10 for the Chairman: Episode 03 (2013.12.20)

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:03

   [Music] hey everyone welcome back for another episode of 10 for the chairman uh for those of you that haven't watched this before uh this is where I answer 10 questions from our very generous subscribers uh that they've asked over the last several weeks or months um and um you're getting from the horses mou so to speak so here let's hit the first of the 10 questions Isaac Clark asks will the dog fighting module also serve as a good benchmarking tool for our current PC Hardware I'd like it if it were a reasonable way to determine whether some upgrades will be necessary before the game goes live yes I think uh it will be a great benchmarking tool so you have to remember that the game today is going to be a lot less uh optimized than the

2. 00:00:52

   final game will be because right now we focus on sort of core functionality and features and not so much on the optimization although we are doing some R&D into some things uh that will you know we think will give us a big performance gain merge instancing on a bunch of our measures and then also we're going to be supporting mantel which will really help with the draw call uh C and efficiency that you get in direct X um so I would basically say if it can run if you can run the hanger really well with some big ships and all the rest of the stuff with the dog fighting module really well then you probably will be able to run the final game pretty well you know I definitely would like to see Star Citizen be you know one of those games that gets benchmarked in all those sort of PC GPU test and that is kind of one of our goals so I think some people are already doing it so there you go okay next question Baron Bruiser asks in the dog fighting module will we be able to have

3. 00:01:39

   our friends join us in our bigger ships it would be great to test out crew cohesion so yes I totally agree uh I definitely we're definitely going to let uh when we have big ships in the dog fighting Alpha um your friends will join and that'll do the whole part of the Cooperative stuff at the very beginning the very first release of the dog fighting module it won't have the very biggest ships um mainly because they haven't most of them haven't been built yet I mean uh you know I'm trying to think constellation is the biggest one right now um uh so and and the ships themselves in the dog fighting there's a lot more assets that have to be built besides what you've seen in the hanger so there's a vast amount of damage modeling and States Equipment that goes on the ships Shield meshes um so there's there's a huge amount of assets that are built so what's going to be constraining us in the dog fighting module is like how fast we can get the assets done So the plan

4. 00:02:28

   is at the beginning that you start in the sort of single seated dog fighting stuff with the Hornet uh maybe a couple of the other ones like the 300i and the Aurora and then as the assets come online as we finish off all the damage pieces all the rest of stuff then we'd fold them in but uh so I wouldn't expect the bigger ships to be in the dog fighting module uh in the won't be in the first release and may not even be the second but probably sometime around mid uh next year we hopefully we'll be having battles where you'd have a bunch of people on a constellation or an Idis against a bunch of people flying other kinds of ships and uh yeah definitely that's that's a big big draw it's actually that's the thing for me that I'm most excited about doing is playing this game where I can run around and man a turret inside a gun while I'm coming you know while someone else is doing a strafing pass in their Fighter um so I'm working on that as that that will be in

5. 00:03:16

   as soon as humanly possible let me put it that way um okay on to the next question enel asks when eventually if you have not already planned to do uh you guys Implement your own server code and backbone as it were will we be seeing a chat Channel on between dog fighting module and the hanger you know one of the reasons why I made the decision to push back on the dog fighting module is that I really wanted to have the dog fighting module be fully integrated with the back end that would also ultimately fully integrate with the hanger and allow for things like chat and all the rest of them I just feel like that's a much better test of uh the ultimate game situation we need all this code in and uh we've actually been working pretty hard on that and we've actually made some really great progress so we're a little ahead of where we thought we would be uh which is really good news and I kind of want it plugged in because it's it's the it's the glue the persistence the glue that goes

6. 00:04:03

   between the dog fighting module and the hanger module and the future things like Planet side and the boarding modules and uh and you know that also moves in with like chat and like we talked about the organizations like how those are getting set up and the chat channels you even have on their website play across into chat channels and stuff that you would have in the game uh so it's so we'll definitely have the chat Channel between dog fighting and the hanger that's why I made the delay is so you can be the idea is you'll start in the hanger and then you'll equip your ship and you could even chat maybe with friends and organization in the hanger say hey let's get into a into a battle and you can jump in equip your ship jump into the ship fire up the hanger go to the matchmaking screen which is basically sort of like a hood element that you'd be seeing in your ship going into simulation mode and you wouldd have chat available to your friends list and all the rest and go in there and that's that

7. 00:04:50

   was one of the major reasons why I just felt like it was better to do it right take the time have the proper system in there rather than sort of uh put a you know kind of Midway uh solution in which would would have been using the existing uh cry engine backend Tech which which we would have then have to throw away um okay so I hope that answers that question uh torvic asks in the dog fighting module how big will the space be where we will dog fight and will there be empty space only or will there be some nice backgrounds like planets asteroids and nebula okay so the dog fighting map uh the base one that we've built is uh 20 km cubed so it's a fairly decent space uh to dog fight around in and then if you go beyond the boundaries will be sort of like Battlefield um and it will be full of some cool stuff so we're going to put an asteroid uh belt in there a nebula some background Planet

8. 00:05:38

   some nice background art so it'll be kind of a fun level to dog fight in all right next question cryp keeper asks is a dog fighting module going to include more settings to tweak so even some of us who are saving money to upgrade our systems can play it a playable 30ish frames per second um so I'm not so sure the initial release of the dog fighting we'll have um you know a lot more sort of performance tweaks or settings than say some of the hanger stuff has uh we'll probably have a simple level of lods in for the Hornet and a couple of the other ships that will launch with the dog fighting um and you can always reduce your resolution but obviously uh as I said a little earlier on in the questions that the optimization stage tends to happen towards the back end of the project uh and so the very beginning of the dog fight it's probably not going to be that optimized and as time goes on it will get better and you could

9. 00:06:25

   probably drop the resolution down uh or the quality level down I mean I think it you know cray engine actually runs quite well if you don't run it in ultra settings on you know some ridiculous resolution so hopefully that will uh will work for you all right on to the next question Shadow Knight asks will there be a flight tutorial very basic with the dog fighting module uh that's a good question um a lot of people around here really hate the tutorials uh I know I was just playing around with uh the elite dangerous Alpha and it had a tutorial and I was kind of feeling like no I just want to be shooting other ships that shoot back at me um so I don't know so if we do a tutorial I would guess that uh maybe we would do a tutorial with like an AI ship or something that you could fight against but we haven't specifically designed that yet so that's sort of still to be determined um okay on to the next question quigan Scotch asks will we see

10. 00:07:13

    greater access to weapons in preparation for the dog fight module will we have access to different missiles more guns power plants and engines will I finally get the cargo box for my Aurora so definitely as a dog fighting module rolls out and then along the way we are going to be increasing the amount of weapons and uh you know Munitions Etc available to you and items you know like Shields and all the rest of the stuff thrusters uh because that's the whole point is to test out all these items to do balance and all the rest of the stuff um and we'll probably allow you know we'll probably give some sort of test money so people can buy some and try them and try them for like a day or two and then after we've tested then we would take it back um and uh so yes the answer there is there will be a greater access and and we'll be basically as the assets are getting built we'll be bringing them online uh and then on the well I finally get the box for my Aurora

11. 00:08:01

    H I think if the if your Aurora's Mena have a cargo box it should already have it in the hanger if not then maybe that's a bug so I'll have to check on that I guess it would depend on what kind of Aurora you have and what the base stats say you've got um but it should actually be already on in the hangout okay on to the next question Christopher Malik asked in the dog fighting module how will you balance ships by class size will there be limits on the number of hornets Freelancers Etc I can't see a round of dog fighting with eight constellations against eight Hornets being fair um well see I think I'd be interested to see eight constellations getting eight Hornets because I'm not so sure it'll be quite as one-sided as you think because they both have different pros and cons so depending on how you're fighting and what you're doing uh it may be a closer fight than you think but uh yeah we I mean we're going to have various categories on the matchmaking so we've been playing with various sort of matchmaking uh setups uh you know one of

12. 00:08:49

    them is you sort of assign points to ship so obviously an aurora would be something like one point but a constellation could be something like five points and don't quote me on these points because these are just for illustrations purposes and each team gets to have 30 points or something like that um so you know you can sort of make the tradeoff between lots of Little Ships or uh a fewer smaller bigger ships and then they may then we'll also probably have matchmaking that like okay this is just for Hornet V Hornet or Aurora V Aurora um so we'll have various options that you'll be able to choose uh from the matchmaking system inside the dog fighting module okay on to the next question failen asks I was wondering whether the dog fighting module will be released with the finalized flight model are the physics and flight system more or less complete or will they be tuned as part of the alpha process if it is going to be tuned what sort of feedback will be useful to the team so the flight

13. 00:09:37

    model is not going to be finalized I mean first of all we're going to have a few different kinds of flight models and the whole point of the dog fighting alpha is to get it out there so everyone plays it and you know gives us good feedback is it fun does it feel good is it you know does it feel cool or does it feel realistic or or whatever it whatever the feedback would be so that's a big part of it and obviously the stuff that we sort of say yeah that's a good point we would definitely work so we kind of want to get it out there to sort of get a get a good idea of of of what people feel um so we will definitely tune it the feedback will probably be along the lines of kind of some of the feedback that you would expect on a subjective basis because this isn't really a bug issue it's more like I like this or I don't like this I think This ship's too tough I think this weapon's too weak Etc and that would probably be in some kind of forum setup that we would have although we haven't sort of built a design that

14. 00:10:24

    LP okay last question is from Voyager NL uh which I'm assuming maybe NL is Netherlands but if not I just was assuming wrong um but he or she asks since dog fighting is a testing module uh what will you have built in the dog fighting module to retrieve data will you only have logging to file which in case of problems we have to send to you can it be turned on or off or do you also have an automated system to gather statistics or other info that is directly sent to you with or without us knowing um you mean kind of like the NSA or have you thought of any other ways of monitoring the test uh you know one of the big reasons why I decided I wanted to push back the dog fighting is I really wanted a proper like test of the back end of the system which means that we're running the servers it's not sort of a peer-to-peer sort of multiplayer typical kind of setup that a lot of sort

15. 00:11:11

    of the sort of firsters shooter stuff can have um and so the servers are our servers basically so we get to see what's happening in every battle and so we can sort of track metrics of like this ship beats that ship More Than This is weapons stronger or too weak or all the rest of stuff so we'll have access to pretty much all the battle data because essentially the servers are run by us everyone else is just running a client connecting to it and simulating local uh you know local stuff that doesn't affect the actual Master gameplay but if you're playing against other people we have to be server authorative I think that's kind of the the uh how we would retrieve the data and it's far less innocuous than some other people that have been retrieving data recently um anyway so there you go that's the uh end of another episode of 10 for the chairman I hope you found the answers useful and informative and we're Maring my Drake interplanetary hoodie um

16. 00:12:02

    keeping me warm here in uh the chil December month in Santa Monica which is actually a little colder now than it normally is um uh so thanks for listening and uh catch you next week goodbye