10 for the Chairman: Episode 78

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:07

   [Music] hello welcome to another episode of 10 for the chairman so for those of you who haven't watched this before this is where I take 10 questions uh from our subscribers our subscribers are the subset of our community that contribute money every month to enable us to do all our enhanced Community content so this show around the verse uh all the other ones we do like bug Smashers uh jump point which is this 40 to 70 page behind the scenes a magazine that we publish uh digitally publish monthly that goes on into the details of how we design the ships as you know game design uh plus lore and we have fiction in it so it's a

2. 00:00:54

   it's really quite a cool read has lots of sort of details behind the scenes and that's all made possible by the subscribers that are contributing the money that really sort of keeps our community team and the enhanced Community stuff going which I think makes a big difference to uh Star Citizen I mean it's one of the reasons why um we're able to update you guys and connect all the time and I think it makes for a really great development environment so thank you very much to the subscribers for that and as part of that deal I try to answer 10 questions from them every week uh when I'm able to shoot this show which isn't always the case because uh you know this year I mentioned on couple of previous shows that I'm going to be back and forth between here and Europe quite a lot you know obviously we have teams all around the world in fact uh we have more people now in Europe than we do in the US uh and uh we've got a lot going on um

3. 00:01:44

   Squadron 42 obviously and then of course uh what we're doing with SC alpha live which uh we know we just uh went uh to the 2.2 version and now everyone's sort of coming down off that there'll be a few little kind of clean up and fixes on that but everyone's focusing on 2.3 which is is our sort of next major patch that is also bringing some pretty cool new functionality so um never stops in the world of Star Citizen anyway so let's get to the 10 questions first one comes from Star Ripper who asks are there any plans to streamline the patch sizes I'm on a road I'm on the road a lot and use my cellular data to update start citizen the updates eat a lot of gigs right now especially when there are multiple patches so yes absolutely we have a plan in fact I sat down earlier this week which would be the previous week to use seeing this since we're

4. 00:02:30

   recording this on Friday and you're going to watch this on Monday um but um yeah I think we have a really uh cool plan that's very configured to our sort of new development Paradigm uh you know not saying new for us but sort of the new paradigm of what we're doing which is constantly um you know building testing deploying uh both internally and then externally to uh you know you guys in the community at the first level on sort of the you know public test University p to you and then of course to live and so you know we need a solution that we can be building rapidly and iterating rapidly and getting it to you as efficiently as possible and our current one's not the best because uh it sort of have these big monolithic pack files and each pack file is two gigs and there's quite a few of them and if one

5. 00:03:19

   file changes in it you have to rebuild the whole pack file and the way our build system works on all the data is we have to rebuild all the data uh into the pack files right now which essentially means uh you know we spend about 3 hours if we do a full build it's about an hour if we just do a code build uh but that's a huge amount so you know it's it's uh you know problematic in terms of getting that done and then testing it if an issue then you have to go back so uh we want a solution that's much uh uh you know more flexible and more iterative and we also uh want one that means that we're not saturating everyone's bwith because it's not just on your guys side but it's also on our side you know we every bite we push costs us money because it's coming the you know Amazon uh you know CDN that we're using so uh we have a plan that uh I think is a much

6. 00:04:07

   cooler smarter one that's sort of all build all around sort of incremental builds of both data and code as soon as it's submitted into the C codebase and all the sort of individual F files are tagged and held in a sort of huge object store and then we the Patcher will know what to pull down and what change so if you even if you changed a couple of files no longer will we be pulling down you know a whole new 2 gig uh object pack or something like that we'll just be pulling down the specific files we'll also allow us to sort of verion back version back and forth between them so it's a really really cool plan it's going to be done by a combination of uh you know our devops team in Austin uh in um the folks in the Frankfurt office and turbulant um are all sort of putting

7. 00:04:55

   this together and building it and it's going to be super cool um not going to be deployed tomorrow I you know it's I just signed off on the whole sort of design we've we've laid a lot of the ground workor but it'll obviously take some time in testing but when it become when it comes online I think it's going to make a massive difference um for our ability to turn around builds for you guys quickly uh and also to reduce the amount of data that we saturate um you know both our CDN and you guys on your bandwidth limit so so I'm pretty excited by that because I think it'll just allow us to be more flexible and more Nimble which is good and uh save them some money so next question comes from narcoman who asks aside from shopkeepers Quest givers and other NPCs considered essential in other games are MPCs in a given area going to be generated randomly based on the current environment and the parameters set in

8. 00:05:43

   the area so what's going to happen is the we have a universe simulation that runs on a separate server and that's much more a sort of big picture simulation think of it like I don't know civilization game or something like that sort of a slower turn-based game and that actually assimilating the universe what all the NPCs are doing sort of on a macro basis who's trading with what what's producing what what goods are needed where where parrots are attacking and sort of the general outcomes of those results are all happening on the universe simulation and its own process and then that's getting trickled down to the local Game servers that all the players I you guys are attaching to and playing in and and the the snapshot of what's happening on the universe server is then sort of car across the game server so what would

9. 00:06:31

   happen is for instance uh you know if you were down on a a planet it would say okay well you know this planet uh it's a mining planet and uh you know so I will generate uh you know and the population is this size therefore um you know we'll probably populate the landing area with X number of NPCs of the X number of NPCs 60% of them will be Miners and then we'll have you know some law enforcement and you know we'll have some service workers like in the cars and stuff like that and it would all be sort of generated by uh the data that's pulled down or pushed down from the universe server and so it will dynamically change so if a place becomes uh you know goes you know you know turns on hardl look times or whatever and there starts to be unemployment or people start moving off

10. 00:07:18

    world to go somewhere else to seek jobs and the population is lowered then you'll see less people in the landing area perhaps the Mind shuts down um so then you won't really see miners anymore maybe the criminal element will increase because there's nothing to be done in that area where you can be gainfully employed so people are tur into crime so what's going to happen is there's going to be sort of a loose fuzzy connection to the what's happening on the universe simulation with what you actually see when you're moving around personally in in in the game and so it will change uh with uh what happens in the universe and of course what happens in the universe is influenced by what players also do in the game as well so the AI sort of like meta actions are all handled on the server and then the sort of player actions are sort of simulated in those local game server instances that you

11. 00:08:06

    know like for instance you guys connect to Crusade right now and results from that will be pushed back up to the universe server and then that will sort of affect things like pirate counts and stuff like that so if there's pirates preing on a cargo run between two p uh planets you know so say they're AI Pirates and then the company that's not getting the goods because the Pirates keep on attacking its shipments hires some bounty Hunters I.E you the players to go after the Pirates in that area or take them out and you do and you go and kill the pirates that are there the 20 Pirates or whatever then that gets pushed back up to the universe simulator and the universe simul says okay let me kill the 20 Pirates and um you know if that kills all the Pirates on the universe simulator when you go back and fly that area back on the local game server instance um no longer will Pirates be a potential um you know

12. 00:08:55

    spawning uh encounter because there's no parents in that area anymore where as before they were so that's kind of how um the connection happens between the game and the universe simulation and uh I think that it should be pretty cool and be pretty Dynamic so you will definitely feel impact from overall sort of macro movements and and player influence uh and uh you should sort of feel places change with time depending on what's happening in the universe so it should be cool next question comes from Krell who asks within the context of fantasy space flight in bracket Star Wars Battle Star Galactic Etc and given how you're implementing the flight model in Star seon how do you see the importance of positioning relative to an opponent playing out should there be an advantage to getting on your target six and staying there or is that pretty much

13. 00:09:43

    negated by six degrees of freedom flight I will say that in all circumstances even with sort of six degrees of freedom and the ability to uh you know do lateral and horizontal and uh you know vertical um sort of strafing uh as well as being able to sort of uh you know change your orientation and maybe not your velocity Vector which is sort of the decoupled stuff um always getting on you know getting behind someone or in their Blind Side is always a bit of an advantage now the difference in uh our system and flight model if you're a good pilot you'll be able to get out of that situation you'll have more options than you do in you know regular atmospheric uh you know air combat maneuvering but um you obviously yeah you want to get behind someone because you know they can't bring their gun you know most guns are forward facing also visibility is usually forward facing facing so you

14. 00:10:29

    know outside of the bigger ships with turrets then you know getting behind uh people or someone in a dog fight is usually uh will give you an edge and Advantage even if they can recover from it uh quicker than they can in you know traditional you know current day atmospheric uh air combat next question comes from Jay stalker who asks we already have a flyable constellation and a flyable p-52 milon how far are we from a workable tech for docking and undocking is this something we can expect in the near future or is this a functionality plan further down the line yeah know I really want to actually get the 50 p52 and the constellation uh to work together because they're meant to to work together it's probably something we will uh start to work on with Craig after Craig grol who's done the sort of Landing system he's still got some Landing system stuff these wrapping up for squadron 42 and some enhancements

15. 00:11:18

    for stares and and that this will probably be the next task to get this working it's not that difficult I mean basically you just kind of want to get it's just like the landing system really You' get in a certain area and then you would say okay dark and then we would just sort of bring you in and connect you then the Merlin would be attached to the constellation and then hopefully you can get out and you should just be able to enter into the back of the constellation so I do want to get the moon because it's actually not that difficult technically to get working it's really just people have had a whole bunch of other things they're working on first uh for instance you know we you know haven't shown it yet but you know we have an Idis flying around and you can land inside it and take off inside it and and walk around it and it's pretty cool so um that was sort of the higher priority and we still got some stuff to do on the bigger ships in terms of uh building it

16. 00:12:06

    out like we have this object container system which we detailed in our February uh monthly report that just came out and uh you know that's kind of how uh well all the future sort of big stuff like the big spaceships or the space stations and uh you know even the landing areas will all be be taken care of it's essentially sort of like containers of uh geometry and objects and stuff that can be nested inside each other and sort of stream in and out depending on the situation and that's how we'll bring in the Interiors of the bigger ships and stuff like that so we've doing that but um obviously trying to have a dockable m and with a constellation is um you know on our list uh just so the next question comes from either mediocres or mediocrities however you want to call it that way will there be a realistic audio option EG no sound in a vacuum so if you

17. 00:12:56

    so you just hear stuff hitting your ship as the muffled sound travels through the structure and lasers SL photons are soundless so shortterm absolutely no be not because um we' sort of gone for the sort of Star Wars Battle Star galactical route where we have sound because you know generally that's kind of cool even though it's maybe not necessarily quite as realistic uh longer term uh I could see the sound Department doing uh you know getting to the end of all the features we want them to implement and think that and do um you know sort of a realistic sound simulation uh option uh which I wouldn't be against I just would prefer to finish up a bunch of other stuff like you know the music system you know we've now got a new 2.0 music system uh you know the sort of um positional voice over IP that we want to

18. 00:13:47

    do so you know you can when you're in a group on a ship I can talk and you'll hear me and I'll be you know if I'm in front of you you'll hear my voice coming from in front if I'm behind you'll hear me coming from behind my voice will be filtered if I'm speaking through a helmet etc etc all those things so uh so all that's sort of ahead of the queue than doing sort of a realistic space sound option but I wouldn't rule it out longer term because we have a pretty talented audio department and they've been doing some pretty awesome stuff both on the sound creation but also on the simulation programming side okay next question comes from nimil who asks what is your intent in regards to personally owned NPC fleets is it that your intent to add as many controllable NPC as possible per person if the technology allows we definitely are going to allow you to hire some NPCs um

19. 00:14:35

    to help you say crew a bigger ship or perhaps like fly as an escort for you when you're running a mission or perhaps fly a transport for you but we're probably going to cap that to a certain number we haven't decided yet so we haven't really gotten into that we we still got obviously a lot of performance things to figure out like how many NPCs we can have running in the same sort of area or instance as well as how many players can run in the same area instance so we wouldn't want to have sort of an infinite amount for people to do and at a certain level you probably don't want to have that CU it could become incredibly unbalanced so uh I don't have a great answer for that right now but uh I would say it's not going to be as many as theoretically you could allow there will be some level of cap on it but it'll be what would make sense for you know you to have some help in the the cases you need and and perhaps different things would have different

20. 00:15:23

    amounts so you know like a if you have an Idris then you and some friends need a flat but you also need a bit of a crew and that could you could maybe have a few more NPCs in that situation than you would if you were hiring individual NPCs to fly uh escort so you couldn't have like 10 NPCs flying 10 Hornets for you for instance uh but we haven't come up with the actual numbers because obviously it needs balancing for both gameplay reasons and performance reasons there you go okay next question comes from Captain Awesome who asks so the Endeavor has biodomes what will be the point of farming and will there be bacon farming well the point of farming will be uh you know the biodomes will allow you to grow uh agriculture you know crops uh and you'll be able to sell those probably for a premium so the idea would be the biodomes and the Endeavor are

21. 00:16:11

    sort of growing things that you couldn't normally necessarily grow on a planet and you can maybe sell for a premium whatever it would be uh I'm sure a lots of people go space weed but um you know there'll be plenty of other things too um so you know it's it's a it's a sort of farming mechanic so you would have that in uh you know you'd have that in space you'd maintain it like perhaps you know you'd have to take the your ship would have to be a certain distance from the local system star or you know you don't have to T fend for it make sure it's you know grown and you know like perhaps a sort of lower gravity set up makes you able to grow a better strain of whatever it would be Wheats Etc uh so there you go I don't know about bacon farming bacon farming I'm guessing is sort of like okay we're going to have pigs uh or cows or something like that I would think at some point we may do livestock but I would definitely say in

22. 00:16:59

    the first iteration or two we probably won't do it just because of the you know issues of okay well I'm now got a bodome full of 20 cows or something but longer term we may but short term it'll probably much more sort of vegetation or plant-based that you would have to farm farm so a little Farmville so to speak next question comes from kry Fus who asks I would like to know more about the procedural Tech you've talked about Consulting linguists for alien languages are you talking to exob ologists exoplanet lists and exoc climatologists for direction and help in designing the ecosystems and climates of alien planets that's a good question uh I we do we have done a certain amount of uh working with the local school here in La actually uh so at UCLA we've been

23. 00:17:48

    dealing with some sort of astrophysicists and and their ilk uh in terms of laying out our star systems and what kind of planets will be what distance from the stars and that's sort of direct you know that sort of dictates um the type of uh planet and you know to a certain extent what we do is we say well we want this kind of planet and then we talk to um you know the folks that really know and say so what situation could we potentially get this planet in and then say well then you know maybe it needs to be this distance this many AU from the Star and d and and so that's sort of how we on a macro side been doing the star system map and some of that will filter into the procedural Tech uh but it's still early days on um the you know kind of figuring out the ecosystem of the planets and the weather patterns and all the rest of the stuff so I mean I would guess that we would

24. 00:18:36

    tend to go a little bit more towards a designed approach where like you know it's like take if you take a look at half it's a you know it's an ice planet and it's cool but it you know is the whole planet covered in snow or is it you know I mean it certainly looks like when you watch the movie uh would that be realistic would there ever be life on a planet like that maybe maybe not I don't know but you know it's you sort of very much Define the planets like you know you have I'm using my Star Wars reference here but you know hath is the ice planet and you know tatan tat tatan is like the desert Planet you know and so and you got you go to the dagaba system and that's all like this swampy jungle thing and you know very much in Star Wars they sort of focus the planets to sort of feel like it's a type It's a Jungle or it's a ice planet or it's a desert planet um so we'll probably do a little bit of that maybe not quite as

25. 00:19:25

    much of that but we'll definitely do some of that because I think it's it it really helps helps in terms of sort of identifying the the the planets and stuff and so so there'll be a combination of a little bit of Science and then also what we think fictionally or law wise or um you know sort of kind of gameplay-wise would uh would help so there you go a little bit of it but not a massive amount okay next question comes from Kiran who asks now that Vulcan is officially released has the Frankfort team had a chance to dive in to see about supporting this API alongside direct X12 we we have a looked at Vulcan uh we're pretty excited by it uh so we are considering our options uh between Vulcan and direct X2 uh we haven't made a full decision yet but um you know Vulcan Vulcan has some advantages in

26. 00:20:13

    most Mo you know the biggest one being as long as it works properly uh that uh you know it it can work on a PC but also can work on Linux and work on other platforms uh whereas directx12 is specifically just for Windows uh both very similar architectures I mean essentially vulcan's not that different than what mantle was originally set up to be so um you know we we're considering it you never know whether we will do direct X2 or Vulcan first stay posted for that one all right last question comes from Augustus Kon who asks what hobbies outside of Star Citizen are you struggling to keep up with over the past couple of years yeah there isn't much life outside of uh Star Citizen unfortunately uh so uh it's tough so I would say you

27. 00:21:02

    know the few things I get to do I'm I like uh playing tennis that's uh the sport that I played when I was young and I still do it it's good for exercise uh I don't actually play football or soccer to everyone in America anymore I used to um but uh you know that was unfortunately about 30 40 pounds ago and there may be a correlation between not playing football and getting older uh but I still watch it a lot so I'm a you know I'm a I'm from Manchester I've always supported Manchester United so I you know watch premiership games over here in America and when I'm in the UK I watch them there or actually go to some live games uh so that play some games or try to play some games when I've got a little bit of spare time that's really hard uh see some movies obviously uh you know big movie fan uh and that's pretty much it I don't really

28. 00:21:50

    have much time to do uh to do many other things than that um but uh maybe once star Citizen's done then I'll take a lot of time off and and get back into some of my hobbies I mean like for instance I think I've shown some of my like little miniature uh Napoleonic figures when I used to war game and I haven't ever since I started like doing that you know Wing Commander onwards I haven't really had a chance to do things like gaming the same way I used to do a long time ago uh because it all takes time I I actually used to think when I went to school uh that I can't wait till I'm not going to school and I'll have all this time to do these other things but I look back on it and I realized when I was actually going to school I had lots of time for hobbies and now I don't really have that much time but Civ um so there you go that's the end of my uh answers uh for ten for the chairman thank you

29. 00:22:38

    guys for listening hopefully some of the answers were informative and useful for you guys so thank you to all the subscribers that enable us to put together content like this and all the other stuff that we do uh here at uh you know for starers and at Robert Space Industries and um thank you to all the backers because without all you guys contributing and supporting the project uh we wouldn't be where we are now it's pretty Monumental uh but it's enabling us to build something that I don't think anyone would have ever conceived you could build and certainly no publisher would have ever dreamed of doing we we aren't there yet but we're getting there I think you can sort of see the progress uh you know there's more and more features and gameplay coming along line on Star Citizen Alpha you know 2.x live as we go and this year there'll be a lot of stuff that comes online that I think uh will really sort of add to the

30. 00:23:25

    experience but even right now sort of in 2.1 now 2.2 there's just it's a lot of cool emerging gameplay that's happening and there'll be more of that happening and uh you know I think we're building something that long term is going to be well it's the game I want to play and I think it's the game hopefully a lot of you guys want to play so anyway till next time talk to you later bye hey guys thanks for watching um temp for the chairman if you guys would like 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 R the verse go here please and I will see you in the verse for