10 for the Chairman: Episode 60 (2015.07.20)

20 July 201501:26:032,620 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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[Music] hey everyone welcome to a special edition of t for the chairman as you all know Chris has been busy in the UK won the performance and motion capture shoot for Squad 42 and he is now back home in Santa Monica um since so much time has passed since the last episode of t for the chairman we thought we'd do something special this time um I've pulled some of the questions and concerns and issues the community has had uh during his absence and we're going to run through those in sort of a uh a bend for the chairman this time around um and just have a chat about what's going on with Star Citizen um so first of all Chris welcome home thank you it's good to be back and it was a lot of fun over in the UK um you know shooting the Motion Performance capture
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for squadron 42 but it's also really nice to be back home and back here in the LA office and and you know seeing the energy of everyone cuz all working pretty hard on a bunch of things right now which I think we'll talk about but uh but yeah no it's it's it's nice to be back I mean I captured a lot of really great stuff and now it's all a matter of getting it in and and seeing it all come together which is some of my favorite favorite time on any project well we are certainly happy to have you home but we know you've been doing some incredible work tell me what before we get started with the community questions tell me what it was like uh working on the the motion capture shoot or performance capture performance capture uh was pretty awesome so I mean well so we would we on this one we're doing something very different I mean the past Wing commanders when I directed it we we did live action Wing Commander 3 was
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actors against Green Screen and we built the sort of digital backgrounds from Wing Commander 4 we did a lot more real sets we shot it on film it was a much bigger production it was almost like shooting a a small film or a sort of big TV show or something um but you know Technology's changed so much now that the Fidelity of the characters and the scenes and and and how it will feel when you're in it it's much more lifelike so there's a real opportunity to sort of put you inside you know the film so to speak in a way that you didn't so in the past that when Commander three and when Commander four you know you were you know Colonel Christopher Blair when you were flying a ship and it was your point of view but when you came back to the ship between the missions you would sort of Click between a couple of locations and then there would be people you know in the in the bar or you know in the pilots quarters and you would click on
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them and then there would be a conversation that would play out from the point of view of um uh you know third person and it would be Mark Hamill who is playing Colonel Christopher Blair and then whoever the character you were talking to and uh so it's sort of a combination of you were the star of the movie but you were also watching a movie play out and uh in some ways it it was slightly disconnecting but at the time it was the best way to really deliver the the emotion uh and sort of the subtlety of Storytelling for the technology then but now you can you could do something wholly different so what we what we've what I decided to do quite a while ago and we ran quite a few sort of test early on is we're doing what's called performance capture so it's a step up Beyond motion capture so motion capture is really just a body so if you see like you see you know the Uncharted stuff which is great or the last of us they do motion capture and the actors say their they're you know
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their lines and they sort of act it out but the actual faces and animation those are those are actually sort of crafted art assets and they sort of hand animate the the faces and and what you can do with some of the most recent technology is we can get the entire performance from an actor transcribed into the 3D World so uh for the Squadron 42 shoot we did full performance capture we shot for a lot of days we had a 66 day shoot which is longer than any of the films I've done um of which 53 days of those were the specific performance capture with actors multiple actors in a scene acting out the scene and they had the full suit on and they had head rig and there was three cameras um capturing every single you know expression motion on their face and 50 cameras in the volume capturing all their motions and
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so uh there's a lot in a movie um or a TV show that you get from non uh like non-verbal communication or just in general life when someone looks at you or you know they roll their eyes or they smile I mean you can tell a lot of whether someone's happy with what they're hearing or not happy what they're hearing or they believe it they don't believe it and it's those details and subtleties that make uh film and TV feel very real and I sort of I feel now that we can transcribe that and bring that into a game for you as a first person experience and so you know we had we put this amazing cast together as good as any of the movies I've done um you know world class actors uh and we scanned them like we had a rig that took 50 cameras completely digitally scan their heads we mapped all their sort of facial contortions and and motions and
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then the performance gets transcribed um that we've recorded that that that I was directing over in the UK into a full performance in 3D in the game so it should feel like instead of you watching a movie you're in it and you're walking right up to these characters that are played by people you would know uh and uh I mean it should be imersive in a way that uh I haven't managed to do before in win Commander I'm super super excited by it it's going to be pretty awesome we're working on a lot of like really cool Tech and it's also going to show off some of the other stuff that um you know we're going to have in the game in general in terms of the scope and the scale the ability to fluidly go from walking around an environment getting into a ship flying around flying a large distance Landing in another environment getting out walking around there there won't be any sort of artificial barrier between the flying around missions or moving around the ship that you're based on talking to
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people it will completely be fluid action can happen at any one of those points um so it should just feel like you're you're in this huge space epic uh and so I'm super excited to pull all that together and and and uh have people experience it because we're able to do it at a level that I never could have done when we first started this crowdfunding campaign because of you know how much everyone's back this game for so we're truly competing with the biggest um sort of AAA kind of action adventure games out there for just Squadron 42 and that's not talking about the persistant universe that obviously is coming uh along the line as well well this is really exciting one of the things that always drew me to Wing Commander was the idea that you you kind of took all these techniques and Concepts from film and you you brought them into the game world as best as you can and now it sounds like you're doing
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motion capture more like you know Lord of the Rings or Planet of the Apes oh definitely well we're doing I mean we were doing I mean we're doing it with Imaginarium in the UK and that's Andy circus's company who did played Gollum and and played Caesar in um you know the most recent um you know two Apes movies and uh and you know they're very focused on the performance aspect obviously because you know Andy's a really great actor and uh so there's a lot of techniques and Technology they've been working for that and we've been working with them and some other companies that are Building Technology to do that because the goal with Squadron 42 is to really sort of De deliver emotion in a story in a way that maybe you haven't had the opportunity to uh in a game in the past so we're letting the player sort of wander around say when he gets transferred onto a ship he can you know it one of the reasons why it took so long as to Shooters you know our script I think was about 600 pages long which
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is longer than we did for Wing Commander 4 by quite a bit longer than we did for Wing Commander 3 by a lot more and one of the reasons is because as opposed to a film where you know exactly where your main character is going to go in this particular case you don't you don't know where the players cuz we're giving you know probably 90% of the performance capture scenes we captured are not cinematic I driven they're completely player driven so we don't know where the player's going to be in the scene where he's going to enter in the scene and that provides some tricky technical challenges that we're solving but the thing that's great about that is it allows the player to move around say the ship that he's based on and interact with various crew members and sort of decide what relationships he sort of Fosters and which ones he doesn't and the goal of that is when stuff happens later on in the game and the story and you know say people die if it's someone that you were spending time getting to
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know hear their personal story all the rest of that stuff and they die it should be a lot more affecting than it would normally be because you actually invested your own time doing it and so because of that as opposed to a normal movie you know we have a whole bunch of secondary characters that are in on the ship you know various and they've got great personalities and they've got great Back stories and a lot a lot of it doesn't necessarily always have something to do with the main part of the story but it is to do to sort of let you go and talk to them and uh engage in relationships and therefore when things uh you know happen as they inevitably do in single player stories cuz you need to have some drama um you know there will be a real sense of emotion if someone gets killed or someone gets wronged um and I'm hoping I'm I'm really hoping that will transcribe itself to a a better experience um than before so instead of sort of telling you the way you want to feel I I want you to sort of
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inherently feel it and so we're using the technology to deliver emotion in a game in a way that you know I know other people are trying to do this too but I mean I really I'm big on that because I think movies and TV too are an emotional medium it's about how you feel when you watch people and what's happening and and so that's something that um you know games uh you know could do better on and that's one of the big goals of Squadron 42 yeah and I think one of the things we we kind of sometimes don't get across with Squadron 42 is what a big deal it is people see to sort of like oh it's an extra we got when we played know this is a this is a full triaa game this is uh this is an amazing yeah well I mean it's it's definitely there because of where what everyone's backed I mean I I you know I think that you know it's quite easy to say well you know you promised
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we'll get Squadron 42 and and uh you know uh but the Squadron 42 we originally um talking about when we started the crowdfunding campaign I didn't think we would raise the kind of money that we've raised so it was going to be much more uh closer to say Wing commander in terms of uh how it would work and here we're able to sort of push it we're able to have more Fidelity in the capture we're able to to to invest a bit more in the technology to make it a more immersive and ultimately I I think when uh someone know at the end of the day you know I mean it's tough it's tough sort of having the patience to wait for all this but at the end of the day my goal is that most backers will say oh you know what I I pledged my $40 or I pledge my $60 even I pledged my $250 and they'll say this was awesome I was playing various parts of the game along the way I had this amazing you know Squadron 42 experience which was as good as any $60 AAA uh you know uh sort
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of console game I could play and I have this whole persistent Universe I can adventure around in um and you know I really feel strongly that we're sort of delivering multiple AAA games all rolled into one uh it's you know one of the reasons why things are taking as long as they are because we're building this huge game and that's made possible by everyone's um you know contributions so thank you very much I mean you you basically said build a huge thing and then that's what we're doing uh but I think people are really going to like it because at the end of the day it's you know I mean there's a lot of people that backed on uh Star Citizen that still remember win Commander or you know one or two or three or four and you know those games are 20 years ago so you know that's spent the that's the the the sort of the test of time it survived the test of time and it's because at the time it was it was going for it and that's and that's pretty much what I've always
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tried to do I think that's why people are sort of enthusiastically back star s on Squadron 42 is that we're going for it we're not trying to do something that's uh you've seen you know oh yeah said I'm just doing a a rehashed version of wing Commander I'm trying to take it to the next level as I would have been doing if I was doing a wing commander and you know I had you know plenty of fun and backing from a big publisher so so I'm I'm super excited for it and then a lot of the things we're developing for squadron 42 obviously come right across into the persistant universe so we've got a whole sort of conversation system that's based in first person that's very fluid and will be awesome for the persistant Universe because we'll be able to sort of put a whole bunch of it's you know it's like an adventure game mixed with a space game mixed with a you know first person comeback game I mean it's it's uh it's going to be cool well win command is certainly why I'm here um before we get to the questions
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one more one more clarification for folks who AR familiar with this process what is the length of an average like Hollywood movie script uh okay so normally uh the length of a script is somewhere between 100 and 120 pages so the general rule of thumb in movie scripts is about a page a minute now if there's a if there's a movie with a lot more action then uh it can take longer so uh you know that would be most of Michael Ba's movies um because there's a lot of slow motion a lot of blowing up because basically denser than than dialogue if you have one page of dialog usually that's about a minute of screen time um so yeah our script was you know five times longer than a typical uh uh movie script um now of course you have to remember that we're really just filming sort of the conversational part
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pieces because a lot of the action gets is part of the game that we're building so we're really building a massive uh massive epic and experience and we're planning to sort of do that um you know we have a whole sort of Trilogy set up for the story line um that we think is going to be a really great journey that will keep people amused and entertained for a few quite a few years and then we'll also be telling other stories inside the Star Citizen Universe using these tools uh you know as well as letting people create their own stories adventuring around the universe so I so I think you know if you're a single player fan you're going to be happy and also if you're a multiplayer fan you're going to be happy um so um there you go and you know this Trilogy you mentioned that's another one I think people have questions about it's it's not one game and then some DL LC it's it's like you're imagining win Commander one win Commander two win
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Commander three all at once yes it's I mean that's one of the reasons why I mean originally we came up with a story line and we sort of looked at it and said you you know for telling a story at the Fidelity that we're telling because we're telling it at a level of detail that we've I've not told a game uh told a story of our game before because we're going for this you know all the the details whats and all that you you would do say in a movie and if you think about movies movies succeed the best when they sort of deal with short moments in time you know Die Hard it's you know okay one evening in a skyscraper that the terrorists or the you know the criminals take over and you know John mlan manages to thwart them it's not John McLean's life over five years or 10 years and generally if you think about movies that's normally what happens around sort of certain events uh in time because then you can sort of tell it with detail that's what's movies are very good at you know novels are better at sort of
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telling longer more epic stories and so uh you know in the case of the detail that we're doing it it was quite clear that from the scope of the story wanted to do which is incredibly epic that we would never be able to to do it um you know inside any kind of reasonable time and you know the other issue is just you know we you know people want to play Squadron 42 so uh you know we looked at it and said you know really this is like full you know this is three full massive um you know Standalone AAA titles so we sort of U set things up and said okay this is the this is the big story arc and then it sort of has the three EP it has the three episodes which is sort of think of it like episode I'm not gonna say one two and three of Star Wars I'll say four five and six of Star Wars um but uh and it allows us to to really give the time on those um and each one's
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going to be you know quite uh you know quite it's not going to be one of those sort of five to six hour play the single player um games that you get in a lot of sort of AAA sort of Shooters it's a it's a you know I would say at least a 20h hour experience I mean if you think about the five or 600 Pages we we we've shot that in itself is about five to six hours of talking and characters so then you've got action and then it depends on what you're doing so I mean obviously there are different playthrough path so if you decide to talk to everyone and do everything it'll be quite a long game experience I'm sure there will be those you know see it on the YouTube twitch um Sprint run throughs that you can do on all games but in general if you're into it and into the world it will be a a pretty meaty experience yeah one of one of the most fun things with the original wi command was going back and I think you can play through it in like 14
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missions but there's 47 in there so these it's the other paths and the other conversations yeah really really cool and then we're doing that so then there's definitely that case it's it's like it's about you know the characters that you you you decide to in interact with and and uh so it felt really really good when I was shooting it uh normally when I'm making things I get a feeling of whether it's going to work or not work um you know and I can sort of visualize it's it's for as long as I've done it you know all the way back to win command that's just kind of how I being where I sort of inherently sort of feel something uh and it this this felt like it's going to it if it comes together the way I sort of see it I think it's really going to be it it'll be great so um you know it's uh definitely worth uh you know maybe taking a little longer than we originally thought but it's much bigger and more um ambitious in scope
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and I think it's really going to be worth it and people you know at the end of the day it's you know it's whether something's good it's the it's the you know there's that um uh you know um you know famous quote which is uh um you know about the fact that a you know a delayed uh you know a delayed game is eventually good and a a rushed one is forever bad and I'm not saying that we're necessarily in that category but the the the you know the the idea behind it is that you know at the end of the day it's about what you're going to play and you want to play something that's great and so for me I don't want to make something that isn't great uh and I think in the past that's what's made my games um you know be fairly uh popular and successful and and we're definitely doing that on Squad 4 2 and OnStar Citizen and that's because of everyone's support out there so thank you guys and
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that's the whole hope behind crowdfunding is it it lets us do that rather than you know sticking to some schedule from a publisher it's a oh tell no tell you if this was a publisher it' be like okay uh you know push it out the door cut this cut this cut this cut this I don't care if um that you know compromises this overall vision and all the rest of stuff it it would be out there and you know you sort of see this you see this all the time where whenever you've got um titles that are sort of on their annual you know like you know Assassin's Creed was really great in the first few titles and then you know as soon as uh Ubisoft realized it was sort of this you know big franchise for them it was like every year there's an Assassins Creed and in some cases the pressure to get it out is you know more than the time needed to to make it right and you know you things like you know Arkham Knight uh which is you know consolle is getting great reviews on the
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PC it's just not really wasn't done right and and finished out and had lots of issues it should have had a bit more time to get it right and so for us you know we don't we know we're not looking at you know oh we got to make the the holiday window and get it into Best Buy or something like that we're we're saying look we've got you guys and you have entrusted us with this money you want the best game possible uh and we will give you that and in the meantime you know we're sharing parts of the game as we're building it like Star Citizen uh you know like the arena Commander module star Marine that will be coming up soon um allowing people to sort of see parts of it as we're building it so they don't have to wait forever but then allowing us to sort of take the time for certain things and you know Squadron 42 is a is a a key one of these because that's a narrative story game so some of the other aspects the persistent Universe the dog fighting some of the
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first person stuff we can share early and get feedback and balance it but you obviously don't want to do that on a narrative story because you don't want to ruin the sort of experience and the journey you're going to take um but uh yeah I mean I'm you know look it's a it's a lot of work there the more people you get the you know the more feedback you get but uh you know at the end of the day I wouldn't do it any different I think this is I don't think that we would have been able to build uh Star Citizen or get Squadron 42 um you know in the direction and shooting for the ambition it does any other way than the way we've been doing it all right let's let's get into the uh the big Community questions okay um first of all uh star Marine what is the status right now what are we doing uh well we're hard to work on Star Marine so you know the folks in Denville f are working around the clock on it we've also got a fair number of
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people in all our other Studios so uh here in La there's a few quite a few people working on it I mean um Steve Bender who's our director of Animation is um full-time on that um we've got Forest um who's sort of our La art director here that's um you know pushing forward the characters and a bunch of other stuff on it um you know I actually have some code up on uh you know my screen that I'm dealing with uh and you know John rigs who's our rigger and then in Austin the animation Department there plus a bunch of other people like Sean Tracy Jason Hutchinson are all focusing on it and and uh in frankfur Germany we've got um a fair number of people working on it too and and you know the frankfur office is um an office at staff with a whole bunch of krych veterans that know the engine really well so we've sort of brought them in to to help uh get us through the last sort of parts
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of um you know there's some you know cry engine is incredibly powerful but it's also very dense and very complicated and so there's a lot of sort tribal knowledge that comes with it isn't necessarily uh easily available and so having the people that built the systems like you know we have the engineer that um created cry animation um you know and so that's uh you know a pretty good resource to have um you know uh you know Todd papy who's our design director is the lead design on the FPS and he's got a bunch of his designers supporting him and then the UK is supporting I mean the all audio is done in the UK uh all the animators in the UK are all working on it um various programmers and some of the um designers and Technical designers are working on it so we've got you know uh you know a fair number of the UK office came from krych UK that also have experience with the engine so uh We've sort of ramped up the uh resources on it
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to try and sort of finish out um the you know the the more difficult aspects of closing this out because uh you know we're sort of faced with uh there's a couple of things that we're trying to close out one is um the the bwork networking stuff which I think you always going to hear CU networking is just a no matter whether it's on our game or anyone else's game um and anytime you talk to anyone else industry they'll share their woes about all the various challenges of getting multiplayer games working all the rest stuff so you know um you know we talked about that and there there is uh aspects of that in terms of making sure that it can work we we're going for um you know um I think 32 players in um the Astro Arena sort of mode and and at least 16 in the um in the uh uh sort of gold Horizon level and ultimately we want to
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push Beyond there um so there's so we're working on that and then the other really big thing is the animations and so the real uh the real sort of Challenge on the animation uh you know and I had a I did an interview about this with um Steve burer Gamers Nexus uh you know just earlier but uh the challenge on the animation is that we share first uh we basically most FPS games have a first person mode and a third person mode and the first person mode it's essentially a floating camera you're basically a hover hover tank or a wheelchair zipping around where your arms are to your ears and your guns right out in front of you and uh it's not actually physically realistic or correct but in most cases it's okay in an FPS game because you don't go out to see your character and third person and then usually in an FPS game um you're
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either fighting AI that have completely different sort of motion sets that don't have to combine with what you do so that allows something like Call of Duty to have all these like really beautiful like first person open things up and animations and feels like a roller coaster ride and you also see the other characters the NPCs that you're fighting move around um but that's also why in something like Call of Duty when you get into the multiplayer mode you'll notice that the other players moving around sort of skip around and they don't nearly have as fluid animations as uh the AI do and that's partly because um the sort of player animation is doesn't really translate to what you let someone do in first person it let someone to just go to like instantly go left instantly go right instantly go forward or back whereas in real life there is a certain amount of like biome mechanics and inertia that you have that don't allow you to be quite uh sort of hover tanky
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um and we have a real we have a real issue because uh in Star Citizen it's not really just if we were just doing an FPS and that was it then we could probably go with the split between first person and third person but really the the first person is the foundation for everything because the whole game takes place in first person when you fly a ship you move your first- person character get into the cockpit and then you start operating your first person character who is then operating the ship and uh you know the same is down on the persistent universe and and because we have a multiplayer game and we're going to have multi crew say ships and all the rest of stuff we are definitely going to have places where we need to have player controlled characters interacting with their environments that you will see so irrelevant of whether you pop out to see the third person viewer yourself you are going to see other players sitting down in cockpits and using things or
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interacting with tables or you know ducking behind cover and all this sort of stuff which means that unless we want sort of the world to seem very fake and people sort of Glide around a lot like you see on sort of fast-paced FPS multiplayer games um we have to do something that essentially unifies we can't cheat anymore we have to have the body be in the right position uh you know we can't put the hands up here or we have to look down and see the body um and so we have to unify first and third person together so we just basically so if you can get all to work it does make your life simpler um so you know basically you just put the camera where your eyes are um you've got to do all sorts of kind of tricks so we do things like we do eye stabilization so if I'm running in real life my head's moving up and down but my view is sort of focused here and this because my brain is sort of stabilizing that in image and if I go sideways this is still up for me um so
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we sort of built in that kind of logic and then we also have to um play with the transitions the animations so we have the fluid like if I'm running and you know if I'm moving fast it's like if I'm here animation director loves to do this all the time but uh you know like if I'm here and I'm going here sideways like and I got to come back onto a leg that's what you actually really do like you you can't you can't shoot from here cuz you'd go like that so you've got to step back to here so there's all these things about where your feet are are moving around and all those you can normally do for AI characters and uh that's fine but for player characters it's diff difficult but you have to build that in so the combination we have to have is the responsiveness of the animation um and the fluidity of the animation but not sort of hampering too much of the player experience and that's really been one of the the big
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challenges is sort of making that balance and so we're still finessing that we're still um working on that and that's actually one of the reasons why the FPS has being delayed is because that's one of those things that you can't really say oh this is going to take one week to do because it's very much about feel so you sort of play an experiment uh and because it's the foundation we think it's very worth it to spend the time doing it and it's also one of those things because it's about basic motion um we don't want to put it out there where if it feels unresponsive or sluggish or kind of annoying or there's glitches in the motion transitions yes sure it's an alpha yes sure um you know you know that's the case but it's going to inherently hurt the feeling of how FPS feels moving around shooting and so that's what we're working on uh you know I feel pretty good about it we're making really good
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progress um it you know is something that uh you know I'm hoping that we will have uh for people to at least play around with in on the PTU sometime around gamescon or after gamescon don't hold me to that because you know that's what happens and then you know a few weeks after that we'd probably go live uh but it's definitely the FPS has been hard at work is we're working really hard on I think it will be a great Foundation when it's all done it's certainly not uh infinitely delayed indefinitely delayed sorry uh certainly not canceled or put on hold uh we got more people working on it now than we ever had um and it's because it is a sort of core foundational thing and that's why we're doing these weekly updates where you can sort of see kind of the the issues that we're working on um and you know I know it's frustrating that it's taking longer it's frustrating for us that it's taking longer than we
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want it to be trust me there's no one here that goes ah no let's just wait back and let's let them sweat a bit more before we give it U we want it out as soon as possible but you know at some level you've got to sort of make decisions and say well you know we're not happy with how this feels just yet so you know in some ways it's like even on our QA side I'm like you know QA are going to have issues with the movement control as this and then I'm going to go well the backers will have so we want to fix those make sure it goes and then share it for you for feedback and I'm sure we give it out it won't be it still will have lots of issues it will still need lots of Polish but I think at that point it will be a more constructive basis to um do uh you know you know a larger sort of sampling and all you guys experiencing it and you can give us feedback and I'm sure you'll break it in ways that we never imagined I'm sure you'll do really cool stuff that we've never imagined um so that's just that's
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that's where it is so we're hard at work on it we're working really hard uh I you know I think it's going to be it's going to be something uh that is foundational for the rest of the game and that's why it's worth taking some of the time on it um and hopefully it's not going to be too far down the road um you know we we are definitely thinking in terms of weeks rather than a months um so there you go yeah and I think one one thing to stress about the FPS is this is not a case of us just deciding oh we also want to make Call of Duty this is core technology that is important to everything we're doing going forward yeah yeah no as I said I mean the biggest hold up really is that sort of first and F third person unification and the decision for that is mainly not anything to do with the first person shooter because it was just a first person shooter we wouldn't need it it's really to do with the persistent Universe um and what's happening in the persistent universe and and you flying
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in multi cruise ships and everything so I I hate uh having unnecessary work done so I hate having parallel systems the two stuff so I'd rather just do one right than do two different things uh and get something out sooner uh because I think long term it doesn't help you you you waste money you spend time on something that you're going to have to refactor anyway um so in some cases you know I think that's a you know that's even though it's frustrating it's a better way to look after everyone's money by not having us do work that we will then have to redo when we're like oh well now in the position Universe we need to do this multi crew Vehicles we've got all sorts of you know issues uh with players looking wonky when they're sitting in the cockpits are interacting with stuff um so uh yeah I mean it's it's uh it's foundational for the old game so it's if we were just shipping an FPS game we could have
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pretty much taken a lot of the crisis stuff straight out of the engine and gone with that it would have made our lives a lot easier because we've gone this unification rout which by the way just let you know everyone at kitech has you know they've talked about doing this they talked about doing on crisis 2 they talked about doing on Crisis 3 uh and you know at the end they sort of gave up because they had deadlines and you know there were some issues that dealt with now we've made more progress than um they did um when they were trying for crisis 2 and Crisis 3 but you know yeah we're still dealing with some of the same issues but I'm determined that we are you know we're going to get them cracked I feel like we can I can sort of see it there so uh but yeah you don't see this a lot because really hard to do all right um next question uh this is the first time backers have seen your face in in a little while because of the shoot um a lot of people have asked how
00:31:10
have you stayed in contact with the team uh well luckily in today's world I mean you know we have a very distributed uh development setup I we have you know four internal Studios all in different time zones so we got here we got Austin Texas we got whims slow in the UK and we've got Frankfurt in Germany and then we've got ilanic in Denver behavior in Montreal turbulent in Montreal and then we've also got individual contractors uh so we're already built to be a distributed development um sort of centric company uh you know we share you know we everything's online for us like whether it's jir you know our Confluence or it's shotgun that we use to sort of pass back and forth our sort of Art and image development um you know all our um you know perforce stuff is you know we share between the studios and uh we've got special 1 GB
00:31:58
backbones between it and so when I went to shoot and eiling we set up a setup for me that I had like very highs speeded connections and essentially I shot you know we the shooting days were from 8:00 to 6:00 p.m. and then after that I would come back and uh you know then it would be video conferences with um the UK and Germany here over in um the US you know luckily uh in that time frame it works because the US is obviously behind where the UK is and uh lots of emails uh lots of comments online on our various sort of online collaboration stuff so pretty much my entire waking time uh for the shoot and the weekends was spent um dealing with either the directing the shoot or managing the project and that's kind of one of the reasons why I didn't do um that much Community stuff because I was just kind of swamped I mean I essentially was you know it was like 16 17 hour days for me and then uh but I
00:32:46
felt you know we got a big project and you know it has to go through and I'm sort of the central director of it so I can't just check out for uh 3 months and you know I think if you talk to people around here they all attest that you know they would wake up in the morning in the US and there'll be lots of emails from me about various things or comments on shotgun and stuff like that so um you know I was very much uh sort of present and involved uh we also brought some people down to the shoot um to sort of them together you know a lot of the UK guys came down we brought some of the US folks over too uh but yeah no I mean that was that was a full-time thing um but you know that's because I'm committed I want to get this thing done and it's got to be done right so if if you don't R your sevion do it no one else is going to do it I could certainly speak to that emails I would up every morning and there there's Chris everywhere so um yeah I'm a habitual emailer so um yeah luckily I'm mostly a
00:33:36
speed reader and I'm uh you know pretty quick on stuff so I I haven't really counted my email count but I'm sure my email counts 500 to a thousand a day which I read I never like pretty much get through all my emails every single day no matter what I actually asked uh I went to Outlook and I tried to search for Chris Roberts past three months to see how many emails and uh it broke the search when I tried so um all right next uh next topic while you were away there was a uh a leak of some content not uh pointing any fingers but um Beckers have gone through the leak and they've said okay why why is there content in here we haven't seen yet how how does that square with our definition of open development um well I well well there's
00:34:23
a couple I mean there's a couple of reasons one uh you know the obvious one on Squadron 42 which I mentioned when we're talking about Squadron 42 is the fact that uh you know it's a narrative story that we want you to sort of experience and if we if you see every aspect of it every part of it or every location or every ship that you're going to see the whole sense of Discovery won't be there and so it'll really hurt the experience so we definitely want to keep a lid on the Squadron 42 aspects um that uh you know I think are behooving to be part of the story I mean some of it like you know General okay here's what a vandal looks like that's fine uh but you know a lot of the specific locations or the specific characters or even some of the ships you'll be on or flying or coming up against um we kind of wanted to sort of keep as a as a great discovery and surprise otherwise you'll play the game and you be oh I've seen this before um I mean I still think
00:35:11
it's be a great game but you know from a narrative standpoint it sort of feels like you need to have a sense of Discovery so that's one of the big reasons um the other reason is you know we have a lot of stuff uh that's sort of in development and um there are certain periods that we sort of feel comfortable it's sort of what I was talking about with star Marine is you know just because programmer finishes writing something you know doesn't mean we instantly put it out there we've got to like test it we've got to polish it the same for some of the art stuff that people do is you know we've got to refine it and do stuff and then we when we think okay well this thing is in a good enough State it's not finished yet but it's a good enough state to get like outside objective feedback let's get it out there and see what people think and do stuff with um so that's actually a that's a big point for us and I will tell you that you know programmers and artists here you know it's always a constant fight because everyone you know they want their stuff to be be perfect
00:35:58
so they're all like I I don't want to say even when we share stuff they're like I know it's not ready yet it's not finished yet um so it's always a fight and we can't share stuff too early because uh you know it's pretty stressful for an artist if you share something early that he knows there's 20 problems with and then every backer like gets on a forum concern Fred and points out those same 20 problems it's kind of the same like I said with star star Marine on a bigger scale that's one of the reasons why we're not sharing the build that we we have right now which we play test on uh every week um for those reasons is that we sort of feel like there's points where you where are useful to share uh where the discussion will take it in places that it will involve things that we need that input on so you know if you know if we know that the shaders are broken and we know the colors off or or you know the shape is Mis you know is is not correct or how it should be you know we already know
00:36:46
that we don't it's not it's not helping out and it's not going to help out the morale of the artist or the programmer that has his broken feature um so we sort of try to have these Gates where like you know internally develop we get it we like it and then we pass it over to QA and then QA sort of give us that feedback and then we pass it over to you guys and you guys give us that feedback then we take that back and we work on it and we sort of that is feels like a really positive iteration cycle and of course we're sharing with you well before we would ever share it if it was a sort of final publisher game so I think you know you guys get a view of it much sooner than you would have normally done um but you know like I said we're not going to share everything from day one for the reasons I've given um and so I mean I hope that's a suitable answer that's St I think that makes sense you kind of has to the work has to speak to the vision rather than being something
00:37:33
we we're not happy with yet yeah I mean you don't want to show work just to show work right you want to show work that says hey look we've taken it this far and we would love your feedback I mean it's the same thing as you know I'm sure there's people out there they have their own projects and they work on their own projects and I doubt that anyone's working on their own project shows their project the instant they started to all their friends it's like okay they get it to a certain point I mean it's like you know I see uh you know some cool stuff when you know like on forums people are like doing 3D printing and ships or putting stuff together or or you know people are sharing 3D models they doing well I mean they're not they're not saying here look here's the screens shot of Max I've just put up and here's the square it's going to become a really cool looking spaceship usually they're sharing it once they've got it to a certain point they want some feedback and and we sort of have that same same approach well next next topic is I think the current most active thread on the
00:38:21
forums which is controller balance can you uh control that that that feels that feels like one of those battle it feels like waterl really doesn't it um and I hope I'll be welling to not Napoleon um but anyway uh so controler balance is just always is going to be a complete ongoing thing it's something we're very aware of um you know I've stated from the beginning that we want to have the game be controller agnostic so I do not want there to be some super class of user that because of their controller they can be better or beat everyone else um you know and we do have inherent problem in controllers in that some you know different control interfaces are good for different things so joysticks or say a host house is much better for flying precisely than say a mouse but a mouse
00:39:10
if you're using a gimbaled weapon is better for precise aiming it's the reason why you know people with keyboard and mouse on a PC can school anyone Using a Gamepad and an FPS shooter um and so they have different strengths and uh you know I think that you know the right answer in this is to allow complete option you know that whoever the player can have whatever they want uh and to make sure that you know the strengths of one thing uh counted by a con on another one so it's like you know yes you have some you know you have aiming that is better for you if you've got a mouse if you got gimal weapons but if uh your flying's not so good but if you've got uh a joystick and your flying your flying gives you an advantage that you that you could use over someone with the mouse and we haven't got that balance properly yet um so that needs to
00:39:58
be have work we've been working on stuff the new 1.15 patch that's going to come out we've still been playing around with some of the stuff one of the big things is you know we we would announced a while back was that you know gimbaled weapons well you know the gimbal itself takes up a size class and so you'd got to drop down a size for a weapon uh well the problem in the past was you know and I think you know people on the forums have done this you know the size one weapon damage output compared to the size two weapon damage out but it was maybe I don't know a 20 or 30% increase between size one and size two well that does doesn't make much sense right you know I mean OB stens it should be closer to like you know say twice as much or something like that and then you know and I'm not saying it's twice as much but if you get my drift then you have a real sort of pro and con there because you go okay the guy that's flying with a joystick has a f you know he'll probably want to go towards fix weapons so that's more difficult to put on target but when
00:40:47
he does he's doing twice as much damage as opposed to the guy with the mouse it's easier to put on target but he's doing half the amount of damage and then you know you got other things the bigger the the gun gets the the on gimbal maybe the slower the gimbal reacts and all the rest of the stuff so those are all things we're actively wanting and trying to balance it's the biggest problem is we've got so many things going on and we also have other uh considerations because you know right now you're just playing Arena Commander with single seeder ships and dog fighting and the full game persistent universe is not going to be all about that I mean it's really going to be I think multi Cru ships are going to be one of the big things I can see a lot of people flying bigger ships with either NPCs or friends with them on the ships and there's going to be a whole variety and different kinds of piling Styles because obviously you can't take a constellation and dog fight the same way you can dog fight in a hornet but then other things in a
00:41:34
constellation you're going to have advantages on um and then there's also things like you know like right now in Arena Commander you know it's sort of that respawn mechanic so people fire a bunch of missiles and then they you know kill themselves so they can fast some more missiles and well that's not going to happen in the real game I mean there's no way first of all you're not going to want to kill yourself because that's a pain in the ass second of all missiles are going to cost credits that you're going to have to learn so you're just not going to spam them like that so there are certain play Styles right now that happen in Arena Commander that won't happen in the final game that in some ways can give you an impression that one controller or another controller has an advantage and we're a active like we want to address them in Arena Commander we want to make Arena Commander by itself a fun experience for everybody using the controllers and each one having pros and cons but also be aware that you know there's a lot of other considerations uh that we were only only coming into so in some ways we
00:42:25
uh don't want to sort of be definitive and say this is what it is like um this early because we've got to get you know the big multi Cru ships in and and and a bit more variety happening before we have a really good sense of the full picture and and figure out how best to um you know give each controller its own pro and con and and make them sort of feel equal and that's not to say that we don't experiment and play around with stuff and I think one of the problems is that uh you know we sort of held off doing an arena Commander patch because we thought FPS was going to be sooner so we haven't really patched anything on Arena Commander for quite a few months and uh that our sort of balance iteration so 115 has some uh balance iteration stuff in that hopefully will make this a little better maybe it won't I don't know there could be some new Fred popping up whether it's Mouse Commander or missile Commander or one of the other ones that's happened uh you know a
00:43:12
Minsky Commander Sledge Commander I don't know uh but that's just the process of balancing uh so we're you know I've made a real sort of commitment now and and focus on the team to say look no matter what no matter what we're sort of busy trying to get things out like multi crew or get FPS out out or get Squadron 42 out we can't not be constantly iterating on Arena commander and trying to improve that and balancing that and going on and taking people's feedback because I think that's one of you know if I go and take a look at you know being away and I come back and you know it's it sort of feels like there wasn't really a lot of new things to play with so at some point everyone kind of gets bored you know it becomes more about arguing about things than actually playing stuff so trying to get back on to the content and the delivering and taking people's feedback and adjusting and and be patient with us we're going to you know we're committed to to make it a fun experience for all um you know I mean it is I will say that you know
00:44:01
for all means you know beginners playing the game have it have it fun then there's detail and depth that like more more experienced people can get into and you sort of grow with it so my my my goal and this is you know something that everyone's uh you know so easy to play but hard to master it's a sort of it's a cliche in the game business I think it was first uh you know maybe coin by some trip Hawkins or someone at EA but uh which may not necessarily be the best but is a very true Mantra of what would make a good game and so we are we are focused on that uh so don't worry the way the controllers are aren't uh the way they're going to continue to be um and you know our our sort of uh plan is you know not to Gim things but to really try to make things um have their own pros and cons that they sort of own um
00:44:50
and it'll take a time to get there and we need your feedback for that so uh there you are on controllers so so kind of speaking directly to the controller balance thread you would say that the vision is that gimbals are here to stay but we want to balance them in such a way that folks who are more skilled with the joystick have an advantage over someone using Mouse yeah yeah 100% well yeah on the gimbal basis I mean you know there I I can't see any version of the future um that you wouldn't have some level of your weapons gimbal watch you know I mean even if we like our you know let's go to Fantasy future like Star Wars and stuff I mean there's guns on turrets and all the rest of stuff but there needs to be a con to that that is you know a pro on someone that's flying that you know they didn't you know Luc is X-Wing didn't have gimbaled weapons and he seem to be
00:45:37
doing pretty good and and you know a magic Force yeah the the Millennium Falcon had its little turret on it um so you know I mean obviously gimbals and turrets for say multi crew vehicles are going to be super super useful because they won't have the maneuverability that a single seat of fighter was uh but we certainly don't want it to be that someone with a gimbal gets all the all the benefits and none of the down side of it and so that's kind of the goal um and we will we will make you know we're committed to making that as uh as as sort of balanced as possible and I would I would say that in general uh probably you know you would see more turreted or gimb stuff on bigger ships uh to make up for their maneuverability and the smaller ships we going to try and balance it in such a way that yes you could put a gimbal on it but then you're really sort of um kind of nerfing your ability to do damage uh but we still that's a whole
00:46:23
bunch we got all this all this tweaking for you know power and and you know distribution of that and the Shields and there's a whole bunch of we've only started to really scratch the surface of that and then the physical based damage will also help a lot with the balancing um so um there's you know it's it's early days and don't worry um ultimately with your help I think we'll have something that uh you know maybe not everybody's 100% happy with but I think it will be good for good enough for everyone go yeah okay cool and I don't feel like I'm unfairly uh unfairly sort of um hamstrung now we've had several uh staff departures recently um what's going on there is is what does that mean uh well I mean I think uh it's just a natural thing so we've we have a very
00:47:13
big company now we have 255 people between our four Studios these are the in-house people and um you just get turnover when you get to that side I mean there's a lot of different reasons why people uh leave you know sometimes they get an offer they couldn't refuse or they get to get to do that that was their dream because you know as hard as it may seem most people here what we're building is their dream but in some cases uh you know like Travis for as long as I've known him I've known since he's been very young because Mark day his father worked with me on the wing commanders um he's being a complete World of Warcraft not and you know when he wasn't working on our stuff he would be running his World of Warcraft character around and you know when uh you know we've we've had people join from blizzard he'd be asking him about World of Warcraft that's been his dream um and so you know you can't really sort of stop in the way of that but generally
00:48:01
on a turnover basis it's been no different here than it's been um when I was at origin and we've grown to the size we are now because you know origin went from I was there you know I think there was like five or six of us at the very beginning in Austin and we grew to 110 when EA bought us and then it was about 300 or so when I left and you know at some point once it got bigger it's like I didn't even know half the people and people were coming and going and and that kind of happens and so you know it's unfortunate sometimes it's for personal reasons um but we've we've got a really uh great um group of people here and a really great infrastructure and I do think that in some ways um people see it more than they would normally because you know at a publisher or whatever you maybe you'll see the very front person on a project but you're not going to see the whole staff but we tend to share our whole staff here and then on top of that um you know
00:48:49
because community and video is here in La we tend to show the folks here in La more than we would say show the folks in a or more than we show the folks in um the UK or more than we show the folks in Germany and we still try to highlight them but it's just easier because you can just walk next door with a camera and shoot stuff and so sometimes you're seeing someone um give uh you know information about certain feature of what we're doing and you may think oh well that person's they're they're driving it well they're involved in it but there's you know 10 other people that are working on the feature with them and you just don't see them and so uh you know I think that um you know it's part of the downside of being as open as we are you just sort of will have more exposure to the regular comings and goings in in uh in in operating a big large development Studio
00:49:36
I mean it's just it's what happens you know the the bigger the bigger the group of people you know the you know the more there'll be different personalities all be different ones in agendas I mean it's the same thing as know we've grown from a small number of backers to an insanely huge number of backers um you just have you know more different uh voices and agendas and all the rest stuff comes on and sometimes you know people um you know want to go somewhere else or you know it's not with them I mean I have to say that uh to work on Star Citizen in Squadron 42 you have to be of a certain mindset because it's hard it's like it's much harder than protected development and a publisher you you know where you're shielded from everything so here when things are late and you know people are venting their frustrations or complaining that something's broken you know you're venting your frustration compain something is broken but there's a developer on the other side that's going
00:50:23
oh man you know they don't like my work or you know they they think art looks crap and and that's kind of hard for people and there's a pace because there's an incessant demand to deliver stuff all the time and so you know you need to be uh ready for that I mean if you if you listen to people that are you know work on big MMOs you know we're talking about World of Warcraft but having a game that's live and people are playing giving you feedback and also trying to develop at the same time is is a very high degree of difficulty and so the pace of that sometimes can be more than people are used to so if we have someone that comes here from someone where they used to spend seven years before anyone saw the game game and all of a sudden they're working on something after a month and showing it to people it can be a little disconcerting some people really like that it really gives energy to people I think it's great I like the energy of it most of the people here do but you know we'll occasionally have people that come in that just that paac is too much with them and like I
00:51:10
said we'll have people that you know have an offer they can't refuse somewhere else and and that that just naturally kind of happen so I don't think there is any uh you know particular you know sky is falling uh you know in the case of Alex it was really sad to see him go but you know he left for personal reasons and uh you know we took the opportunity to use that to uh streamline our production around the around the company so uh you know Aaron uh who's you know my brother who you guys know that work me since win Commander one and pretty much most of my space games and An Origin Electronic Arts and then digital Anvil and you know for the last seven years before he joined us again he was at Traveler tales and you know his Studio Trav T Fusion you know they built up from I think six people to 200 odd people and delivered you know a whole bu of the Lego games that have had great
00:51:58
critical reclaim and uh you know and sold really well and you know they were a machine they were delivering these as you know you can see the Lego games consistently um and you know he's he's he's great actually when I first started I actually talked to him by having the Global Production role originally but he wanted to focus on building up found 42 um but you know now um it's 115 people it's our biggest Studio he's know we've got Foundry 42 over in Germany and uh you know so he's agreed to become the global manager of production which was originally what I wanted him to be and it's kind of nice because now we're going to centralize and unify our production techniques because the US was running a slightly different version of how we were running our production techniques to how we were doing in the the UK and Germany and so we've taken the opportunity to unify under one person uh and uh go from there and I
00:52:46
think it's going to be better I mean he's great I mean there isn't anyone that I worked with it's a better producer and production person than Aaron and he's also my brother so he can say things to me that maybe some other people wouldn't say to me which is good um so you know I'm sad to see Alex go but I'm very happy uh to have eron here and you know I think anyone that knows Space games and the history of of what he's done and what I've done uh would know that this is kind of like what you really um you know is is is the best thing for the project absolutely I mean you know I've been following Space games for a long time and it certainly always seems like Aaron is sort of your finisher he he comes in and he gets things done no he's very good at he's very he's very good at pushing pulling people together getting them finished cutting through the cutting through the um you know holding people accountable um you
00:53:35
know I think you know I definitely see on the forums as you know people are impressed by the stuff they see coming out of the UK and part of part part of that is because of uh because of Aaron so no I'm I'm trust me I'm super happy it's also funny you mention uh Travis as a kid visiting you at origin because Mark used to then put Travis on the computer where he would chat online with teenage Ben I would beg him for Wing Commander information so small world so backers have pledged for a number of ships over the past uh two and a half years or so some of them which are already aren commander and others which uh some people think oh have they have they forgotten about the caterpillar have they forgotten about the B merchantman what what is the process uh behind the screens well I so part of the uh you know part of the issue with our ships is they're incredibly detailed and
00:54:22
Incredibly complicated so you know just seeing the concept of first which we actually spent a lot of time on building the 3D uh sort of conceptual model and figuring out with design um is only just a very sort of the tip of the iceberg so when it gets down to actually sort of modeling it and putting an engine there's a huge amount of work in iteration that goes between the artists and the designers and the animators to get all the features working to make them functional inside to make the spaces work to make the various parts of the ship like landing gear fold up into a uh you know the right place or they make the sleeping quarters work and so they take a long time especially the bigger ships take a long time so give you an example you know Chris Smith and Josh Coons have been working on the rebuilt of the constellation and the constellation itself uh you know we've already had out and we're we're sort of updating it to our most recent modeling
00:55:10
techniques which are more efficient for rendering and actually provide greater detail uh and those themselves uh you know that redesign has been about six months with Josh and Chris are two our best sort of hard surface vehicle and MERS so it takes time Nathan disley who's one of our you know he's our principal sort of vehicle artist he uh you know took about eight months sort of prototyping everything for the Retaliator developing techniques that we would use um that would uh you know enhance the quality but say reduce the draw calls and a few other things for because we have performance issues that we also have to take care of so just takes time uh we found it's too complicated to Outsource these things because there's a lot of back and forth between various people in the in the in the on the project the designers the animators uh so we have about 14 people um on staff that are dedicated which is not a small number um we're
00:55:58
looking to higher more by the way so if there's any of you guys out there as hard service modelers let us let us know um and uh and so with that number of resources the amount of time especially the bigger ships take you have to have some level of priority and so for us you know Squadron 42 is one of the sort of you know it's definitely going to be there before the full pu so um you know Squadron 42 in some ways has been taking priority we've got a lot of ships to build there the the Vandal ships the UE nav ships um and then some other sort of you know auxiliary ships like you know star era Herald um the cutless um are all part of the Squadron 42 um game and so they're kind of on the schedule and they've sort of been Tak getting some of the attention and love and some of those are really big ships like the you know the adris um the you know the Bengal
00:56:47
they're huge ships and uh so for those they take a long time and there's a team I think on the Idis there's like five or six people working on it right now um so it just takes time um but we're trying to um come up with a good schedule I think we've just U put something on the forums that sort of shows where we're at on on the ships and you know don't worry as far as the ships that we're building um you know we're not forgetting about them we're going to get them done and sometimes you know the priorities move around uh based on sort of Squadron 42 or what we need for the pis Universe we're going to get them all done uh and uh we will we are Feathering in uh persistent Universe Star Citizen one so for us some of the the ships that involve other kinds of game play uh are actually quite important because we want to try and get them in sooner so we can sort of iterate an experiment with game playay in future versions of AR Arena
00:57:36
Commander that may not just be about combat will be about things like Mining and stuff like that cargo and cargo hauling yeah no no definitely I mean so you know we longer you know when we get the multi crew stuff like we'll definitely look at you know prototyping game modes in Arena Commander ultimately will be the sort of things that would happen in the pist Universe like okay uh you know Swan fly is a big cargo hauler and you've got a couple of people that are flying escort and then the other team are pirates and they've got going to try and stop the shipment getting to its destination and rip off the shipment and you know so we're going to start creating scenarios that are closer to cist Universe scenarios to sort of prototype that kind of gaml and see how it works and that's and that's sort of the longer term plan of Arena Commander once multi Crew hits um and so we'll definitely be having some of those ships on the schedule too but we're going to try to have a much we're going to try to
00:58:23
sort of keep everyone up to date with where the ship are in terms of where they sit on the schedule and when they're going to sort of move into in-game modeling or into the hanger into into to flight so you know if you pledge for a ship um you know hopefully you know uh longer term right now we're sort of doing on the forums in sort of Anar manner but longer term you should be able to go and see the status of the the ship you've pledged for on your web platform and speaking of ships can you speak to one question that came up after the Starliner went out why do we continue to offer concept sales uh okay well uh well I mean we offer concept cell for a couple reasons one um U you guys like him and ask for him so um I constantly see threads popping up about what about this next one when are I going to see this one uh and uh you know for us you know obviously it's a it's a
00:59:12
good way to uh continue to raise funds for the game because you know it's a big Endeavor we have a lot of people working and uh you know the more money that we bring in means the sort of bigger richer experience we can we can do from the start also means we can invest more in sort of the online Cloud stuff earlier you know we we've been delivering a lot of data to people we're trying to optimize it but you know that data costs money and we've been delivering pedabytes and so you know it's essentially much bigger than we estimated at the beginning because everyone down slows all these patches and that's cool uh but things like concept sales help support that um and also support the general development effort uh and then the final thing which is more sort of a creative thing is uh I really want to seed the universe with all these different roles and ships so because you know one of the things struck me when I first started um Star Citizen and looking and reading what
01:00:00
people on The Forum I just listening to what people were sort of talking about what they wanted to do in this universe and the kind of roles they wanted to do it sort of was creatively pretty inspiring because you're like wow okay and Ivon wants to just shoot each other they want to do all these different kind of things and so you know you've got people that just want to have a mining Corporation or just want to build a huge Merchant Empire or uh you know shuttle passengers around the universe or just go and rescue people or take them onto a hospital ship and fix them up I mean it's it's it's really and so for me I kind of want to seed this universe with these different ships that have these different kind of roles and I definitely want to put them in the hands of players because I don't want every single player to start the game with an aurora because it's going to just feel weird and boring and so just like real life outside there's lots of people with different um you know whatever you want let's talk about cars different cars so you know Aurora is a Ford Fiesta and you know
01:00:48
there's different rates up there and some people like their pickup trucks and some people like their sports cars and some people like their RVs and and uh and you know people sometimes like they're sailing boats and all and so I kind of want that same range in the universe so when we start there are people that are flying around in uh you know mining ships there's people hauling cargo there's people bringing passengers around there's people picking up uh people in space there's people repairing ships out in space as you know people will be mercenaries people will be B hunters and so we'll have all these sort of specialized roles and the concept sales uh you know are all different roles um for gameplay reasons and putting them in the hands of players is much better than putting them in the hands of AI we'll definitely have ai rning around but players do the most interesting thing and that's one of our tenants of the final position universe is to enable it so the sort of players themselves sort of drive a lot of the
01:01:35
the the kind of drama and the action of the universe and to do that you sort of have to um make a diverse range of them you don't want everyone to start exactly the same point or level or have exactly the same ship you you sort of uh want them to sort of go after different roles so we're giving them the opportunity to sort of sign up to a role early while also supporting the development of the game so for me it's feels like it's a win-win um and uh so that's that's kind of why we do it like I can see the next concerned threat already from the Aurora pilots who have had their Shi compared to a Ford Fiesta well it's nothing wrong with Ford Fiesta it gets you from point A to point B uh that how does it deal with the new ones are pretty good yeah know they got like all this Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and stuff um but yeah but I mean andur isn't meant to me in like if you played the original Privateer uh you know your
01:02:23
starting ship isn't isn't the best ship You're Going To Fly in the same on Wing commanders and stuff like that I love my Tarsus all right here's a big one how has the scope of staris and changed since we launched the project back in 2012 uh well I mean it's changed quite a lot I mean we started with uh you know when I originally started uh you know I showed the demo and I sort of pitched what I wanted to do with Star Citizen I didn't think that we would have nearly the amount of uh support that we've had I mean I you know I thought that I would uh you know raise between hopefully between $2 and $4 million and then I had some private investors lined up uh to invest another 10 or so and then I would work hard to sort of get a a sort of smaller um much less ambitious Alpha together and then once that's out there
01:03:09
and people like that and they're you know contributing money to buy the game I could use the money to build the game up into the you know the big universe that I always wanted to build um and uh you know we'd set these stretch goals out as we started um our campaign and you know we smashed every single one that we set in the initial campaign and then we you know continued to sort of talk about features that we thought would be good we would like and uh the community contined to to fund them and uh you know we obviously have done an amazing you know you know amount of of support and funding with the $85 million that uh we're at and it sort of allows to build a much much bigger more U full featured uh ambitious game that I think is you know I mean it's definitely my full dream game and I think it's the the game that a lot of people here and um
01:03:59
Clyde Imperium and and everyone out there backing is the game that they have dreamed of playing and so you know on a certain level it sort of feels unanimously to me that everyone's gone hey I want really I want this game and I want it great and I don't want you know I've been waiting 10 years for a decent space game and I want you to build it and I'm going to give you the money to build it right you know not build it half ass just build it properly build it um in a way that will last for a long time and we can spend a lot of time playing inside this in this game and and uh and so in that context yeah the Scopes Chang a lot I mean the original campaign uh you know minimum amount that we were promising was uh you know increased web communication well you get I mean you get so many much on our web now it's crazy we have you know all these video shows all the posts I mean we post more times uh than there are
01:04:48
days in the week and uh and then you know the other thing we said was that you'll be part of the sort of multiplayer alpha dog fight well you know people we got reading Commander right now and we're continuing to iterate and improve that and make it better and then the last um promise was sort of a much smaller version of what Squadron 42 is being now and and that was it it wasn't even the posant universe was a stretch goal when we first started and and uh we sort of hit all these goals and you know the game's ex you know in terms of what it's going to be has gotten has has definitely gotten bigger uh and so you know naturally you know that presents a bit of a problem because of course when you're doing more things it's going to take more time even if you have more money just Hing up the people to do it all take it all that I mean I truly think that the end result is something that people are all going to be happy with and that's what people want uh but
01:05:35
you know the the the sort of pro and con of it is well yeah but what about all these people at the very beginning that said hey you know uh oh you're going to give me the game in two years well uh you know yeah we can't give you this in two years but you know originally the promise was for this uh so that's one of the reasons why we went this whole route of having um you know originally we were just saying well I'll give you multiplayer Alpha um for the dog fighting and then you you know we'll give you Squadron 42 when it's sort of in beta and we said no you know what this thing is obviously going to take longer to build than you know uh it would have done in a more sort of smaller you know less ambitious version so why how can we find a way that the players can be playing it as we go along and seeing features and giving input and uh you know making the game itself better so they so they get something in the short term and they also get this
01:06:24
bigger thing at the end and so that was one of the big drivers of switching our development philosophy around because you know originally we weren't talking about the hanger module the FPS module the social module any of those features and so now we've sort of split up our we've sort of focused our development in a way that we can sort of deliver a lot of this game play uh and you know you can be experiencing and then we're building it around you and it's going to get better and your feedback will make it better so you you know you'll get to do things in the short term um but you get a much bigger game than you'd ever could have like if you this on October 10th you know you weren't expecting anything of the level that we're doing now you couldn't have done because there's no way it could have been delivered for for that amount of you know for for what we were saying you know we needed the you know minimum of $2 million that would have been aided by the the the private investment but you know people came and said no we want it
01:07:13
bigger and actually we you know stretch goal after stretch goal I mean we ultimately decided you know what even though stretch gos keep pushing revenue and you know bring people in and gets people excited you know at 65 million we just sort of said look we we've done this a lot we've got like a huge amount of stuff to get done so at the end of last year we said n you know we're going to do a moratorium on it and we're going to focus on getting this finished out and the money that's coming in now is going to be focused on making this hu you know what we promise now as good as possible you know as rich as possible as polished as possible um and uh and and that's and that's sort of my answer my answer is basically yes it's increased in scope um but I think it's what everyone wants everyone wants this game they don't want something that's sort of a you know a small uh you know pale version of of what we're building right
01:08:01
now you know I've definitely seen uh games that go out there and you know they yes they have plans to put all this extra stuff in there but people are complaining like oh there isn't enough gameplay or I don't get to do more I'm bored right now and so we don't want to be in that position that's one of the reasons why we're sort of trying to build the bigger Universe right from the get-go and people have sort of supported us and said yes uh that's what we're we're we want you to do and and and so I I think it's my job to give them the big dream but also at the same time give people parts of it to play as we go along um and I think that's ultimately what um I'm hoping people like I mean it's definitely the best answer I think because you know the ultimate game that was going to get built is you know it's it's a game that I think you know most people would have thought could never happen I mean it seems like that's really the the benefit the reason to go
01:08:48
with crowd funding if you were doing this game for a publisher EA would tell you no ship it now ship the much smaller vision It Go going this way this it's the whole point yeah well and I and I think it's you know you and I've said before it's like the community sets the ambition right so the community says okay no we want you to make something really big and bold and they've funded us to be able to do that and uh and that and it's it's with their support we know we you know I've said before that we sort of scale what we're doing in our development based on the the money that we bring in because we operate very much like you know we're not like a normal box game where you just you know everyone works on it and then we give it to you when it's finished I mean we are sharing as we're going along so we're really operating a live game which at the moment is is is the hanger and Arena Commander but very soon we'll also be star marine and not long after that we'll be the arena Commander multi crew
01:09:36
plus persistent Universe uh like social stuff um and that's live that people are playing and we're iterating on and trying to improve their experience and take their feedback while we're also doing work in R&D towards the bigger thing with all the you know more of the game systems and more of the content and and everything else and and and I think that's the best solution because we're not you can't think of Star Citizen like you would think of a normal game right you can't think of it like oh well here you are here's your you know whatever it is $10 go make your game and come back to me when it's done in two years because we're not operating that way our backers aren't I mean you know there's there's a level of interaction that's happening with the game that um you know I've seen almost nowhere else uh you know even on other crowdfunding games you know that I mean I've supported a lot of them uh but you know then the amount of updates and
01:10:23
stuff yes there's definitely updates uh but you know in terms of interaction playing builds doing all the stuff the amount of effort that's going into that um you know isn't to the level that we're doing it it's not necessarily to knock I me we've obviously been lucky enough to raise a lot more money and have more you know basically a much bigger staff so it allows us to do that level of interaction but I think that's key to the experience it's like I think if you look at Star Citizen through the prism of the old world it's going to seem weird to you and seem foreign and you know it's not right something's not right with that in the prism of the new world I think it is the kind of I think I think that's what I think the the new kind of game especially the new kind of online game is this game that uh you know you engage your uh your community much earlier and they get involved much earlier they give you the feedback much earlier uh while you're continuing to build it and try and make something
01:11:09
that's a that's you know a bigger uh you know more full featured um game and dream and so yes the scope has changed um it's changed because you guys said you wanted to change I'm happy you did because I think what we're building now is is going to be something when it's all said in done everyone look back at it and say wow okay we did this together and no one else could have done that no publisher would have done this um we did this together and so I would all I would say is to uh all you guys out there you know it's going to be worth it to to stay the course because uh uh I'm I'm not giving up on this thing until it's done and finished properly and uh I'm I feel very lucky to be in the situation that I'm right now certainly on a community side we we definitely feel that our charge is to give people enough content that they feel that was worth
01:11:57
the ticket price you your $45 got you an entire development cycle of videos and interaction and drama and all that well no I mean I said I say it a lot I mean you know I mean because the vast majority of our backers have you know contributed like $40 so yes we definitely have some uh you know much uh you know uh you know people that have contributed a lot more than that and thank you so much for doing that uh but the vast majority of only contributed $40 and those people you know and the amount of game they're going to get it's the best deal in the world I mean they you know they're getting a you know Squadron 42 is by itself stand up to any other AAA single player game and then you're going to have this persistent universe and you know you're not going to have a subscription fee that you need for that you can just play in the universe and earn the chips and you know when not it's it's it's you have that and you you
01:12:46
got the you know you got the first person combat aspects you've got the trading aspects I mean it's like three or four go games all rolled into one I really sort of feel that um there's a there's a lot of value that comes with it in the long run and people hopefully will think hey you know what I had a great time uh you know watching this thing evolve and give feedback and do it and and you know kept me entertained for years and the game's out now and it's so amazing with all these features and this is just like gravy and so that's that's that's my goal my goal is to you know make the journey as enjoyable as the final product that they feel like the final product is the is the bonus basically and they help get us to that bonus that you know I sort of feel like this game definitely gets made better by everybody pulling together as a community um you know all the feedback you know even if there's feedback that I
01:13:35
don't agree with or maybe other people here don't agree with all the feedback is valid because it helps it helps us make a better game it forces us to challenges our ideas makes us decide whether you know something should be changed or shouldn't be changed and you need that level of uh feedback and agitation to to to Really craft something that's strong and and can last for the ages so I I think I don't think I could we could be building Star Citizen under the traditional publisher model at all uh they wouldn't let us to have this level interaction I think we need this level of interaction to build the world like we're building um and I definitely know a publisher would never have invested this kind of money into a PC only game uh at this point so thank you guys now there are some claims that star szon is too big that it's an Impossible Project to complete what what's what's your response to
01:14:23
that um I don't think it's impossible at all I think it's very doable uh and uh you know I think maybe some I maybe some people that claim that don't have uh enough of a uh you know imagination or don't have enough of the technical ability to do it I mean I know that and all the features that we've talked about in terms of the large persistent Universe how we're going to move between it um you know how we're going to transition from uh planets to space move in and out of these big ships into smaller ships and uh everything be seamless uh we've got the fundamental uh you know technology pretty much cracked I mean we're going to go to games con which is in a few weeks uh and we'll sort of show the next iteration we're going to show the first large World U map um and you know this is only just a
01:15:11
small corner of possibility of it and it's you know the the gas chant you're orbiting around is 182,000 kmers in diameter and I think we have three moons maybe four moons and you know if you just flew between them at top speed and like the fastest ship would be about 2 and 1 half hours at the moment of course we're going to have the U sort of a Quantum Drive quick jump to get between some of the stuff but it's all in the same area same level there's no loading no loading screens um you know we've be actively working on not just the large World which is sort of this you know much bigger Precision for much larger distances because pretty much every 3D engine is a 32-bit engine and then so it's fine for first person on foot where you know maybe you've got 8 kilm by 8 kilm play area but we've got millions of kilometers by millions of kilometers play are and so we need uh you know we need a much higher level of precision so
01:15:58
we move to 64 bit for all our sort of 3D positions uh and uh we've got that blended with something that we've called the zone system which is the other bit of tech that's very different than most engines so most engines again are built for firstperson shooters or sort of Close Quarters Third Person cover Shooters and stuff like that and in those cases you have a very constant density of information like you know walls objects items characters and so uh in terms of um sorting them what you need to render what you need what you don't need to render what you need to update what you don't need to update it's pretty simple and it's fairly straight ahead and they use things like OCT trees and stuff like that but we have a problem in space that we have these huge areas and there could be nothing in it because there can be nothing in space for hundreds of thousands of kilometers or even millions of kilometers and then you can come up to pockets of a lot of data so you know an asteroid field or you know a big
01:16:45
capital ship with you know 50 rooms inside it and 100 people on top and bought it so we have this zone system uh that's sort of like this Dynamic container system that various uh levels of of uh items data information is contained inside and it can be done in a sort of Russian dollar manner so you can have a container inside a container or a Zone inside a Zone inside a Zone and everything inside a zone is relative to the zone so we can sort of have say uh you know there'll be a planet you could land on and that could be one zone and there could be a a Space Station orbit around that planet and that itself space station will be a Zone inside that planetary Zone and then inside the space station each one of the rooms could be a Zone and it's a really great way of um sorting through the data for rendering needs and for um update needs and everything else in a way that can manage our incre you know the the the big
01:17:34
challenge for Star citizens we have incredible Fidelity you can get right up to in first person as much as you can see in any game out there but you also have incredible scale and no one's really tackled that ever properly and that's what we're doing and we built the the cor the course stuff for that and some background streaming stuff uh so you're going to see some of the benefits of the streaming in the new 1.1 five you have it's very early stage but you'll notice first of all we're going to have 16 players um that you'll be able to dog fight with which is double what we've had before and you'll notice there'll be hardly any glitches once you're in the game when people are respawning and stuff and that's because we're dynamically streaming and caching stuff in a way that um you know we haven't been in the past and we're continuing to work on that so as you fly around as you approach zones you sort of stream the content of that zone in and then it starts to decide that it's going to render it and update it and and that's going to allow us to have this sort of
01:18:22
big seamless uh World which is the which is what everyone says oh you can't do so we've had the best you know you know one of the good reasons to have Frankfurt um you know our studio we built there we have people that have built this engine in the first place and they've been instrumental in helping uh finish out some of this technology to allow us to do something that you haven't seen in a in a normal um 3D engine uh and uh so I'm super excited so on the technical side I think we've we've got most of it there the you know the other Big Technical thing we're working to is the back end and as as you've seen you we're we're making progress that we're moving from eight to 16 players um we we're we're you know working on 32 players in the FPS side and you we're not stopping there we're going to carry on pushing that and also looking at things we can do in the cloud where we can maybe have multiple servers all sort of slave
01:19:10
together so they can maybe have a much larger number of players that they're all sort of simulating in Tandem and communicating with clients because our goal is to you know have uh quite a lot of players in play areas all playing together whether they're in separate ships or you know crewing a ship together all the rest of the stuff and so you know those are some of the aspects that we're still working on but I don't there is nothing that we don't have uh a plan for basically and some of it may take longer to get properly worked out than we would like but I see the road map there is no there's nothing along the road map that I go huh that won't be doable uh so you know really then it just going of comes down to the amount of time it takes to crack it sometimes things take a little longer to get polished out like we're experienced with the FPS uh sometimes they don't um so on that level um you know pulling it all together you know I
01:19:59
I I can't look at you right now and say you know here's here here here here here's an absolute ironcloud date everything will be ready by this date but I definitely know we're we're going to be there and we'll be delivering it and uh and and everyone along the way will be playing and seeing and all the stuff that will happen and uh you know before they before they know it they'll be having this game that they've dreamed of and uh so what do I say to people and you know speaking for your team um the challenge is why we're here you know I I think anybody who who works on Star Sisson could go and get rich making Flappy Bird on iPhone but we we're here because it's big because it's such a big deal uh yeah totally no I mean and also I think I mean it's just like you know we're doing stuff like the giddy faces of like the developers here or you know getting some of the stuff with you know the because we have the
01:20:47
full zone system and the large world and and also the local grid stuff which is the sort of local physics for each one of the different ships so you know going you know starting you know in a space station walking into uh a cutless and a whole bunch of people getting into the whole the cutless flying up getting flying along finding a Retaliator floating derel and then people are getting out the back of the cutless eving across getting inside the the Retaliator going on powering it up starting it up flying away that's everyone's stre the people have been doing a shim videos about it and you know we we are going to be showing a version of that gaml and that will be real gameplay and as Arena CR the 2.0 and onwards we'll be using it uh we're laying the foundations to build this incredible playground for people to um sort of spend hopefully many years in um uh in the Star Citizen universe so I'm I'm uh
01:21:38
I'm excited and all the developers here are that's what excites them this is the game they've wanted to play too so um let's end this by asking what's next for Star Citizen uh well okay so what's next I think we've talked about some of it um you know we're working hard on the FPS and we're also working hard on uh sort of our preview of multi crew uh which we're going to show at um gamescon which will demonstrate the large world and some of the zone system and the local grid stuff and transitioning between various ships and all working correctly um so we're going to have that that'll be hopefully a demo that people will appreciate um it certainly will show the the potential and the scale and the scope of uh you know what we'll go and people can start to sort of extrapolate from there um and so uh you know there'll be that um you know soon after that we'll hopefully have the FPS in
01:22:25
people's hands live uh then beyond that the next stage will be the multi crew Arena Commander which will be sometime after the FPS not too long after the FPS but maybe uh you know four weeks five weeks six weeks after the FPS uh and uh then we're also going to start rolling out some of the uh the persistent Universe aspects so Tony's been hard at work on a bunch of stuff um that U we will start to sort of roll out we may even roll out a little bit of it earlier on in some of the Arena Commander modules we Dr some of the FPS stuff we dropped but our plan is to sort of feather that out over time so we'll have some nice stuff to show also at citizen con October 10th where we will um be sharing a few things that people will like uh but I don't want to say too much yet because um let's leave some surprises down the road but everyone right now is focused very very hard on
01:23:13
um you know the immediate goals which is FPS and uh what we're going to show you at Gamescom which is the multi crew um Arena Commander spaceship stuff well thank you very much for taking the time to go through this with me and uh you know it's an honor to work on staris shake your hand no you're welcome thank you Ben thank you very much I mean it's it's been great and I'm very happy that you you you decided to to join this endeavor very early on especially back when we had hardly anyone that was working on it so you I remember in the early days where we had uh you know just Orwin and Sandy and yourself and Dave hadock and uh forest was sort of our you know one artist that we had work in and we had help from a few other folks like Paul Randell but he was still actually you know he was doing it a Spare Time well he was uh you know at kch and Sean Tracy who's um you know with us now um and it's it was uh you know it was H it
01:24:03
was it was you know a kind of small merry band at the very beginning that uh you know from the initial campaign grew more people uh you know joined like Eric later on and stuff like that and we grew up and got bigger and uh you know now we now we are now we are now you know uh We've you know a few friends have gone along the way but uh you know I think we've gotten incredibly strong and T Ed uh team and uh I'm really really excited and then you know it's I can't get all done soon enough basically is the problem but don't worry it's not for lack of trying it's it's been something watching to come together so um next week we will have a temp of the chairman with questions from subscribers uh post those to the subscriber forum and uh Chris will be answering 10 of those yes and thank you for by the way I always say on the normal chairman thank you to
01:24:51
the subscribers out there because even though we weren't answering any questions this time and you guys make all this possible so we basically use the the subscription money that we get um to create things like jump point and do these video programs and have a higher amount of sort of uh community and web interaction so we've got some really cool stuff that's coming down the road on the uh website that I think uh you know a lot of it is for Community stuff and it's you know as a subscribers you guys are helping make that happen so thank you thank you very much and I'll see you next week [Applause] hey guys thanks for watching um temp for the chairman uh if you guys would like to uh see more episodes go here if you
01:25:40
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 round the verse go here please and I will see you in the verse

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.