Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - aUEC, Hotfixes and More

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:11

   Welcome everybody to the second edition of Calling All Devs, our new weekly question and answer series where we take questions from you, the Star Citizen backer. You guys vote on which ones you want to see us answer each and every week, and then I sit here in backstage in our mocap studio because my desk is way too loud, and I call people on Skype and get the answers directly from the proverbial development horses' mouth. All right, starting off this week's show with our most voted on questions from our backers, we have two questions here that I think are perfect for Todd Pappy. So, we're going to give Todd Pappy a call and see if he picks up. Todd. Hello. How you doing, man? Not too bad. Not too bad. You're our first repeat guest.

2. 00:00:59

   Sweet. I told you last week that, you know, with your new title and everything, I was going to be picking on you quite a bit. Okay. And and I I come not only with one question, but two questions. It's just how it happens. You know, our backers submit the questions, they vote on them on Spectrum. You're going to get me a nice big like WWE belt kind of thing for like uh for a repeat repeat question. Okay. Made out of paper mache, you know. That's fine. I I'm going to have to learn that paper mache. All right, so we'll do this do this quick. I know you're a busy guy and whatnot. Star Sit What is your title now? Star Citizen Live Director? No, Star Sit Live Live Game Director. Live Game Director. Okay. All right, so first question submitted by backers, voted on. This was our our most voted on question of the of of the of the week so far. Is buying ships with

3. 00:01:48

   auec still a planned feature for Alpha 3.1? It is a planned feature, however, with our current optimization plan and everything like that, I don't think it will be hitting in 3.1. Uh and then the uh next one, uh what are the plans for adding a UEC transfers between player characters? So, we have actually already have that in a in one of the designs for service beacon. Um we understand, you know, like if you go out on mission with multiple characters or multiple players, you want to be able to actually uh um be able to go through and say, "Hey, you know, I will give you a cut of this." And right now, uh we know you can't do that, but the plan is is part of the service beacon

4. 00:02:37

   design. Whether or not that is the the first tier that rolls out, that's that's something that um basically Tony and I are still discussing. Uh what about plans for a traditional like trade window? Like like we see MMOs all the time. You go to another character, you click on them, you go trade, it opens up a window, you type money in, you give people you give people money. That is basically via MobiGlass, and that that is that is kind of the service beacon design of, you know, hey, with the MobiGlass, this is this is how I um basically uh create contracts so on and so forth. We call it a service beacon, but it's it's part of the MobiGlass and and how that would work, where um it's player-initiated contracts. So, if you um are a hauler and you want to hire a bunch of mercs, or if you're a pirate and you want to be able to pay, you

5. 00:03:26

   know, basically people for a day's work, you know, that's that's what we'll we'll be working towards. All right, cool. Well, that's all I got for you. Thank you so much. All right, thanks, Jared. We'll see if I don't call you next week. Take care. Bye. All right. Well, next question on the list. Uh remember, these questions were are submitted entirely by you, the Star Citizen backer, and voted on on Spectrum. Uh the next third most voted question that I think I can actually, you know, call and reach a person for, I think is perfect for Jeffrey Pease. So, let's go ahead and see if he answers. Jeffrey. Hello. What's up? Not much. We don't get a lot of chance to talk. Is this our Is this our Is this our first Skype call that we've ever had? I think so, yeah. Like we've met in

6. 00:04:14

   we've met in person a few times, but we I don't think we've ever talked on Skype. We've met in person. We've been on like sync calls when like we're releasing patches like when we're all listening and we've been on Skype calls, but I don't think we've ever been in a one-on-one call. How you doing? Doing all right. It's kind of cold in Austin right now. Yeah? I know Not not as not as cold as it was in Arkansas. So, I know you are of course bearded CIG here at Cloud Imperium Games. And I'm I'm sitting here and watching you and I just instinctively was rubbing my face and going going you know, and like, hey, I'm not going to say I miss my beard, but but I I don't miss my beard. I do get questions from co-workers asking how I managed to eat with my mustache in my face. I I swear to God I've got a hairball in my lower intestine. I have to. It's going to be there for the next 3 months. All right. We've

7. 00:05:00

   wasted enough time on chit-chat. The next question I have from you from our backers, it says, will we will we see hotfixes between 3.0 and 3.1 and 3.2? To answer that question, probably the first thing we need to do is establish what we consider a hotfix because different software companies and even different video game companies have different definitions for what a hotfix is. For CIG, typically we consider the term hotfix to be for something that we apply to an environment that's already been deployed, but where the fix isn't something that's normally included that for the build that the environment's hosting. So, like in a worst case scenario, if we were to redeploy the exact same change list that our backers

8. 00:05:49

   can see in the launcher for the version of the game, those fixes wouldn't be included for a redeployed version of that game because they were added after the fact. What this tends to mean is that the fixes can go into the game without players actually noticing that they've been added unless we specifically tell them. Uh to answer the question as to whether we will see any hot fixes, the plain fact is that we have already hot fixed a number of problems that were encountered over the holiday break. Ahmed and Bryce, as well as Tony, and some of our other engineers and programmers were looking into several issues that were happening with the diffusion gateway and our shopping system and the probability volume service because we had a bunch of

9. 00:06:37

   problems where game servers weren't recovering their ability to list items in the shops. We had a problem where the probability volume service was spawning a mission that was causing the game servers to deadlock. Uh we had a really strange issue where the game servers were causing ships to become parents and children of other ships, which caused the circular reference. And then when the cache tried to clear the data because it was a circular reference, the cache would deadlock because it would just keep going round and round and round and round. And uh I remember I was I I just I was just sitting at home uh reading the Skype chat and watching reading the logs and parsing what I what I can of of that stuff and just going, "What the heck?" It's like an ouroboros. Uh

10. 00:07:25

    and then uh another one of actually some of the hot fixes for the persistence cache that we did were to put in additional logging so that we could figure out what was causing it to deadlock. And then Tom Sawyer ended up figuring out that the deadlock was being caused by that cyclical reference. And then we also did a hot fix to the general instance manager because I discovered that it was trying to match make people into matches that weren't supposed to let people in once they had already started. So like for Vandal Swarm and uh Pirate Swarm and Race modes, once the game mode start, people can't join, but it was still trying to put them in and then it was telling them you can't join that cuz it's already started. So another one of the hot fixes we put in was to make it so that the gym would stop doing that. And uh we also have this

11. 00:08:14

    new feature for 3.0 for the back end services where we have a dedicated process that will take all of the items that people have purchased on our platform Mhm. and add them to their account in game. Originally, the servers that would do that would be the same servers players were on and if one of those servers crashed, it could cause problems with items being missing and stuff. So now we have a dedicated process for that. That because it's not shared with instances that players are playing on, we don't have to worry about it crashing in in the middle of someone getting the items added to their account. Right. One of the gym hot fixes we added was to exclude those specific processes to rolling restarts that we can do to the game servers. Uh I think that covered most if not all

12. 00:09:02

    of the hot fixes we did. So if I understand you correctly, uh the question was will we see hot fixes? Uh yeah, I think there's a misnomer there. He goes, there will be plenty There have been plenty of hot fixes and there may even be more hot fixes in the future, but you may not necessarily see them. Am I right? Yeah, yeah. It It We don't have to We don't have to send down a patch for a hot fix. Yeah, it's it's not always something that people are going to notice unless we make sure that we're communicating to them that they're happening, kind of like how we are doing in this video. I wonder why that that It's like what, what, what? It's like there's there's a plan behind everything. All right, Jeff. Well, thank you so much. I'll let you get back to work. Thank you. All right. Bye. Bye. Okay, so Jeffrey Freeze out of out of Austin. Our first Skype caller, first

13. 00:09:51

    one-on-one Skype call we've ever had. We've worked here for years. So, next question, it's a ship question. Now, we do have a ship show for ships. It's called Ship Shape. But, this is your question. You guys submitted it. You guys voted it up. So, I have a person here in Los Angeles. Yes, there's construction going on that I think is going to be perfect for us. So, let's see if he picks up here. Kirk. Kirk Tome. How you doing, man? Hey, Jordan. What's up? Not much. So, you remember I came by your desk earlier today and I told you about Calling All Devs and I said I'd be calling you. We arranged this. Yeah. Uh-huh. You got time for me now? Uh yeah, we do. Or I do. All right. So, I got a question. It's from backers. It's voted on by backers. It's one of the most voted on questions in the in the first couple days here. put simply,

14. 00:10:38

    what is that construction noise? No, hold on. All right, here we go. What is the plan for our Freelancer variants? Uh the Freelancer. Um Okay, well, it it is one of the original five ships for Star Citizen that were planned. And we do know that backers have been waiting for them for them and so for that we do apologize. I do know that they're currently scheduled to begin work in the latter half of the year by the UK team. This doesn't guarantee that they'll be done by the by the end of the year, but we are striving to to make that happen. And we do we do know how much the the community has been clamoring for them. So, we we are working on them and we do plan

15. 00:11:28

    to get them started and we'll try to get them completed. Um, unfortunately, as you know, we do have a lot of ships that were making and a lot of features that need to go in the game. They also require artist and design and engineering work. And so, things do get pushed back, but they're on the schedule. So, we'll we'll try to get them out by by the end of this year. Also, some a bit of other news, the 300 series rework is also on the schedule for this year and and that will be done by the team in LA LA. So, we'll we'll be working on it here locally. Awesome, man. Thank you so much. Cool. I'll let you get back to work. And so, for our final call for this this week's Calling All Devs,

16. 00:12:18

    um, one of my favorite people He doesn't know he's one of my favorite people. He's one of my favorite people, mostly because I Well, I'll I'll tell you about it later. We're going to give Luke Presley a call and see if he picks This is him. Luke. Hey Jared. How are you? Good. Thank you for picking up and answering my call. No worries. Okay. What time is it there? It is 5:00. Got you. When I did the first episode, I did all LA people that kind of keep it, you know, easy on me. And this episode is almost entirely UK and Austin and Frankfurt people. So, so I've had to I'm up really early in the morning right now. But it's okay. Thank you so much. We've got a question for you for Calling All Devs. It's the last question of the show and these are questions submitted by backers, of course, and voted on on Spectrum.

17. 00:13:05

    So, the question that I have for you here is is the current way we spawn ships and vehicles in game the final implementation? I you know, using a terminal and popping them in or are there plans for further development of this feature down the road? Um, there are definitely further plans for development. Um, so, the terminal probably like the notion of going to a terminal probably won't change. Um the terminal will definitely change. I mean the the UI on there will they get major improvements. Um and the the kind of flow of it. But as for like popping in and out, I guess the reason you've seen so much popping in and out is because um places like Olisar um and Grimhex that only has the landing pads right

18. 00:13:53

    now, doesn't have the hangars. Um Uh I mean you see these things popping in and out on those landing pads. It should be a hangar. It let Olisar is a legacy kind of thing we just build on and build on until we finally get like the truck stop and you know, we'll we'll get a a final hotel eventually and it'll have some hangars and that means that all of this popping in and out will happen away from the player, you know, he won't be able to go in that hangar before he's asked for the ship and then he'll be granted access to the hangar and he'll go in. Now, that's not to say that we can ever completely get rid of popping in and out. Um I mean for instance, when a player logs out, you know, his ship hangs around for an amount of time and then it has to go somewhere.

19. 00:14:40

    Um and if a player logging in, obviously that that ship has to come in some, you know, where he parked it before. If he left it, you know, off unless um not stored. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, I don't think we'll get rid of it entirely. We are a game after all, but we you know, you won't be seeing them popping in and out on the landing pads as often as you do now. Yeah, that's a hallmark of every, you know, Chris Roberts game. That that that that that um what's the diegetic universe? We we we we we want to try to make Star Citizen appear as much as how it would appear in the real world. So, I I I this is the first time I've heard that idea. So, I love the idea. So, eventually you're saying that the version of the Portal star we have is not the final version.

20. 00:15:27

    Definitely. Definitely. All of us all is a monstrosity. I mean, you're about to see something that you it's going to about to get even worse because you know the Reclaimer is is huge. It's it's almost the size of the address. And uh that's coming soon. So, we've had to just the the large landing pad that is already like a football field is now going to be like two football fields uh on on there. So, I mean it's good because we we don't we don't waste like final art or anything like that. We just you know, expand upon the this thing until we've got until we know all the things that it needs to do. Um and then and then once we've got that, we can build this thing properly knowing all the the pieces. Very cool. Very cool. That I'm I'm

21. 00:16:15

    excited. I'm excited. Uh thank you so much, Luke. We'll let you go. All right. Thanks, man. To work. Bye. Bye. So, uh Luke Presley, one of my favorite people. Um about 2 years ago when I came back from my Gamescom, I swung by UK and met with Luke Presley and I pitched him my ideas for for for two different uh quests or missions or things in the Persistent Universe. And uh one of them uh he said was well, he was very kind about it and like shoot me off. It was about finding my missing keys. The other one though was essentially what became uh Benny's Henge. It was basically a story line uh to find out uh who was stealing all the Big Benny machines in the Persistent Universe and and and he came up with Benny's Henge and whatnot. So, uh so that's why Luke Presley is one of my favorite people. And that does it for this week's episode of Calling All Devs. Uh I hope you enjoyed it. Remember,

22. 00:17:02

    there's a thread on Spectrum. That's where we got all five of our questions this week. Uh you can submit your questions and most importantly, don't forget to vote on which questions you want to see uh asked each and every week. So, for Calling All Devs, I'm Community Content manager Jared Huckaby. I'll see you next week, everybody. Thank you for watching. So, if you want to keep up with the latest and greatest in Star Citizen and Squadron 42's development, please follow us on our social media channels. See you soon.