Inside Star Citizen: Mission to Module

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   hey before we get on to the normal business of inside Star Citizen this week we wanted to take a moment and recognize and acknowledge what's currently happening with the live gameplay experience obviously anyone that's been following the project for any period of time knows that running a live gameplay environment throughout the process of development is an unusual sometimes trying but often rewarding experience but it's not just the tremendous work of our developers that make this possible it's also the continuing commitment of you our players that allow us to test things at scale because it's often easy to forget that with the hype and excitement of a new release that every level of Star Citizen is a development and testing platform

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   even the live Alpha now even knowing that the launch of alpha 318 was going to be rougher than normal I think it's fair and safe to say that we were all hoping for a somewhat smoother experience and the one that you have been finding the last week now while I'm going to continue I'm going to continue pointing you to the amazing efforts of our platform team the player experience team and especially the community team in updating you on the continuing progress through the website and socials because quite frankly they're far more plugged into those things than I am and will have much better information than I ever will we did feel it was important to acknowledge the current state of things at the top of this show whose story was set weeks and months before I said it on SEO and I'll say it again here we don't just share in the

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   victories with each and every one of you we're often right there with you with the same thoughts and the same feelings about our disappointments we're sorry for the rough launch but I hope you can see the determination and the dedication of those people working to improve things in the improvements that are being made each and every day this week and will continue until we get things where we want them to be so with that said let's get started with this week's show since the launch of the persistent Universe in December 2015 Mission gameplay has been at the center of the Star Citizen experience whether that's doing someone a favor and investigating a few ycc probes delivering an important package from one planet to the next or infiltrating a gang of would-be near do

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   Wells and efforts to keep Stanton safe missions often push players forward into areas they might not otherwise have discovered and pull them deep into the scandalous underbelly of the star system and over the years through the work of the mission feature team missions have continued to evolve into a modular system that allows for designers anywhere in any Studio to create missions not in the weeks and months of 2015 but in the mere days of 2023 so on this week's inside Star Citizen let's learn a bit more about how that modular system works the technical complexities that make it possible and take a peek at some of the new modules currently in development for Alpha 319 and Beyond [Music] good you can do it I can do it missions

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   matter no missions modules Elliott Maltby Mission modules you're at scene five mission modules Lars scene 5. I always wanted to do that at the very beginning the early days everyone was just coming up with missions right what we used to have to do is have a bespoke mission for every Mission we had someone might have built it to act this way and then another person might have built it to act this way but in a completely different way so one person would start like a delivery Mission would have to write it from beginning to end and then some other person wouldn't have write a bounty Mission from beginning to end and then another delivery Mission Again from beginning to end and the problem with

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   that situation was that um everyone wrote their scripts differently each Mission while might have similarities every bit of logic was different in some way we are a game that constantly evolves it constantly gets updated so things break sometimes we used to get bugs back which was like oh you know that when we enter the action area for this this Mission this happens but it wouldn't happen on the other one even though they're functionally doing the same thing everything was built in a different way and so everything also needed to be fixed individually it was a lot of reworking and redoing and over and over again and eventually that could not be skilled up anymore in a game like Star Citizen where we really want to populate the entire universe with missions we can't really do that we have

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   to come up with a different solution we don't need all these people working on all these things all over the place if we can have more of a unified approach towards it that's where Mission Logics come in foreign to fix all of those issues is a more modular system this is where we identify key functionality between missions and plug them all together and make it all operate under one module this means that when we get a bug it is likely that every other Mission will experience this bug and we can fix it so we have modules and sub modules and sub-modules and there is no answer that you can keep putting them inside of each other but on the high level we have what are called wrapper modules so some of the different wrapper modules are like delivery missions your typical delivery mission is pick up a box and then deliver the

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   Box in another location which has certain variations so we have ones that are called multi-stop which are essentially uh here's five boxes uh here's the pickup locations and here's all the drop-off locations the player can decide in what order they want there are the linear wrapper module which is we give you one box and you have to deliver that before we then give you the next box infiltrate and offend has like various subtypes and different variations that we can use depending what the mission wants to achieve you've got to eliminate all missions or you've got eliminate specific missions or even eliminate boss mission where players must neutralize the grunts first and then afterwards a Boss shows up and that's the eliminate Target and those are all the sub modules of the infiltrate and defend type and we're still making more then is the bounty hunting modules are about emissions are

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   quite well known the most basic version is you accept a contract it tells you where the Bounty is you travel there and you take it out which then can be modified in like several variations it consists of the synced assassinations it's the group bounces where you have three different bounces at different locations you have to get to and kill it's the Idris event where you have to go and kill it Idris with potentially multiple people you don't know and when the ability to capture people comes online will add even more modules to help support this so what we're working on now is resource collection missions that includes Salvage and Mining missions we're even gonna be adding classic things like um someone wants 40 pieces of Wheat and you have to go and find that and bring that back to them all of these things we're looking into investigating hopefully you'll see soon

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    no Reddit that's just an example we're not actually going to collect weight so let's dive deeper into sub modules and let's use one that looks relatively simple the delivery module the delivery module uses a wrapper called the multi-stop delivery so when that fires that starts something called the initialized delivery Loop the initialize delivery Loop reads parameters that designers give us say how many boxes they want to be delivered for this example let's say three so those three boxes would start three individual round deliveries now a round delivery will care and track the progress of a singular box and it's Journey from point A to point B so then after that round delivery has booted up and it has all

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    the information that then goes right now I need to start the first part of it which is the pickup part so it starts to pick up or drop off module which then will check what has a designer specified to me does the designer care where this is spawned do they want a locker do they want a certain item Port if they don't it will choose randomly so let's say they go okay I want it to be picked up from a item Port which is essentially what you know as a shelf the image spawned on a shelf and it sits there waiting when the player interacts with the item and picks it up it sends a call back back to the pickleball dropper and say this item's been retrieved the pickle oil drop-off goes my job's complete let me tell the round delivery the round delivery then goes okay thank you for that information I can now start the drop-off process because the box that I had been told to pick up has been picked up it will then say I'm gonna

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    boot the pickup or drop off again but this time it will specify the drop-off process once again taking into account anything that the design has specified if they want it dropped off in a locker or at a shelving unit again say this time it's a locker then what happens is it will boot up a completely different module of the delivery Locker then that will send the request to the delivery locker and say hey delivery Locker you're going to expect X item from X person the delivery Locker then Waits when you put it in the delivery Locker the delivery Locker will verify that the item is the one that was actually asked for you to be delivered and then it will once again send an event back up to the pickup far drop off going hey I've got the right item that'll go cool thank you send that over to the round delivery the round delivery will go well that's my box gone I've finished I'm gonna send this up to the initialized delivery Loop the initialized delivery Loop goes

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    that's one out of three now delivered it will then repeat this process for the other two boxes that can be done in any order then when that completes all over together the initialized delivery Loop will go cool all of my things have been finished I'm going to send it up to the multi-stop if the multi-stop will then go that's my mission over complete you get your money and it's as simple as that the reason we set this up like this is because it allows us to quickly plug pieces in for example the prison Mission had to expand on the delivery system to allow you to pick up from a corpse and drop off to a satellite as a sort of upload function what this means is we didn't have to create another delivery module to do that specific process we created two ending modules of pickup corpse and upload data those live at the end so after to the pickleball drop off

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    has run its course it would just pick those two which means we don't have to add specific functionality to the entire module all over it only has to be at the end so I guess you really want to hear about some of the new stuffs so let's talk about Salvage modules the Salvage module is currently a singular module and what we have done is allowed for a bunch of functionality the most simple version is you get your contract in your Mobi glass given by a company that has Salvage rights you accept mission in Moby glass and then it's going to give you a piece of Salvage and it says well we have a piece of Salvage for you and it's located at this LaGrange point the player is shown a location where a shipwreck can be found so they make their way there and it could be that

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    another NPC is there salvaging already or you could have an illegal variant of the mission where you have to go there and Salvage everything quickly before another player that has the contract legally shows up but there's going to be time on screen of whenever the legal owner of that Salvage gonna appear which can end up in uh enemies arriving because he calls them in we've made several sub modules that allow to work with it so the first one is spawn ship waves so it's going to be a wave based module that allows the designer to Define what the waves are like exactly and then they show up and another module that we've been making that we're actually quite proud of is the chicken ship module and that's a ship that shows up and then is either going to attack you or try to run away and if you scare

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    It Off by either damaging it or taking too long it's gonna try and jump away and if it does so then it allows the designer to Define what's going to happen then so the most basic version would be he's going to call his friends they come in and then all of a sudden it's not you and a vulture against another vulture it's going to be you against Retaliator bomber and four arrows and you're in trouble now the other option is like okay if you destroy it then what happens so we have the option of like a Carrick arise because the company is like well we haven't heard from Bob in an hour we're gonna send like someone else to do the Salvage but maybe something happened to him we're gonna send something bigger or you basically warded off the Defenders and you're now safe to salvage at your own Leisure this kind of modular approach will allow all the designers to come up with whatever they want when it comes to

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    building missions there there could be a number of possibilities it is only limited by their imagination all of these sort of modifiers and options are there to sort of allow us to create different types of gameplay or different experiences with very little changing of the logic it's a lot of just changing different properties on a what's called a mission record Another emission module that we're working on that hasn't been revealed yet is package extraction so it's a mission where the nine tails have taken over another Crusader platform and they have gotten their hands on some highly valuable Crusader prototype chip components so Crusader really wants them back before they fall into the wrong hands and as a result they put out a contract and many players all around Crusader are tasked with going to that platform and handing it to the ninth Hills essentially getting back the

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    Prototype ship components before they can be flown off world one thing we've been playing with is that we hooked it up to the Bounty modules that already exist so we would fire a bouncy module where the player goes to a location they kill a ship and then we kick off a salvage module All in One mission so the player goes there kills the ship and then instantly their objectives are like and now Harvest it and then that's the completion of the mission so at the moment mining missions are on pause while we wait for resources from other teams but in the meantime we will continue to develop Salvage missions mining missions and the overall scope of resource collection missions so you know you could hopefully see your wildest imagination of resource collecting missions come true a reasonable expectation of resource collection missions in the future so the biggest virtue of this is it

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    allows other designers like game from Montreal or Sam from the EU locations team to go in and be able to piece together their own custom Mission we just send them one submission module is finished all the questions that they need to fill in for this their designer can go today fudge select a mission modify a few properties that will change the behavior of the mission whether it's the type of box they're delivering or what enemy they want you to kill all of these modules are intended to be stitched together in easy ways to be able to create completely new bits of content so that the content expansion can be huge and this is really important for when you try to build a game of the skill of Star Citizen they could build a mission where you go to a location to do and eliminate all and as you're arriving there there's a bounty Target in the sky

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    you have to take out first as you go in and manage to kill them all they use the item dispenser we use in jump town and Korea to spawn an item that when the player picks it up it then starts a delivery mission that's the real win of thinking modularly so that was a little look behind the scenes of what we do in the mission feature team the mission for each team consists of more than just the people you see here we have a much bigger team that are building these behind the scenes to be able to bring you this new content these new functionalities and also help our designers internally to be able to also deliver the same thing this is only a fraction of things we have worked on and are working on obviously as more systems come online we are going to start making more and more modules Salvage and Mining were the most recent ones and we've worked on those

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    um crafting is coming soon so we're gonna probably make some modules with that and we're going to continue to make more and more Mission modules and more things for you to play and enjoy thank you very much for letting us tell you uh what we do we're uh hopefully making everything you like and uh yeah I don't know what else thanks very much for watching and I'll see you in the next episode of inside star citizenship I'm not in the next episode you said you were so what did we learn this week well we learned that modularity is what allows for the work of One mission to be carried over and utilized in a variety of others then it allows for the relatively quick construction and

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    iteration of missions by designers from all over the globe that it is ultimately what is allowing us to currently add gameplay quickly and efficiently to new locations like the underground facilities building interiors and even the upcoming pyro system and that new modules are being created along the way like the Salvage and Mining Parts a resource collection as well as the investigations we've discussed previously and just to touch on Alpha 318 once more the team continues to tackle the troubles that have plagued launched since Friday and you'll find continuing updates as needed at the robertspace industries.com website now stability has been steadily returning all week with more and more people being able to connect in and stay in for longer durations after that and there's been a number of absolutely critical fixes that only became known and necessary thanks

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    to you all showing up and stressing the ever-loving hell out of the new entity streaming foundation for the persistent Universe in ways that frankly we never could on the PTU so thank you thank you thank you and thank you to all the developers who never appear on camera because frankly they're just too busy been a frustrating week for everybody but I'm also really proud to stand here and represent those who are working so hard to do right by the community and this project for inside Star Citizen I'm Jared Huckabee thank you for watching keep an eye on the website for all those Alpha 318 post lunch details and we'll see you all here next week the last time I was in front of a camera it seemed like really artificial and it was difficult to talk to the camera it

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    felt like it was just judging me whereas with you guys I feel like I'm more having a conversation do you know where Mission logic comes from no well the earliest record of logic that we have in our world started with Aristotle right he wrote this book that we translate nowadays as the instrument and he was preoccupied with stuff like um Socrates is Mortal all humans are mortal therefore wait did I mess that up I said Socrates is Mortal no that's it you had one chance