10 for the Producers: Episode 05 (2015.04.20)

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] hi welcome back to the fifth episode of 10 for the producers I'm Daren borick and we've got Travis day back from where you spent a month over at IL phonic in Denver working on the FPS side so first off we just want to start off uh we're filling it for Chris Chris is overseas in the UK working on Squadron 42 so doing another episode of 10 for the producers so we first want to start off with uh thanking the backers and subscribers for making shows like this possible without you guys uh we would not be able to make this kind of content possible no and I think this is uh I don't know being able to talk directly to the community is one of my favorite things about working here so I think

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   it's uh it's hugely beneficial to have subscribers that are willing to throw down and make it possible for us to to to be able to communicate in this way so I really appreciate it should we start yeah let's see you want to do radio flux sure so the first question comes from uh radiant flux will we be able to retract the wings of the ships that can when in Space the Hornet and Vanguard for example have retractable wings but currently looks like as if they were meant to be extracted for space flight so for those who don't know the Vanguard and Hornet they have what we call swing wi type configuration where the wings kind of depending on the speed they kind of fold in and out but in space there's no aerodynamics which a lot of times what the swing is for is decreasing the drag Cod efficient allowing to fly uh craft to fly faster so in the case of Vanguard we actually

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   went to one of our Tech designers KX Renault and I actually asked him about what are we going to do or how is this going to function on a spaceship and he said that it's going to be a button that you can toggle on how much you want the wings to be able Deploy on the Vanguard and on the wing tips there are thrusters so for example if you want to go super fast you swing the wings inward therefore the thrusters are pointing towards the F thus allowing you to fly faster uh when the wings are further out deployed they kind of give a little more I guess right would be leverage for controlling how much roll and giving you better response to roll uh but it does increase your I guess cross-section MH signature because the wings are a lot wider at this point and it kind of makes you an easier Target but increases your axial rotation

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   that's what I was looking for I just wanted to use it all right so our next question comes to us from Krell a two-part question you're pushing your luck buddy uh first will there be a sump for heat as part of the heat pipe system so a heat sump that you can dump heat into uh that is a way to temporarily store a certain amount of heat to prevent it from increasing your signature if you're trying to be stealthy second if your sump fills hate when that happens and you don't want to radiate that energy will the temperature inside your ship rise and how will that affect your avatar and the rest of the crew so again I went to KX on this yeah just like the idea of like roasting the crew inside like rotisserie did you see Ace Ventura 2 yes the Rhino the Rhino exactly it was actually kind of the

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   picture that came to mind because well when you're dealing with whether it's fusion power plant or thermonuclear weapons um that's you're talking about thousands of Kelvin or thousands of degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit whichever system you'd like to use that's not something you want to shunt within within the cabin yeah so that's going to instantly you know ath Venture a rhino you now perix he wanted a system where let's say you had a a heat sump tank where basically a lot of the heat overflows temporarily just to keep from radiating to the outside but that's going to cause wear and tear on the ship so if you keep doing it over and over and over it's going to damage the system so it's not something that you it's meant to be used all the time it will temporarily give

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   you a a quick IR reduction because if you're going at full thrust that's going to generate a lot of heat it is kind of a cool idea though like you you come out of a jump point of Vanguard and like nobody knows you're there yet and you basically do your stealth attack run right and then dump whatever that thing is and and scooted out of there I I like the idea yeah I still um you know I think it's it is one of those things to that we've always talked about from the beginning is kind of having like a sump a well a storage unit so I think it's something we do and it would just be another item that attaches to a hard point yeah so just don't go into that sub tank yeah don't go into the sub tank and I'm trying to think after a long battle you're getting out of your constellation you're [Laughter] doing out my head Star Trek first Contact when data releases like the

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   plasma coolant oh and all the Bard get fried yeah yeah yeah same thing we'll do that to the vuel there you go I think we' beat this question to death yes there you go all right next question comes from madun badun I've had a thought and yes it hurt this is as much a suggestion as a question but my musings are thus have you thought about a visual way of in-game communicating ideas information to your fellow such as jump point locations ship modes or ship mods Etc when think he was in a hangover or ship location you could tell your Associates to gather around and enter into a map projector mode that you physically control your avatars gestur to a point uh add information displayed and the other players could save onto their own Mobi glass yes and no we we thought

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   about it largely in the discussion I guess of capital ships so for example if you're ourada and you're on your large bridge and the Admiral or captain of the ship can say I want All Ships Converge on this target uh on a giant Hollow sphere or Hollow table and all of them kind of every other ship gets that information Rel to their command Bridge command and controller mechanic yeah right but as far as smaller ships and things like that that maybe even possibly using like an interactive map where you know you pull up your map kind of like in a party mode where everybody can see where they are on a on a two-dimensional map and everybody click Point here and everybody knows that they have to jump to that location yeah I could totally see it on the ship like the Carrick that has that large map area or even a constellation has a you know a map display you get kind of like John madet with your friends or you get out your your digital Hollow pen and start circling stuff it seems to be standard

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   MMO Fair yeah it really does I mean it seems like something that uh on a because yeah you brought it up with the command and control obviously will support that functionality but I think you could do that on anything and once the functionality is there for command control you could do it on any number of devices or displays yep due to the extensible nature of our our Hollow framework that they've written Behavior it's Hollow yes it's a poor framework it's all Hollow actually you know your bones are partially Hollow the honeycomb pattern gives them their strength anyway our question comes to us from Gerald Evans as a way to recruit people to start citizen have you thought about bringing a facial capture rig Booth to the conventions and letting people really flesh out the Pu and become part of the game would that be more of a headache than it's worth in variety and

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    publicity yes uh I like this question because it was something I was talking with one of our animators John Riggs about since we're working on that facial capture system and while it would be kind a cool novel item to have like E3 or Gamescom or even you know citizen conf for everybody come in just sit down have their picture taken have a 3D model done of their character all cool it's not something that's very viable in the immediate future it's no I mean it would taking a massive amount of work to translate that yeah into the engine yeah so it's a cool idea just not something that we're we're ready to kind of sit on just yet and I I think we've talked about doing it it's really it's it's the economics of it it's do you want to spend X number of M days per character artist converting what shoot a thousand heads at E3 mhm first of all we don't

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    need that many uh we can make variants ourselves internally just by pushing around sliders uh second of all holy crap that would take probably beyond the next E3 to convert all those well I think they're also talking about like being able to scan your own face as your own character yeah that would actually be cuz something we'd like to do eventually yeah um to get the Fidelity though of what we have on the other characters I think you would require a really nice camera rigs you'd have to do it on one of our setups um and it would it would just take a lot of work from a character artist to actually translate it because like we recently did all those heads the Danny and the uh God I forgot the other guy's name I feel bad now the two British looking heads that we're putting into the game and arasmus one of our our cinematics guys did a

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    really nice job cleaning them up but it took him a long time to do it and it does obviously the pipeline's getting flushed out but it would still be a probably more effort than is economically viable uh to do it for every individual head right I mean the TL tldr version is that it's not easy as just taking a picture of your face and convert it into 3D and making it work yeah all right who we got next llan this one's for you Travis since you're fresh off the not boat but airplane from Denver when do you plan to have the FPS module released as soon as it is ready and meets with Chris Roberts expect how's it looking so far it is it is looking good there's a lot of things I think that we tend to do internally it's interesting

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    where so you go buy a new game like and I've been harping on Hardline recently but you go play Battlefield Hardline for example and you play it for a month or two and then after a while you start to go man I really wish this game you know this game's cool but I wish you could do X and I wish you could do y and I wish you could do Z and uh sometimes we as developers will encounter that problem ourselves internally where we're seeing something at all through development cycle right so from the very very beginning the concept of this thing and then seeing it through to the prototyping stage and then to the playable stage and then you start getting to where you're play testing it every day and like when I was at El phonic we're play testing the FPS build multiple times a day every day and you actually get player fatigue in the same way that a player does with any game and you start to go okay wow this is really cool but you know what it's really missing is a little bit of paprika a little bit of nutmeg you know and so you

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    kind of come up with these little things that you want to add that complete the experience and complete what you find lacking in the experience right and so when I first got out there one of the things we did is we took a look at this current state of the game and we kind of came up with options it's like okay if we want to ship in x amount of time here are the things that we can do and the things that we can't do and if we want to do in y amount of time you know same same Z amount of time and I don't rule of Threes you generally do three options uh presented those said You know here are the available resources here are the different things that we've been identified that we need to work on uh how do we want to cut it and the decision was made to basically go for the maximum amount of detail and Fidelity and I actually think it's going to be very very cool it's just going to take a fair amount of time there's other things that we've been doing in the background too that influence this decision like we're moving from F to wys

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    a audio middleware package made by Audio kinetic um so in making that transition we are kind of having to reset up all of the audio now we've decided to make the move out of its own stream that it's been sitting in since pretty much since PS uh Australia and bringing the FPS back into the main development Branch so that it's going to get all these new features like new lighting so we're doing some relighting the levels because we got new lights uh we have the new Aegis system it's a term that's really going to catch on eventually but it's basically like Euphoria uh from Rockstar or rag doll physics yeah exactly or ants from uh the EA Sports titles um then we also have uh so we have the Wy stuff we have that we have the new physics stuff we have the new item Port system that's been done in M so all of these different things that build a much more cohesive

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    experience because obviously when the FPS releases it's also going to release with Arena commander and it needs to have support for the social module features that are coming online so since these all need to be integrated in the move back to main we'll get a lot more feature Fidelity we'll get a lot cooler Behavior and the zero g is going to be awesome uh just the new fold body look poses and animation are going to be rocking but that all takes time yep so that is the very long-winded answer to when we plan to have the FPS module released without actually answering the question our next question comes from dreamwriter oh was Ghost Rider there the one in Top Gun anyway dream writer how often do the for critiques of designs by backers who are actual Armament experts aerospace engineers physicists combat Shooters Etc

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    make it into the final form of an in-game ship firearm or other artifact quite a bit I think I mean we do factor in a lot of the community feedback that we get from experts in the various Fields so but at the same time because it is a science fiction game there is a certain level of uh suspension of belief that I mean let's take the Vanguard for example it's a swing-wing spacecraft in terms of aerodynamics doesn't really make a difference if it's got a swing Wing or not but one it looks cool two we gave it a purpose to to give thrust same thing with a torpedo yeah traditionally a torpedo is a projectile that's Lo laed underwater so what do we do in space when missiles are doing the same thing so we kind of created our own class of of projectile behavioral differences yeah yeah so while expert critique does

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    factor into our decisions at the same time ultimately we look at what's going to make it fun and if we have to take the route of let's make it really realistic but it sacrifices fun I'd rather go the fun route yeah I agreed and somebody pointed out I think it was on the Retaliator this one I do want to change and I know that that Chris would want to change it too based off his feedback on the original bearing Marksman was that the retaliators Torpedoes look a lot like Mark 48s which I believe are used by the US military um and they don't actually have any thrusters on them for attitude adjustment um so we should probably add some thrusters on there so that's one piece of advice that I think we'll take they could have perpetual motion engines that is possible yes the other hard thing with the Internet is as he points out you know a lot of people on our forums are Armament experts aerospace engineers but it is also the internet so

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    you know like when I'm on the internet I'm A Soldier of Fortune uh that's my Persona so you know it's always hard to determine who's telling the truth and you I do know a lot about astrophysics y actually so I get to teach art team about gravity oh yeah yeah do you guys have that Su coming up okay nice in a couple weeks all right you haven't moved the bullet in a while that's true uh T Mark 48 is a Mark 48 torpedo yeah okay I was Mark 48 Adat which is a more which is like a gen more advanced version of next one is algarin good day guys I I I guess he's from Australia how is cig prioritizing bug fixes Etc compared to further development so this is actually a pretty

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    easy question for us you should take this one then okay um I actually just had this discussion when uh producer Jason Hutchins was visiting from the Austin office we also discussed this with Alex B and also our new production coordinator Lis Ohan one of the things we have to look at swimming in producers yes seriously I we have so many producers now this is awesome uh we have to look at whatever given development time that we have for example if we've got a patch coming out in let's say one week looking at the the level the amount of bugs that we have and amount of tasks that we have in our our tracking system jira Is it feasible or even realistic or even wise to be able to try to get all these bugs fixed and sacrifice uh feature development so for example do we want to take you know

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    maybe Dan or kaix or Matt off of a feature to get them the fix bugs well depends on the on the uh priority of that bug if it's a blocker meaning that it actually prevents players from be able to play the game and obviously that's going to be up higher priority and we're going to have to stop development just so players can actually be able to play the game and fix that but if it's something that's whether it's low priority or even if it's a high priority bug but ultimately we're going to fix it eventually we're going to f focus on on more future development because that's going to iteratively develop the game even further and it could get to the point where we may end up pushing that bug so far down the road that eventually whatever redesign that we do fixes it anyway so when we revisit that bug we go back oh it's not happening anymore because we fixed it you know three months ago no and that's actually that is a great example something I was just talking with Paul about today uh and like during the

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    release of the Gladiator there's some great examples of that when there are certain behaviors within the ship that are exposed by the introduction of multi crew that are supposed to be handled by the ghost system the game object State machine system in the long run uh and this being like hey if you get out of your seat and in getting out of your seat the turret deploys down drops you off then it needs to return back up and it needs to be aware of its up or down state and where it should be when you hit the call button and all that kind of stuff same thing applies to the constellation you see all kinds of bugs of the constellation with it whether or not it's deployed whether not the back of the Avengers deployed cutless deployed all this stuff so all of these kinds of issues are handled by ghost that's ghost's job game off State machine but we get into a situation sometimes where like on the Gladiator some of these will actually break the

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    functionality of the ship if for example you get out of the ship and then the other guy gets out and then you get back in before he does this doesn't reset you can't get back in the chair mhm okay well we got to fix that because that actually blocks your ability to do the thing that is critical to this patch but there are other funny issues like where if you use something or multiple things within a short duration of time before the other actions have completed it'll just queue and do all those actions even if they should be mutually exclusive so like you can close a door while deploying a stairwell through the door or you know something stupid like that that stuff whatever it'll get fixed by ghost in the long run right and Visually it sure it looks weird but it's kind of funny too and it doesn't impact the actual game experience from a production standpoint I'll give it actually using the constellation example because we're

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    actually in the middle of redesigning the constellation it's being done by by Josh Coons Chris Smith and a few of our guys as well Kirk to Mark Mall kind of make sure they get their credit Mass select all those bugs disregard yes yeah uh because our QA guys what our QA job they're their job is to go into the game test whatever's actually live in in whatever function or fixed version that they're working on if they find a bug they report it we have to look through those bugs as producers to see if it's something that we want to prioritize our to work on in the case of the constellation because we already know that we're going to be redoing it anyway we tend to just kind of either close those bugs saying that we're not going to fix them we shuffle them off to another a later later version let's say 2.0 knowing that that ship's going to be

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    reintroduced within that time period and therefore these bugs may be null Andoid will we still want to hang on to them just in case yeah and then it's just a regression yep yeah all right next question comes from beer for the beer God our good old buddy yeah is the new damage this actually he consistently has good questions so he does props to him he also pays us on the table that's great too with beer yeah is the new damage system described in the latest monthly update another attempt to reduce the workload for developing new systems or is the emphasis more on Fidelity how do you intend to balance things given that so many knobs that you could otherwise tweak are embedded in the physics simulation I believe this is regarding the the physical based damage that we're working on yeah you I go for it okay um yeah so the answer to your question is both in the

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    same way that the damage system on the ships of how they take damage was a more performant B less work and C looks better uh similarly the physically based damage being physically B we need to come up with a new term but the physics based damage of projectiles it still sounds a little too similar anyway physical based damage of projectiles will a reduce the workload in the sense that once we've converted everything and we have the math and the formulas down we should theoretically be able to tweak the values much more readily and quickly and they'll make much more sense relative to one another right because right now we're punching in arbitrary damage values based on what feels right and now we actually have to justify those with physical realities so that's what's kind of cool about it

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    it'll also make it so that the barrels for the different ammunition will actually have to match you know it basically brings a whole new level of Fidelity the other piece of it is that yes we do intend to balance things given that so many knobs we could otherwise tweak or Ed in the physics simulation but we still have all those exact same knobs that we would tweak they're just as part of the physics simulation so you can t change the mass you can change the density you can change the size there's all these different things that you can still tweak they just come now with uh I don't know physics based names basically opposed to arbitrary damage value and an inherent value already embedded into it for example if you use depleted uranium versus uh and yeah and you can standardize those across weapon systems and ships and they behave the same and they'll feel the same and so that's sorry I you got really animated no I I got really excited about that one

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    because that's the cool part right is that you if you make something a physically based data driven system what starts to come out of that system is emergent behavior that feels right to the player and that's what makes this such an important thing to do right so and it's easier so all right next one from keer so Kaiser so how is the upgrade system going to work on ships say I have an adventure does each ship come with a level on the subsystems like it does on the power plan or weapons will each ship have different levels of targeting system coolers Etc give us a brief rundown on them and how they might vary between say variants I would assume that the freelancer uh might have a higher Target system size and the freelancer max Etc yeah and so actually this is something we already see on on some of

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    the variants like the 325 um in the 300 ey lineup it has the will Ops targeting computer which allows you to dock more targets it allows you to lock on quicker with missiles the Aurora Ln I believe yeah Ln has uh better cooling system so it can kind of dump the heat from the additional weapons that it comes with from by default without a sump without a sump yes with no sump um so yeah we we definitely do this I would guess on a uh a default component basis but I think the other part of this question too is he's asking about of the the same way that we have a size one two and three Shield generator could we have a size one two and three CPU and the answer is absolutely uh the idea especially on the avionic side is that you have a CPU and I think we go with the idea that the larger the CPU the probably the the more you know CPU did the data pipe it can push it can handle

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    more data coming through the pipe um so with that in mind yes we will have a concept of size with those now it may be that your avionics unit has a size that it can accommodate so maybe you can put in a motherboard of this size or a motherboard of that size which will then have a number of Slots of different things you can put in put in your targeting computer you can put in all these different things and you can maybe make a choice that oh I want to use two slots on this as opposed to one and have it better so there was going to be a level of customization under the hood there um this is something that Chris really wants to see uh just like you're talking about so yeah the the answer is yes it is a bit odd though that we'll have larger CPUs that handle larger amounts of data when in the modern day at least CPUs continuously get smaller as so they get faster we ignore Mor's law yes yeah every eight years our CPUs actually get

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    slower all right this last question comes from Tommy train AKA Aral uh Hey guys seems like forums are full of top speed and relative ship speed discussion so maybe I was hoping you could talk about the bigger picture now in how this is developed moving forward a question can you describe uh the game design pipeline for setting ship top speeds and relative speeds are current values set by cry engine limitations Fidelity bugs and are you attempting to change this in engine well yeah so I mean one of the things we've talked about is uh so yes the 500 meters a second was at one point a cry inine limitation uh it probably won't be anymore once we move to the 64-bit floats as that system finishes we should have the Fidelity to be able to go over that no problem uh the question is do we want to

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    uh do I see a need for something move faster than 500 m a second under normal flight conditions meaning not Quantum travel not Point 2C travel not uh jump Point travel I said Quantum and point2 C the same same what one of the ideas that has been floating around is that say every ship for and we've actually done some interesting if John pritchet sent me his one of his classic waren peace emails like novel about an idea that they had for the the physics based solution to the idea of why a ship would be limited to 500 MERS a second um which is kind of fun deals with higs b and particles and Fields and it was all very interesting and you read it and you kind of it makes you go like I see that you're trying to justify this thing but I'm kind of okay with it there's enough pseudo science in there but no so the the reality is that every ship this

33. 00:25:43

    kind of the thought process and if we do this or not is is really actually totally up to Chris and the actual wead designer um not not myself but the every ship would be limited 500 meters a second but then your ship is obviously designed to perform somewhere within that envelope right so the 300i may be perfectly good flying around at 300 meters a second can turn on a dime just the way it should like that's its performance envelope is up to 300 meters a second 350r might have the same except it's got stronger thrusters stronger ability to turn and then everything within that envelope would be measured by acceleration right so you can accelerate faster on any given Vector um which allows you to turn faster allows you to go forward faster and then getting up to 500 m a second you may see like a distinct fall off in your shift's acceleration so you're able to quickly get to 300 and your normal time let's just say like 5 to 10 seconds whatever that is and then if you want to punch it

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    beyond that a you're really going to be able to go to a straight line because you're getting the point where your thrusters your maneuvering thrusters are so weak that they can't really do that very well so you might start to turn and you might literally just turn while M moving on the same Vector still without it actually adjusting your your orientation adjust your orientation without changing your velocity but for everything Beyond 300 M a second to the 500 envelope you would see that Stark fall off in your ability to accelerate so that was kind of one of the thoughts and so that would be a way that you would avoid having ships that are just flatly faster than others which is kind of can be annoying at times and just make it a game of acceleration and Optimal Performance characteristics okay rather than just what this I just will never catch this show you know what I mean so that's one of the thoughts um we'll see if what

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    happens and that is our last question so once again I'm Daren morck I'm Travis day and we're two of The Producers here at Cloud Imperium games Santa Monica filling in for uh Chris Roberts often beautiful eing are you subb of London so once again thank you to our subscribers for making this possible again without you guys uh we would not be able to provide content like this to you guys so thank you yeah and thank you to everybody who's pledged to support the game this has been a very fun adventure that we're doing so really appreciate it thank you for your faith hey guys thanks for watching um temp for the chairman uh if you guys would like

36. 00:28:09

    to uh see more episodes go here if you guys would like to subscribe to our YouTube channel and always keep up to date with all our video content go here and uh if you guys would like to watch episodes of around the verse go here please and I will see you in the verse f