men and women who put their lives on the line and join them in protecting the dream that is the uee answer the call today so anyway uh you actually you probably

68. 00:55:14

    already know because it's been on Reddit we we sort of pre uh released our RSI Polaris covet and uh I think yesterday was the best day we ever had in Star Citizen and and and and I mean the one thing I do want to say though because I I know this sort of sometimes there's a bit of debate and controversy the uh it is your no one needs to get a big fancy spaceship or anything else you spend 40 or 45 dollars that's all you need but the way I look at it is you know this you know getting a Corvette or you know whatever a constellation um is really just supporting development I mean that's kind of the way it looks like and so for me it should only be if someone's saying you know what I really like what these guys are doing I want to support it I love the process and I'm

69. 00:56:03

    there and and they're giving me a cool ship in the process that's that's the way it should be nothing more nothing less because you will absolutely be able earn everything in-game playing right just saying uh but it is a cool ship anyway just let you know and you you go so we'll get our we'll get off that but yeah thank you for everyone that's uh bought a Corvette because it's what makes us go it's what allows us to build the things that we're doing and uh thank you to anyone that supported it whether you've gotten a tiny little thing or a really big thing thank you very much uh okay so I'm gonna click there we go look at that um so we're going to give you I'm going to go through a bit boring uh update stuff now and then we're going to show you some cool stuff uh so first Squadron

70. 00:56:50

    42 uh sort of uh tell you kind of where we're at on it um Squadron 42 like other things uh you know like we just showed you spectrum and by the way the one thing just to segue back to where we were on that that uh Benoit and John didn't mention is that the goal when we deliver Spectrum for the first time is also delivering the Next Generation launcher which has the new Patcher which will not be downloading gigs of data all the time whenever we do a small thing uh which which I I think would would help people out I mean you know if you got faster than that maybe it's not such a big deal but with data caps and all the rest stuff um and it's also frustrating even for us when we're patching on the dev side it's like you change one file and suddenly there's at least two gigabytes so the new systems really uh exponentially

71. 00:57:40

    better it will only be bringing down things that change um so we're working hard to deliver uh the Spectrum and the new patcher for you before the end of the year so I'm not going to give you any specific dates because I get shot when I do that uh but um I you know our platform seems much more reliable than than than me uh so um as I'm an optimist you have to be an optimist in this business um so anyway so speaking of optimistic uh Squadron 42 uh we it's it's significantly grown for when it was first pitched in 2012. uh so to sort of get you where we'll land at because we're content and sort of feature locked now we have what we call chapters which is chapters in the story there's 28 of them uh in uh Squadron 42 uh episode one um which is equivalent to probably about

72. 00:58:31

    60 plus missions most of our chapters are multi-part so if you compare it to a wing Commander Mission they're usually two to three missions in length so there's flying around down on foot or talking to people all sorts of stuff um uh so it obviously it has an ALS A-list cast that you all know about there's a few people we haven't told you about that will be a surprise that we will unveil later on um because we have some other people that are part of it which is pretty cool um we have 340 speaking roles in it um you know which is insane because most movies have maybe 30 or 40 speaking roles um and uh state of the art facial scanning and mocap we showed a little bit I added 10 for the chairman we talked a bit about that and uh you know we're really making uh great strides on that and the goal is to be as good or

73. 00:59:20

    better than anything else you've seen out there uh of over 20 hours of performance capture which is um not a small amount and that gives you an idea of the play amount you're going to get when you've got that much of sort of people talking to you as well as action stuff um you know Dave and will um who are I think here in this where are you Dave and will hands up over there okay incredibly talented 1255 pages and have been steadfastly there with uh me last year in this year's shooting and I have to say uh they're absolute rock stars I mean you know we were con I think we only just finished writing all the stuff for squadron 42 earlier this year when we were doing the the final shoot which we did earlier this year um but it's um I think a really

74. 01:00:08

    fantastic story so I can't wait for you guys to actually experience it and play um we have 40 distinct ships from fighters to dreadnoughts there's a lot that you guys I mean there's there's Vandal stuff and some other stuff that's in there you've seen some of the stuff you haven't seen some of the other stuff uh we have uh some really beautiful handcrafted environments uh built by the environment team that we have uh enhanced with some of the new procedural Tech so one of the things we've been doing is some of the new developments we've been doing on the Star Citizen front we've been bringing back into Squadron 42 to expand the gameplay um you know which I'm sorry we just want to make the best one game we can and if we got stuff there we're going to use it um uh so I should really apologize for that just do it um and uh you know we're really working

75. 01:00:57

    for uh like systemic uh space and FPS gameplay so it's it's not so the idea is you do not just go one play path it's not one script to play path you can approach uh different missions different ways so do you want to you know go the you know the back door stealth it you want to go kick the front door down and and you know guns blazing uh so we're building that and the systems are all built systemically and it is some of the same systems that we're going to be doing in the Star Citizen uh and uh you know we're gonna you know we we're always gonna have dog fighting in space but now we're going to have dog fighting planetary atmosphere which is kind of a big deal we have the new tech which we're going to be showing you a little later on here um and we have the subsumption uh which is fully systemic um AI it's sort of the Next Generation stuff uh created by the genius mind of

76. 01:01:45

    Tony zurovec wherever he is I don't know he's heading out somewhere here um and uh the big AI team behind it led by uh Francesca rakucci and his guys that are implementing most of it in the designers that are doing it but it's going to allow for um you know being say on a whatever ship you're serving on say the Idris or a bangle and the crews going about their day having schedules doing lots of different things fixing things it's uh it'll be very cool um all right I will demonstrate clicking there you go see I'm just pretending to click and they they actually do it back there um so as an as an update most of our technology is now done we have some key things still left so subsumption um is still the the major one that we're doing just because it's

77. 01:02:32

    this whole new thing that we're doing and we need to continue to work on the pathfinding because it's not just pathfinding like you would in traditionally game we have these different moving ships so like for instance the Idris is moving around in space while people are moving around inside it uh which is a challenge that you don't normally get in most games uh and they have to work animation integration so we've done all we've spent all this time capturing these actors and a huge amount of fidelity and we want to make sure that the the fluidity of the animation going between actions and everything doesn't feel sort of like the typical AI which is like this and then it then does that right so that definitely takes uh time improved combat logic in terms of the AI sort of working together and stuff uh integrating sort of we have the

78. 01:03:20

    we had sort of an older mission system which was more traditional the old cryengine crisis way but since we've gone more systemic and we've got subsumption we're building another layer on top of subsumption to be able to do it an extra level of systemic sort of missions which you'll see in Squadron 42 but then the that's actually the engine that powers what we're doing a Star Citizen that's even more flexible uh and enhanced flight AI to sort of make them fly together as wingman better which is kind of sort of a bit about the improved combat logic so those are all sort of things we're working on so AI is a big thing that we really want to push to make the experience good object container streaming I talked about object containers back in gamerscon it's sort of how we we can travel around these big star systems and bring in like really

79. 01:04:08

    dense areas of information objects and then get them out because we can't even if you've got a machine with a lot of memory you can't keep it all in you can't keep the video memory all in so you've got to stream it in and out and so that's the sort of technical Challenge and then we want to do some CPU and GPU optimizations um click forward please there you go um so right now where we're at squadron 42 is all the chapters and gameplay features are at grade back gray boxer better so gray box is one we've had everything blocked out all the actions done uh We've sort of balanced it for what we think will be fun or not but it doesn't have sort of the final assets the final polish um and you know things like the AI that I was talking about um we are currently taking one of the chapters of the story all the way to what we would consider final shipping quality

80. 01:04:54

    um the idea would be to flush out all the technical integration and polish issues you would get with that and that was actually I gave an interview I don't know three weeks ago probably spoke too soon and it's saying we're hoping to show you a squadron 42 Mission uh and uh we're not quite there yet so we got very close uh the the team worked really hard but we don't want to show it until we say this is what it's going to be like in the final game with all the Polish and you know for our standpoint we don't want to show something too early on Squadron 42 we want to show the final stuff so I know that's a bit of a bummer um it's important because I think Squadron 42 itself is going to be in a fantastic experience but uh there is yeah work in progress Star Citizen yes I think work in progress on Squadron 42 I don't really want to do because I am

81. 01:05:42

    accused of being a bit of a perfectionist but it does need to be a great experience um and well I I'm gonna I'm hopefully gonna show you something that will make you forget what I just said uh so we'll see maybe not but you know uh then you can just buy me lots you can buy me lots of drinks afterwards or I'll drink lots of alcohol or do something uh but uh but but one of the keys is that we and I think you know Aaron said it in the video and I feel that way is um you know we want to do it right it's really important to do it right what we're enabled to do by you guys is to do it right because if we're in a typical situation with a publisher they would say well no you've got to make the Christmas window get it out and did it there and then you can patch it with

82. 01:06:29

    some you can do some patches and then the DLC and don't worry about the people won't you know won't think it's quite as polished or whatever and it's got a bunch of bugs and no that's I that's I don't think anyone because everybody's you know this is what you guys is what I want I spent all this time you guys have obviously spent a vast amount of time supporting and being there and and you know let's make it right like why why why span yeah because because you remember I mean look I got to tell you I was you know there's quite a lot of things that like you know I was kind of I was like looking forward to in chart four and they're like oh no it's gonna be February and I was like oh damn it and then I played it and I didn't give a [ __ ] that it was I was playing in like whatever it was March instead of back in November because it was a [ __ ] great game and so sorry pardon my French uh so that's so that's

83. 01:07:19

    really important for us so that's that's my long-winded way of saying that as much as we wanted to have Squadron 42 for this year is not going to be this year because from the Polish we need to do it it still needs a bit more time um but we will be showing you this final uh this Mission polish level in the near future so and I'm hoping that will be the before the end of this year but I'm not going to promise that because I get shot by people when I say um Okay so uh they're Squadron 42. let me move on fam here we go so 2-6 is the next thing we're doing which is has uh star Marine which is obviously a big thing and the reading Commander updating uh there's some of these things that we'll be talking about in the future size we have new features

84. 01:08:06

    for submarine we're doing stuff for arena Commander we're adding more stuff for the Crusader map um we're refactoring the library lobbying the leaderboards which we talked about on a recent ATV episode and also we've talked about the and we also talked about the flight model which we're also doing and right now the evocative I know we say it bad or wrong what do we say avocado should I just say avocados all right there you go avocados uh uh are you know they have a version of it built on the 2-5 release uh giving some feedback and uh you know we're listening to that and and that's kind of what the power and the beauty of uh this community is to do so uh it's going to have the new music logic system in um which is actually pretty cool because it's a dynamic music system that's uh you know I back in the old days of wink Commander we had a very more rudimentary

85. 01:08:55

    version of that and I think you know music creates a fair amount of emotion and gets you into the immersion and the mode and the the the the action that you're doing and uh so I think that's actually going to be a very subtle thing that will make things better um we have a sort of new uh camera we've been working on the camera system for two six I think that's important I mean I keep watching all the videos you guys do and I'm like okay let's give them better tools and makes because you guys make awesome videos I mean a lot of times we're looking at videos where we're developing going wow that looks awesome did you see this did you see what they did that's great um so we're going to have that in there and uh one big thing we're working on is to stop um the chain loading of screens so like you play a Arena Commander or a star Marine game you go back to a loading screen

86. 01:09:41

    do the lobby and load again so the idea is we won't do that we're just going to go in there and then there's no loading back and forth levels or anything it's all just going to stay you're going to go in once and there so hopefully you'll be able to have more frequent games so but the the focus for 2-6 for arena commander and star Marine is to make it a really kind of fun uh easy way to get in and just you know play around in space and dog fight or run around on the ground and get into sort of FPS combat and and and make that sort of as polished as possible um so here we go Boop so Arena Commander did I miss submarine hang on a second let's see nope there we go uh is uh so we're gonna have this new virtual ship

87. 01:10:30

    we showed it on the ATV so instead of like having to go to the hangar to set your ship up in the lobby screen you can click on your ship and you can do your Loadout and equip your Rec items which will make things much better and faster um we're gonna we're gonna have a new pirate swarm mode in addition to the Vandal swarm uh missiles will be persistent so you know you can't just like oh I found my missiles and I crash into a asteroid to respawn with more missiles uh which you know I think I'm not saying everyone does it but there's a few people that do that uh you know we'll have sort of reloads and stuff that will will help in the kind of gameplay just to sort of make it a fun uh fun uh combat experience uh we'll have a scoring rebalance and uh we'll um you know I think uh pretty much most of the ships you can fly normally in

88. 01:11:17

    Crusader you'll be able to fly in private match matches all right here we go on to the next there you go I swear it's like there you go um all right star Marine uh there's going to be two player two maps you'll fight on there'll be stationed Damien which is a smaller space station it'll be a four by four uh map and then there's going to be sort of a bigger sort of asteroid base which is a 12v 12 which we call Echo 11. uh there'll be two game modes there'll be death match and control so control of areas you fight for controllers teams uh we have new armor weapons grenades tactical visor friendly player ID which helps sometimes you know shoot your you want to shoot your friends instead of your eyes uh you'll be able to loot so like you shoot someone you can take weapons from them or ammunition from them um and uh we'll have achievements in

89. 01:12:05

    ribbon so it'll be both Arena commander and star Marina are having a lot of focus to sort of make the experience of just straight up sort of Arena shooting whether it's in space or on foot uh sort of fun quick easy to get into much better than what we've had uh today and I think that's kind of important so people can sort of have fun and play while we're working on this bigger Epic uh and so I'm just going to walk you through before we get to the fun stuff uh kind of our road map obviously we talked about 3.0 back in games con uh which is sort of the first uh kind of you would consider yeah that's you know I wouldn't say it's what Star Citizen the final game is going to be but a lot of games if they had those features they'll be very happy uh which is you know gonna have trading

90. 01:12:53

    cargo piracy smuggling Mercury Barry Hunter she talked about we're going to try to you know get the Stanton system in there fleshed out it's going to be using the planet V2 technology which I am going to show you very shortly after I've gone through these slides uh which I think you guys are going to like um and you know in Trio we'll have the you know we'll have things like the Rover and the dragonfly who you saw a little bit of a gamescon caterpillar the Aquila um which you may or may not see here in a bit um okay so and I want to give you a bit of road map after 3-0 so you know what we're doing I guess it's a lot of miners here very finest so three one and just and just also by the way in case you haven't noticed it I

91. 01:13:41

    know last year we said well we're going to do a release we're going to try to do a release every month um after going through this year we've sort of realized that that's a very hard Cadence to do because by the time you get new content in and you start testing it get feedback it it's almost impossible to get a significant amount of content to test and do the feedback so I would say that our Cadence on releases which is what you've seen in the last few releases is probably going to be something like two to three months between releases so just to give expectations because I don't want to go through 3.1 3.2 3.3 and 3.4 and everyone goes okay we're gonna get that in four months um because I again will get shot by everyone on the development side but anyway so three one is going to have mining we're going to have refining and processing we're gonna have Quantum interdiction which means you'll be able to wait and you know pull people out of uh uh Quantum travel whether it's AI or

92. 01:14:33

    you're doing it yourself refueling escort uh we're gonna do we're gonna add additional locations to Stanton um and uh you know we're gonna have the new Drake shipped well we're basically we already have the red and blue but in the new way we do ships uh the missed call C for trading the prospector for Mining and the origin 85x which was uh this kind of cool Cruiser that was with the 890 jump and if you already have an 890 jump of course you will get that already uh the next one up would be 3.2 with repair and Salvage so we'll be able to salvage and repair so dive a bit deeper in Mercenary because we have some mercenary stuff that will be in 3-0 and we'll be sort of flashing all these out again uh you know adding uh more locations uh in in in

93. 01:15:24

    Stanton and fleshing it out further uh finishing out the RSA ships in the new way the terrapin uh and then the variance of the heart the Vanguard and the reclaimer which is a beautiful ship and uh I know it's one of Nate's favorite ships so if you know Nathan Disney likes the ship it's going to be awesome um 3.3 here's the one hey new farming was so popular so so well we're gonna aim for 3.3 is farming uh sort of the rescue side yeah uh uh and then you can hit Tony up about all this here because

94. 01:16:13

    um uh the yet more fleshing out while we're doing a Stanton and uh you know the Anvil Carrick which I think everyone's there's a the 890 the 890 charm right and the merchantment so there you go and by the way so once the Squadron 42 uh The Foundry 42 team Williams 142 ships they're going up they're actually all rolling so the way we're going to do it is that we our biggest uh vehicle team is in Foundry 42 and right now most of them are working on the Squadron 42 ships because a lot of them there's a lot of Van dealerships a lot of UE big ships like the Bengal I mean the Idris the javelin um so they're all going to roll off onto sort of the big new ships which are you know character Merchant man the whole sea we had before and the US vehicle teams are going to be focusing on sort

95. 01:17:01

    of the more uh you know the more contain like you know something like a Buccaneer or um bf8s or something like that so um anyway and so that's what we're gonna have with 3.3 there we go uh and then finally 4-0 so this is a so um which will be that'll be the first time we'll go beyond this go beyond uh Stanton to other star systems I'm not going to say how many star system star systems yet depends how much we'll be able to build with our content pipeline which we'll show you a little bit uh up and coming here which um but we're very focused on have you seen some of the ATV how to author star systems at the Quality level that we like uh with the sense of Law and art

96. 01:17:50

    and character and history uh but you know be able to do planets because you know I mean sometimes in FPS games people spend forever years just making a small two by two kilometer level and obviously for us to build the Stars the system the universe that we need we we need to be here we need to be a bit faster than um so but we will have 4.0 is when you will be able to jump to other style systems uh exploration and Discovery will be sort of highlight there for our for obvious reasons um science and research um and uh you know the RSI Orion and The Crucible will be two of the big ships that we will be doing there all right so that's the road map for Star Citizen so and our goal is this is the road map going forward in you know over next year

97. 01:18:39

    again please don't hold me two dates because everyone goes why do you say that Chris I'm like oh anyway uh it's always best play laid plans are my cement um okay so well now we're going to get on to uh what we what we talked about so it's demo time so uh this uh you know a gamescon we showed you flying between locations and that was our sort of V1 planetary Tech and I said that we have this new we have this V2 Tech that you're not seeing there's a whole nother level beyond what we were showing you and the the goal really is to sort of deliver that crisis level uh quality down on the ground walking

98. 01:19:28

    around driving around but on a global scale right so like most of these games you look at Battlefield you look at any of the sort of typical FPS so the frostbite engine what cray engine does I mean they do beautiful stuff but it's all limited to you know two by two kilometers or four by four kilometers or maybe if you're lucky 16 by 16 kilometers so for us we want to have that level of quality but on a planetary scale and that is a big big ask uh the team in Frankfurt who have mostly been leading this are a lot of the guys that built cryengine in the first place and they are brilliant and this has also been supported by a lot of the teams from the other Studios because a lot of our environment and the art and the content and the assets uh come from other places but we are going to show you here I'm going to show you uh

99. 01:20:17

    a demo set in a planet now we took a planet not necessarily that's in Stanton because we wanted to have something to add more diverse ecosystems to sort of show you what the tech can do um and so this is the first time we're showing the tech publicly of course like everything we do it's going to get better and better but it's a completely new terrain system it seamlessly supports the sort of spherical terrain at planetary scale so you know most terrain systems are flat whereas this it's you know it's the planet it's round and you can go around every side and the gravity and everything works and the horizon line is the actual real horizon line if you see something you can walk to it uh there is there is no cheating at all on it uh it's all yeah I know it's hard to believe it's not faked I know

100. 01:21:06

     um you know it's kind of like the moon landing really um anyway uh so but everything's uh you know everything's generated at runtime because you you can't have this amount of data in there and it's amazing and actually when we show the dev I think we've set up so you can sort of see the frame counter because what the what the guys have done uh there you know the game logic and the code and simulation slows everything down their actual engine generating the the world is incredibly fast so you'll you'll if you look at the top right you'll sort of see when you're seeing the world and you'll see it sort of drop frame it's still going to be very fast but you'll see the frame kind of drop when the game stuff starts happening when you're moving around and stuff um so uh you know I mentioned there's no view distance it's artist driven uh uh you know so we and and uh

101. 01:21:57

     over here I'm gonna have Sean and Simon who I'll introduce in a bit they'll we'll do it we'll do a bit more of a deep dive after I've shown you this particular demo uh to talk a little bit but longer term um the uh ATV episode for Frankfurt is going to really go into some of the tools that we use um yeah another they're awesome was that Brian saying Frankfurt all right just checking that voice sounded familiar to me um but the but the key the key is that it's absolutely artist driven so we're using the procedural techniques and we're using all this stuff to just basically author planets of the global global scale very quickly um but to give it real sense and character because you know it's there's I mean there's obviously there's quite a few other games using sort of procedural Tech to do planets and um you know I have to say there's

102. 01:22:45

     technical achievements are all like really impressive and cool and and all the rest of stuff but for me I want to sort of be able to say you know I want to build this you know planet that looks like half and I want to build this planet that looks like tattooing right I need to have I want to have the sense and I want to be able to control it and so the big key for the tech we were doing was to have it sort of artist driven with the procedural technology enhancing what the artists do and we're gonna so that's what we're going to show here the other aspect of it because it's not just about procedural artist tools we're also trying to think about how we're creating content for this universe so you can explore and adventure around and it's not just the interactions with the other players but we have a rich world that's sort of going on and there's missions that you can sort of stumble across or you know AI are doing things and and you know we showed a game

103. 01:23:33

     is considering example of coming across the space wreck um inspect you have to retrieve a black box from a you know destroyed staff error and what we're planning to do is have sort of a combination of sort of the simple emissions which are mostly generated you know like oh well this location needs this kind of mineral so they're creating a job for someone to bring it to them or you know go and fight the pirates that are getting in the way of the trade lanes and then there's the sort of more in-depth stuff which we sort of showed with the males Eckhart mission in the Gamescom demo and what we're showing here is sort of the version of that that was more planetary focused where we build different building blocks and players uh could come across it and and do it uh and you know to have a rich living world that they're going to venture on and so that that sort of the the missions that have

104. 01:24:22

     these scripted blocks that sort of procedurally sort of connect to each other and have maybe different situations or outcomes depending what's happening and that's something that Todd Pappy who's not here today is our design director and Tony are very big on and I think it's going to be really cool so having said that we are going to uh go to the demo I don't think let me see if there's a screen here or not what's the next screen let's go down let's yeah let's go down and we will start the demo this is all 100 live in the engine in real time let's let's go in in real time

105. 01:27:43

     yeah they missed it he actually says hello citizen car but you guys are all laughing when you saw the guy all right

106. 01:28:45

     here we are in a constellation Aquila contrails so we're heading towards the distress speaker so the idea with this would be that you know you potentially could get a mission where you get a distressed speaker and you're going to find out on you know in this particular case uh this planet so we're heading towards it all right so I think uh this is telling us the atmospheric conditions are unsafe

107. 01:29:34

     but one of the one of the key gameplay things you want to do on because obviously the planetary Tech is going to allow us to have a whole bunch of uh play areas we don't normally have is to encourage players not to always you know maybe you can't always fly there maybe you have to get out and use your Rover for instance and she will have a new film so it's fine let's go find in a landing Zone that's on the edge of the desert playing I'll look around all right so let's we're gonna head out

108. 01:31:40

     to do some exploring and uh yeah we're on Let's uh get ourselves let's be nice and tidy close the locker up and uh then grab a gun just in case there's some pastels like that um I mean but this is kind of an example like for instance you should be able to sort of sit in heavy armor flying a chip maybe you're in your flight suit and then you go and equip your armor or your Eva suit when you need to go outside and do stuff and so you sort of want to make it quite immersive and have different reasons to be equipping and using different stuff so if you if you notice this is uh uh the actor that we had that was in um people to Planet he's actually in

109. 01:32:29

     Squadron 42 he plays a character called joaquim Style again so let's go and see the distressed beacons about almost three kilometers away over there we get our scope out all right so let's figure out how to get there since we can't fly so handily we've got the constellation killer so we have so you know you saw the constellation a killer commercial a while ago we are now doing this into the game in real time lots of videos where people walk all the

110. 01:35:22

     way around the planet or they go to the mountain they see in the distance because that is not a Skybox that is actually the proper Fountains of geometry that's all that everywhere and that's actually the liberating thing with the this Tech has built them planet on the planetary scale its level of detail and of course you can see up close it's like when you see a battlefield one for instance in the desert uh of course it's all in a global scale and we have different Echo Systems obviously we float through flew over oceans we flew over sort of grasslands or forests or over three mountains and now we're sort of at sort of the edge of a desert approaching clear it

111. 01:36:43

     looks like someone didn't heed the atmospheric unsafe flight warning if we take a look back here you can sort of see where we came from about two and a half kilometers back there and so we're heading past this rock out uh this set of this sort of Canyon walls to head to the distress beaker a little bit of bread crumbs

112. 01:38:25

     miss her eyes and javelin as where that came from all right let's carry on see if there's anyone around and head that way to get to the distress Beacon about our shop moment here we go

113. 01:42:01

     all right we've got one we got another distress speaker we think two so let's go look for that and remember we came all the way down from planet all the way down here and we're down driving around at this level of detail so that's kind of a big testimony to the about the front Planet V2 stuff does and the tools has given the artists the looks amazing you want to think that's in a global scale if you see up there that's the space

114. 01:44:54

     station and if you look closely you can actually see the Rings slowly rotate but that is the space station we flew past on the way down and that's kind of what the sort of tech and the 64-bit Precision for positional space gives you and we just can have this dynamic range of scale that I don't think any other game has so all this up close detail at this level at you know as high quality first person as you see in any other game but on a global or a planetary or even star system scale all right so Orpheus Horizon black box so we've now between the two paths triangulated to where the black box and the obvious Horizon is which crash spaceship Vince is understood underturned by the

115. 01:46:12

     impending transform but seriously the sandstorm is an example of we want to have Dynamic weather on the procedure we're working to have sort of a dynamic procedural weather system and things like sandstorms hurricane various weather systems are all victim of the planets that will add additional sort of drama and challenges for when you're adventuring and playing around right let's go check out these are wreckages maybe dangerous out in the desert who

116. 01:47:18

     knows that looks like the obvious Horizon and visit but we're just gonna do it all right go out there yeah I know I gotta I gotta memorize that whole speech so we showed you a crash staff error

117. 01:48:46

     this is a crash traveling well just we'll just pop off here still about 200 meters away yeah okay hang on a second it's like there's a sad nomad let's reshoot it nice shot

118. 01:49:46

     got cocky he's like up the move too that's that looks like it's getting

119. 01:51:10

     okay let's uh let's get out of here [ __ ] hurry up [ __ ] everything all right that's not good

120. 01:52:11

     I just lost our way here let's see here that's where the black box is the black box for me so let's uh let's see if we let's find a way out and that's where we were at the cardio

121. 01:53:07

     Fair it was probably about eight nine kilometers away maybe that's not a good idea

122. 01:54:51

     okay that's the first time it's ever done that I mean you get to see them pull out twice now all right that was uh that was a

123. 01:55:49

     demonstration of the uh what we can do with the procedural Planet V2 technology let me just go to the next slide so um we're going to I'm going to hand it over to Sean Tracy who's our technical content director and Simon Vickers um who is a CD designer in 2042 and we're going to sort of open up the curtain a little bit they're going to get in the editor and they're going to sort of zip you around the planet we Built For This which will be a planet that will be in Star Citizen eventually it's just not on the Stanton system and uh so can I show you some features behind it and then uh there'll be a deeper dive done by the German office uh so I'll I'll hand you over shortly I have to say that they that last thing was the first time I've ever seen it anytime we've done that play through but

124. 01:56:36

     that's live demos for you um so Sean over to you awesome thanks Chris hey everyone how's it going all right yeah you know you guys know I get excited about this stuff all the time so they thought they'd put a mic in front of me and actually like usually I write down bullet to what to say I actually have bullet points of what not to say so that's gonna be good stuff so I wanted to show you some behind the scenes um they want to see your screen up there very good all right so what you're seeing in front of you um myself and Simon uh work in this uh every day is this is the space box editor uh this is what our developers use to build our build our systems build the planets uh pretty much anything that goes in the

125. 01:57:23

     game runs through the editor so you might recognize Portales are but uh what you probably haven't seen before is the planet that's sitting there underneath so one of the big things that we had to do with the cryengine and I get asked this a lot of times like what do we change from the crying did we just take that and start plopping models into it or what not not at all the terrain system had to be completely Rewritten so one of the biggest things that it needed to support of course was spherical terrain like you're seeing up there uh one of the other things that had to do was go up to a planetary scale now the cryengine terrain system was actually really good in the first place but it was designed for you know a flat eight kilometer sort of area and not a true planet so one of the other things is all this stuff is runtime generation so all of it is happening in real time right in front of you you saw we had the frame counter up in the top right for the entire demo

126. 01:58:11

     there and that's something that you know any engineer uh any artist anybody working on the demo can really be proud of because that frame rates of that level are are hard to get when you're trying to do content to this fidelity so one of the other things that you saw was the seamless transition from space to first person ground um I haven't seen any other project or any other uh game to that matter um that has the sheer uh range of scale that we have so when you get really up close on the first person terrain it looks like you're down on the on the train it's not blotchy it's not too big you don't get all screwed up with the uh with the scale hmm all right so the next thing um is that there's no restriction to view distance you saw this in the whole pull

127. 01:58:58

     through in the uh initial demo but you'll see this here as Simon zooms around within the editor and again this is all happening real time we thought it best to show how we actually build this stuff for you guys so that you guys can have a little bit of faith that we're going to be able to fill um all this content up for you so one of the things we like to do is just kind of show the scale because the scale is really hard to wrap your mind around um as even as a even as a designer it can be uh um very jarring when you go from just a centimeter level of precision all the way out to thousands and thousands of kilometers so he propped a character in there just give you an idea of what you're actually looking at because it can be easy to get sort of a God complex when you're looking at this kind of stuff all right so I think we're gonna go find

128. 01:59:46

     a little area here and uh do a little bit of work because one of the biggest and most powerful pieces of the tools and it's probably what we work on the hardest is that it's it's artist guided but it's procedurally generated so the artist can still have this really fine-tuned control over the areas that they want but we can do it on such a massive scale and they can even go in afterwards and sort of tweak up the objects so you'll see he's actually just creating more landscape we actually use an ecosystem system an ecosystem technology to do this so I'm gonna let Simon paint a little bit of terrain here and this is pretty awesome this is what we get to do every day so um it's really exciting to be able to work on this kind of technology and it's even better to be able to stand in front of you guys in front of this kind of

129. 02:00:34

     Technology because there's 360 other you know developers that are working on this stuff so um gotta say that it's a massive massive team effort all right so what he's actually doing is taking down different ecosystems uh the ecosystem is kind of like a high level visual representation of a classic level of a classic game level really um so the ecosystem finds things like uh the general terrain shape um so whether it's down desert whether it's mountains whether it's ocean um it also defines some of the main feature terrains uh things like erosion or valleys and trees and you can see as he paints around it changes all the ecosystem underneath all right shall we find a nice little

130. 02:01:26

     spot to build up on so while Simon looks for a little spot here just to let you know the planets are made out of uh all these ecosystem tiles or chunks uh and it's made out of thousands of these chunks and we can modify them again on a really really macro scale so on a planetary scale or on a very very micro sort of scale so the first thing he likes to drop down is always a little bit of a lake or a river so of course we've got the water support that we wanted to but we had to actually rewrite the whole ocean and water volume system in the cry engine to be able to support again this spherical

131. 02:02:13

     level uh uh terrain and as you can see the results are actually really really good it's no pressure on Simon at all so what he's placing in now is one of these object containers so again we thought it'd be cool if we really just kind of pulled the pulled the curtains and and showed you how we how we make this stuff so an object container is uh how we actually classify a whole bunch of different objects so it might be lights it might be geometry uh it might even be script um there's many different things that an object container can contain uh and the whole point of object containers is really so that we have this powerful streaming system so that we can bring in an entire level worth of content and

132. 02:03:01

     then bring it out and even better we can fly around levels of content which is what the capital ships are really doing so this is the tower we just saw in Homestead we're going to set up a little uh location here we'll put a couple uh objects down and we'll do a little bit of exploring so you see how quickly the designer actually controls uh the procedural distribution of the trees grass groups of objects and this isn't restricted to vegetation right you can do this with rocks you can do this with grass you can do this with buildings maybe question mark uh we'll get to that at some point I'm sure yeah so one of the things I did promise

133. 02:03:55

     my German counterparts is that we'd keep the tools off the screen because they really want to reveal this stuff they've done a ton of work on these tools so a lot of what you see we get to Showcase you know the final results of this stuff but there is so much work that actually goes into being able to bring you that um and a lot of those guys don't get enough credit so really excited to be able to stand in front of this stuff for them woohoo so he's dressing up the scene a little bit he's trying to make a little bit nicer looking um we've got a special little prop here that Simon seems to like to drop in

134. 02:04:45

     you might recognize it so we're creating a little home for this crab I think he lives under the tower yeah maybe he's got a family yeah it's a debt it's a daddy crab you know yeah now we're talking Simon now we're talking so that gives you a really good idea of you know this took what maybe you know five six minutes and we were able to build up just a little section now you know this isn't about to ship out to you guys looking exactly like this but again

135. 02:05:34

     it shows Oh I thought he was mad we would ship it Simon just we would ship it you would all play it I'm sure so again we need to be able to create this content super quickly but still have that artist input because if you don't have that artist input eventually you end up with very generic looks and we can't give you these moments that we really are uh um are excited to to share with you so what do you think should we show that uh all right so the last little bit of this uh it's kind of a fun bit is uh in a lot of game levels the thing is is that you're in a sky box like what you're not what is so hard to wrap your head around is that that's not a Skybox that's actual atmosphere scattering that's happening the sky is blue because the

136. 02:06:22

     light scatters right um so let's just kind of prove that to you um those little Sprites in the sky they're not really Sprites those are other planets so let's see if we can explore one of those one of the other cool things anyways just about our editor in general you saw that while he's developing he can actually just jump in and start actually playing the game directly from it um it's a super powerful Tool uh you won't iterate too much on stuff if you have to shut down take five minutes to reload some other uh some other uh executable then you come back to your editor being able to just minutely change thing after thing after thing and jump in and try it again and jump in and try it again and jump in and try to um gives you really polished content so there's one reason I'm standing here

137. 02:07:11

     talking about it and Simon's flying he's actually he's a very very good pilot and I think we're about to Showcase this no pressure so that's not a Sprite let's go all right so a little bit of a different looking Planet here so this is kind of showing off a little more of the Exotic ecosystem that we can do and we barely just scratched the surface on how far we can really take the uh the Exotic bits these are sulfur Lakes this place probably just stinks I mean it's super hot the sunset though that you can see again with the atmosphere scattering we get this for free

138. 02:07:59

     um you know not for free I mean somebody worked very very hard running Carson Wenzel um but in terms of actually running in the game when the sun comes down on the horizon yeah we're going to get that scattering we get natural day night cycles because well the planet's rotating so you see they're doing a bit of mining here but uh Simon's he's Brave all right he almost blacked out we're all done there's no there's no but we really wanted to show you again like uh without having too big of a demo put around it we wanted to show you how we kind of you know level design Jazz Simon called it earlier just

139. 02:08:46

     something a little bit improv in all what's this somebody find information with us so we're gonna go chase him down see where he went it's an interesting ship there all right so we've given away way too

140. 02:09:35

     much already they want me to get off I know I'm so sorry all right thanks a lot guys I hope you like seeing how we actually build all this stuff for you all right so there was a little view behind the curtain a few little things that um you'll see a little later on when we show you the Squadron 42 uh uh polish level uh but anyway so uh you know I'd also like to point out that the um uh whole sort of discover the javelin sand worm demo I believe when we did gamescon we didn't have any of that so that's how quickly with the tools that have been built by the team in Frankfurt that we were able to sort of put that together

141. 02:10:21

     obviously we had some of those assets like the javelin although we had to wreck it and put it in the desert and but with all the Echo Systems building that world out um that's just the beginning the tools are built to iterate uh really quickly so what we've been concentrating on is the technology uh to put in place to enable us to populate the universe of Star Citizen with incredibly like High Fidelity content and if someone's doing a drinking game I guess you have to take a shot when I say Fidelity uh Fidelity Fidelity Fidelity uh anyone's gonna get drunk now um but uh no it's the the the the 10 I mean it's incredibly exciting for us as a team because the uh the gameplay potential now into because it's not just flying missions in space or even sort of

142. 02:11:11

     wandering around in fps on ships I mean there's a whole I mean not a whole world there's Whole World's out there to go and explore an adventure and have a you know different encounters on and uh we're gonna use that in Squadron 42 uh and obviously Star Citizen it's going to be a large part of and you've just seen the tip of the iceberg so if you see how our ships get better year after year and a bunch of our characters get better year after year just imagine what the planets are going to look like in a year's time and everything else but I have to say the team that are building this is fantastic so my hat's off to him and my hat's after you guys uh for enabling us to be able to do this you know it's four years it's happy birthday for us four years on

143. 02:12:01

     and my lovely wife is Sunday too better singer than me what I'm not singing oh you're not singing oh you're not gonna get saved we're not getting taken off the internet now no I'm not out here to sing no I'm out here to announce citizencon 2017 will be held in Frankfurt so as soon as we have all the details we will share them and I'd like to uh give it up for all of the staff who have put in like hours and hours and hours all around the world all our 363 staff and our volunteers were our volunteers okay they're coming who's going to kick Chrissy gonna kick

144. 02:12:50

     off the singing what's that you're gonna kick off I'm am I think it's awful happy birthday to you happy birthday to you is uh so people can see it or not I have to cut the cake all right here we go just do it I did it

145. 02:13:42

     all right who wants to cut out all the things all right I would say thank you to everyone here thank you to everyone up on stage thank you everyone watching out there and I think uh now it's time to have some drinks and fun