CitizenCon 2948 - Road to Release

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Applause] hey so I hope you've had a great day and sad saw a bunch of the panels are some very very cool stuff the various developers were showing so hopefully and the panel's you didn't get to see they'll all be on youtube so check them out afterwards okay yeah it's not working wait go back okay yeah it's broken yeah what is life I don't know what is release okay calm down everybody chill out so we were

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   actually debating about the roadie release discussing that for star citizen and we were talking about whether we were going to go up with a hundred bullet points and talk about all these features and myself and aaron and todd papy and tony we're all having a sort of discussion about what the core meaning the core elements and the core technology that we felt would create an experience that sort of defined the game and also was worthy of playing irrelevant of whether the full feature sets is finished or all the content in terms of planets and locations is done because for us when we think about release I mean we're really releasing every three months now so we you know we've got three point three just about ready to come we just had three - we had

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   three one and we're running a live game and that's sort of the epiphany that we've had internally which is okay we need to focus on how the game plays now we've got to improve the quality of life we've got to improve the user experience the UI how you get into it make it accessible ensure that the gameplay right now is polished we're not there yet but we are definitely working towards that every single release and that is a priority for us but for us we were looking okay what was going to define the experience that's the big vision of star citizen and that in really for us when we hit these milestones then for us we say okay I think this will be the core experience in tech that will deliver the vision of star citizen so we go for look at that can we go ballistic over oh it's working

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   now so here you go so the very first one was the ability to be inside a ship right so so it's not just a cockpit it's an actual fully real tactile physicalize ship that has engine room beds toilets mess hall whatever you would imagine to be in a ship of that sighs and there we go and we did that that was a very beginning thing that we did the hanger module which we did back in 13 the next was space combat which was about okay I'm gonna get in my ship I'm gonna fly around I'm gonna Doug fight which I'm pretty sure you guys remember is what we did with arena commander the next key technical milestone was the 64-bit flow floating precision so moving from 32-bit to 64-bit so we can move we can have

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   sort of millimeter resolution and going all the way to billions of kilometres route which is what we need for star citizen because we model entire star systems that have to be billions of kilometres across but we need millimeter visual precision because you're right up there looking a cockpit in first person it's only a foot or two away and 32-bit precision just doesn't cut it and that's why most games FPS games most engines now are 32-bit and if you see them they find it very hard to have air play areas bigger than 16 kilometers on a life on a side right and they you know they brag about oh we got this really big play area and it's you know a couple of kilometres across so that in the physics spreads which

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   allow us to simulate separate physical worlds you know when you're flying around and ship walking around while you're flying in space or if you're on a planet and it's rotating around a star or spinning on its axis for night and day so that was a very critical piece of tech and of course that was it's wrong with this thing okay that was a speci alpha 2.0 unless paul's trying to read my mind over there then the next key element to the gameplay we wanted was having the ability to earn money and have a level of persistence which was I can go out and I can earn some money I can buy some things I log off I come back on I've still got those things and that was quick Paul there you go alpha 2.4 where we had our very first

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   basic persistence it was only very limited didn't have persistence of location and a bunch of other stuff then the next big milestone that we needed to solve which in a way we've gone go back yeah yeah I'll say go for I'll say go forward and then you go forward just wait for me to say go forward well it's 1st and 3rd unification of the character and we've talked about it a lot but it's you know most first-person games cheat and they have very different animations and models for first person to third person and then when they have their multiplayer say battle mode they have limited amount of actions that you can see on a third-person play a character that's doing because it's very difficult to sync up the actions but for

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   us since it's going to be an you know an MMO with thousands of people you can be sitting right next to your friend and he's interacting with the dashboard just like you are so you're seeing him do the same thing in third-person that you're doing a first-person also where our guns actually aim is where the gun is really aiming it's not sort of cheating at where the mouse cursor is so we needed to unify it it was quite a difficult task but we did it let's go forward and that was really kind of what star marine was we had early parts of it before that the next big thing was the planet tech so you can see the planet or the moon and you can go there and you can walk around it you can explore every single inch so there's no fake loading screens there's no transition down to it there's no go down you can only land on a certain area and

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   that was the procedural planet tech which we debuted go forward with 3.0 and the other big thing was location persistence which is the ability that you go to a location you log out you come back you're at that location you're not starting back at where you started before and again that was the first stage go forward poor with 3.0 and the next big thing which is where we're at right now is object containers streaming and banking and this is actually a massive thing I think we've talked about it you know we fought originally when we scheduled it out it was going to take about six months it's been about 18 months solid development on it and as you all know ban culling has been something that we've had on our roadmap

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    and it's been pushed back and push back push back and that wasn't necessarily because we wanted to push it back it was mostly because it turned out both the object container streaming and the bank or Bank calling needs object container streaming to really make sense and object container streaming was incredibly complicated because we had to re-engineer most of the game engine itself because for object container streaming to work at our scale well we're moving around we have to be able to stream in the objects and textures and models and all the data and initialize them all completely asynchronously so the games running here meanwhile it's loading up the stuff that will be over here or over here over here and we don't know where the player is going to go and it's complicated because it's multiplayer so a multiplayer we have all these different players that

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    been going in different directions so we need to be able to have object containers streaming that works both on the clients and on the servers and applying culling that's going to work on the clients and ultimately on the server's so with three-point-three this is the first use of the object container streaming and the bank lynktec it makes a massive difference in terms of performance because you you're only worrying about having the part of the world that's relevant to your character streamed in which means you don't have to simulate all the objects in the entire solar system you don't have to worry about them they don't take up memory so it's better for memory it's better for performance and you know as we've said on a TV and I think in our newsletters we've had some really great results so far I mean it's has stability issues right

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    now because again when something is multi-threaded and asynchronous there's a lot of unpredictability because when two different threads are stepping on each other it can have unpredictable results but it's a massive step forward because the biggest thing for us to be able to scale the game and also have performances this tech here so we're really quite excited to get this out because it also in ours allows us to start building out in the stanton system because before as everyone knows even with 3:03 132 the memory use of star students was way too high for where we want to be and we just couldn't fit anything more in memory at the same time so object container streaming allows us to do that and so that's a that's a massive win for us so let's move forward Paul and that's going to come with three point three which

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    we're imminent doing the next big sort of pillar it's the ability to either buy or rent ships and that's because the game loop is essentially going around earning money so there's various ways to earn money there will be more ways to earn money as we flesh out the professions but once we earn the money we want to spend it on something so there's a lot you know there's only so many suits of armor or a guns you can buy and the core sort of upgrade loop in the game is really the ships the ships allow you to do bigger and better things different professions and so as a player you want to earn money and then upgrade and then that ship will allow you to earn more money and upgrade to a bigger better thing and do different things and so that's that was very important for us to get in it's going to be in three point three but the purchasing or renting obviously there's going to be

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    some time where you just to try to get the economy to work properly because we do have a problem that you can buy the equivalent of a Cessna or an a you know a nuclear carrier and you know there's only like one nation on earth the one we're in right now that can afford to spend ten billion dollars on a nuclear carrier but we in our game sort of allow the player to have that huge range so you got to figure out how we make that work and I'm a economic basis on the low end and progressing to the high end so I'm sure they'll take a bit of time to dial it in but it's a it's a major point for us so let's move forward and that shall be in three point three so then the next big pillar and there's twelve pillars that we don't know dony Todd myself identified that we felt were really important and or the

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    organization system so this we already have a version of it online but this is the organization system inside the game so you can get your old mates together you can do things like assign out roles or missions or cost share or revenue share you know specify their tithes for the group or you know however you would like to organize it into different pods or modules for communication reasons and we want to move that in so the so build it further out on the website for some of that stuff and then bring it across into the game and you have all that so you and your friends can create your organizations of groups as small or as big as you want and then we move forward full persistence is the next big thing

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    it's the eleventh thing of the pillars we think so for persistence we talked a little bit about it at the beginning of the day but for persistence is the ability for you to go anywhere in the universe and you know me drop this remote on the floor doesn't work so I might as well drop it there you go right so and then I'm then I'm gonna walk away right and a walk out here let's get a stream out it's gone and I just said are you know what I really want my remote again and then it's gonna remember that I dropped it it's gonna stream it back in even if it was on the surface of a planet and I'll be there and I can pick it up the first person and that's a big step for us to be able to do that and we'll so the fall and the fall persistence

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    combined with the object container streaming and killing uh I think things that will make the world alive because you know it's not just me dropping a remote it's leaving a ship somewhere or you got damaged in space with your ship and so on rescue you went you went away and you came back to get your ship and repair it and then take it home and we're gonna you know persistence in your hab so you'll go there you can see that you can move and interact the objects you can you know find things on travels in space take them home bring them leave them at your hab or leave them in your ship so the you know physical inventories are gonna be very important in the game going forward in terms of you know being able to store and manage stuff so the more you play the more stuff you collect you know if you're a hoarder then you'll probably want to get a bigger big hairy humans face and the other aspect of full

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    persistence is the aspect of age wear and tear so you know a long time ago talked about death of a spaceman that's very much on our roadmap and plan and this the ability for items as they get used to get where things aged you as a character will age and again that's what full persistence is about it's getting to this point that is you play the game players in the game do things and it persists so this universe is not a theme park that gets reset every day that you come back and visit this universe is a living breathing universe that changes as players live in it and interact with it and I think that's probably one of the biggest things that's why we call it the persistent universe is that it has a life and a persistence and people's

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    actions will mean something in it and that's a very very important part the 11th pillar and the last one if we go forward Paul is server meshing so when we get server meshing that is we think the last piece of the puzzle that have the full game experience and this is our ability to go you know right now we have about 50 players on a server we probably will be able to increase that number because of bang following and stuff but it's still going to cap out at some level with server mashing we'll be able to get to thousands of players playing concurrently in same locations star systems they're not all going to be able to have a thousand people dogpiling together they won't be able to render it all at the same time but you certainly will be able to have you know a thousand people on the planet person for instance and so the server

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    meshing is the last key piece because that will allow us to have a truly massively populated universe of players as well as AI and having servers that dynamically scale up and down to take care of the processing needs of that and so from our standpoint in terms of what we would think is the experience when you guys can sit in and play the game day after day and not worry about it getting white not not worrying about oh I'm going to do something for a day or two and there's no point because they're going to reset the system when we get to full persistence of the server meshing that is that's our marker and sure after that we've got a we've got planets to do and star systems and we're going to have continual feature

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    development but this is an online live game and so for us we don't have a particular viewpoint in terms of oh that's it this is where we finish it and we don't do any more work it's like literally are we kind of you as long as you guys want to live in this universe every three months we're giving you a build and here you are and here's a bit more and here's a bit more here's a bit more and when we get to the full persistence and server meshing I think at that point that's when we're not going to be resetting the servers it's when it will be ongoing living breathing game and that I'm not going to give you a date but but you can watch you can watch on a road map as we develop it and I just watch for that for because us internally

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    those are those are what we view is our you know sort of cornerstones that we need to get to and yes there's a lot of other things that we've talked about that we're also working on but when we get that we feel like that that's gonna it will be a game like no other so that is kind of what we in terms of road to release but speaking of near-term release three point three I think we're going to go wide to beat you as of today so you guys get home everyone here will get access I think we're gonna open up to subscribers and concierge first and then as long as things don't blow up too badly then we're gonna go full wide and then we're going to keep hammering on it because we want to get three point three

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    in everyone's hands as soon as possible because of object constraint streaming and Bank culling makes a massive difference to the experience and performance and once we get that stable and we need a lot of people playing a test to get because that helps us with chasing down all these sort of edge cases are very hard to replicate then we're gonna roll in the personal Orval aspect which we showed earlier today and I think it will be it should be a pretty great patch when all that said and done and there's a lot of stuff in three point three I think we've talked about it but it's quite a lot of new ships I mean I think it's probably one of our you know and it's kind of fun it's the first one we have a straight to fly a bull ship in the Valkyrie which is cool the I think the hammerheads probably the biggest ship that we've got in the game

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    at the moment and it certainly is probably up in post firepower of a ship in the game and they got you know the Phoenix which is great fly around with luxury and then the cool new mustangs and all the tumbrel variants really cool too so I think it's going to be cool I'm looking forward to you guys playing it so that's that if we just go forward one extra thing we're going to do and I don't think any other company that operates an online game does this or I'm not aware of Swan it does this but we have we collect telemetry on obviously all the servers and all the clients that are connected to us and so we get a good idea of what the frame rates are what the machine specs are what the latency is what the load times are and we've often had debates because we see a lot

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    of anecdotal you know framerate sucks and everybody's very searched and we're like we're watching the data and that's not exactly what our data says so we decided that we wanted to give all you guys the ability to track the telemetry yourselves so what we have is you can go into the website this will release for three point three and we will have live telemetry on three three going forward you'll be able to see your machine so where you start in the CPU score will use sitting the GPU it will tell you what your steps are and we're going to be tracking not all this stuff gets tracked right away but we're planning on tracking the latency and the loading times you'll see the crashes and then you can track yourself against a heat map of everybody playing the game and see where you land and see also kind of

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    what the specs are here so that's you know in the spirit of open development you guys are going to be seeing what we see in our control dashboards and you can also sort of see because that it you know pcs are challenging because everybody has a slightly different configuration and you don't know if someone's Bitcoin mining on the side while trying to play star citizen or doing nothing right but it's quite interesting and I have to say that there's we've had a few outliers on this where some people have had like thread rippers that are just crushing it on three point three so it's a it'd be pretty interesting in the new Intel multi-core ones they're doing pretty awesome too so you guys will be able to

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    track yourself against everyone else and then longer term not right away but I think the next stages will open this up so you can sort of see our server performance too so you'll be able to track how the servers are doing what the stability is what their frame rates are so you know when I wants to betting I'll suck so whatever you just go to this page and see how it's going so I think that should be really cool Goemon okay I know you guys were trying me so obviously I know there's a few people okay well squadron 42 well it's going really well I'm really happy with it and you've seen actually today if you've

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    been in some of the panels you've seen some of the tech we'd be working on like if you went into the character panels you went to this space gaping Wan even the cloth stuff that was happening there's a lot of stuff we're developing specifically that goes into squadron and then goes across into the PU and we're closing it down all the remaining features were in content and the last major technical hurdle that we were worried about on squadron was object containers streaming which as you know we're almost ready to close out here on three point three so we don't have any major technical hurdles left on squadron so for us you know it's it's a bit easier to get squadron closed out than obviously star citizen that needs to serve a mashing in all the red stuff so that's going we're going to publish the

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    public roadmap for you guys in December all the way to completion of the project and I'm just going to leave you with something right now you