ATV Interview: Tony Zurovec

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] thanks guys in this week's ATV interview we're sitting down with the director of the persistent Universe Mr Tony zurc Tony how you doing uh pretty good now uh We've gained a lot of new followers a lot of new citizens since the last time you were on camera here so why don't you start by introducing yourself to the community and tell them a little bit about what you do my name is Tony zerc I'm the director of persistent universe and that entails a number of different responsibilities uh we do everything from Guiding the development uh at the high level of uh what I'd call the peaceful AI it's the AI That's going to drive all of the uh characters in the various Landing zones that you're going to see throughout you know uh all these different environments um the the the

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   non-combat oriented AI uh it's also involves the creation of all of these different areas that you're going to be visiting within the persistent Universe um we've already uh we've already put out there uh Area 18 which is the first of those there's a whole slew of other ones that are you know coming down the pike and that you'll be seeing soon um we'll get into you know a little bit of detail on some of those later in this conversation um it involves a whole lot of uh work with regards to uh everything from shopping interfaces to how uh you're actually going to transition you know from server to server the whole backend you know infrastructure you know for the networking and a variety of other things you know sounds like most of what Star Citizen is as opposed to Squadron 42 yeah uh yeah Squadron 42 in

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   general is a very specific you know uh a very specific experience and if you play through it there will be some variability but by and large different players will have very similar experiences as they get TR see the game whereas the persistent universe is intended to be a completely open-ended uh environment where you completely dictate your own path are you going to be a mercenary are you going to be a pirate are you going to be uh you know you know a a protector you know of the of the weak and vulnerable are you going to basically are you going to be a minor um the the sky is completely wide open in terms of not only what you do but you know how effective you are it whether you recruit other players to your cause to assist um and all these types of things gotta now for a long time we just launched the social the social module uh

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   for a long time we talked about the social module was going to be inviting people back to your hangers when the social module actually arrived it turned out to be so much more than that can you talk can you tell us a little bit about why that change was made yeah that was actually one of the later changes that I made and there were a couple of reasons for it one was at the time just for technical reasons the code base had been split in into uh a Game Dev and a 12 version and so it was very difficult to get back all of the pieces of the puzzle that we needed to uh to basically do the shared hangers at that point in time um as of right now it would actually be much more straightforward we're back we're reintegrated that's no longer an issue um but that kind of goes back to the primary reason why I found AA 18 way more interesting as an initial release of the social module was that the mechanism by which you access it is the

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   is the same for all the players so when I go to my hanger I'm in my own little environment I then go to Area 18 and I'm automatically shunted into a common area with all of these other players that's dramatically different from me Landing in my single player hanger and I invite you over and now it's just the two of us and unless I specifically invite someone else and maybe they maybe they uh accept my invitation and maybe they don't then maybe we've got a third guy and I do the same thing and maybe we've got a fourth guy um that's much slower Pace you don't tend to meet people you don't already know um and so it just struck me that it would be much more interesting to a much larger SWAT you know of the community to basically put them in close proximity uh you know via you know via

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   passive means so all they needed to do was go to Area 18 and they were going to automatically be combined with other players this will actually touch upon some of the enhancements that we've got to uh to the very next Milestone the you know the so-called you know 2.0 Milestone which will introduce the million mile high club um we've got some specific enhancements planned for that release that will make going to uh Area 18 that much more interesting uh versus versus what it has been in the past okay uh since you brought it up the million mile high club uh we're going to talk with Mark Skelton a little bit later about it but what can you can you give us kind of a top level overview what the million mile high club is supposed to achieve yeah the million my high club is basically a private you know uh meeting community area that was purchased by a

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   number of players in the past and so we're now delivering you know upon the promise you know uh to those players and what it is is the owners of those areas have the ability to invite other individual players or entire Clans to you know to these you know to these areas it resembles kind of a combination between a sports bar and an entertainment Lounge um we've decked them out out with a blend between it's it kind of Blends visually technology with traditional wood finishes so it's got kind of a high-end you know technological you know look to it um they're filled with aquariums monitors uh you have your own private bartender you've got your own private dman so it's really a way to you know uh allow players to set up you know their own personal meeting area um to discuss you know whatever they want and eventually

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   once the you know once the uh the main game is online this is a great uh area for you know for people in a given you know Guild or Clan to basically head to to find other players that are looking you know that they know that they've interacted with before that haven't already gone out into space and gone to a different planet or a different system Etc it's like these guys are literally waiting for other members of that Clan to arrive and then they you know they basically join up and head off um and as opposed to having to do all of this communication through you know typical you know chat based interface and hope that you're on the same server and all that type of stuff there's actually going to be a lot more to it than that in terms of you'll eventually be able to deck out the Milli high club with all of the trophies that you win you know from various competitions with the souvenirs

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   that you purchase from different Landing zones that you uh that you visit with pictures that you'll be able to eventually purchase you know on the walls you'll be able to customize you know the artwork things of that you know things of that s you know type that's exactly what I was going to ask whether whether at some point down the line we'd be able to cut customize our million M high club so that mine doesn't look like yours doesn't look like Ben's or whatnot yeah and and that's actually something that the same interface by which you'll be customizing that will also be extended over into your hanger and that will wind up hitting on the second iteration of the shopping we'll start to get into the ability to buy things and actually route them to places other than on your person so that you can buy a small trophy that you find you know from a you know from a small vendor in the bizaar area on Nyx and Route it back to your million mile high club or to your

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    ship or to your hanger somewhere other than on your physical person so the million mile high club is cool and I understand that's coming in 2.0 M what else does 2.0 bring as far as the social module Planet Side aspect the the 2.0 some you know uh the 2.0 release will be the first one to where you can actually formally establish a party and this is important for a number of reasons once you're obviously you know out you know undertaking missions then it's got you know very you know uh you know uh very you know obvious benefits but it's got more subtle advantages in terms of when you are in your Hangar and you transition to Area 18 now we will no longer just select a random server according to how many players are there and shunt you to that now it will give precedence towards trying to push you

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    into the same instance where your other party members are and this is something that we're going to be utilizing throughout the game in terms of there's going to be hierarchy of things in terms of what my capabilities are versus other players on that server in terms of whether I am a uh I'm you I'm in a party with somebody that's on a particular you know server whether I've got them as you know maybe not a party member but they're a friend or someone that I actually know these are all things that will be taken into account when you go to an area where we may have we may have two or four or 10 or 20 different you know servers representing different instances of that area but what would be most most interesting to you is to be pushed into a version of that area where there are actually people that you know and you know you've got a history with um it also uh adds some backend

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    infrastructure in this 2.0 version um that we're exploiting to uh allow us to create the Milli M high club that's going to make it much easier for us to then link other Landing zones and stuff into uh into the game in the future it's all been uh very abstracted now at a high level to where the difficulty for example of adding Nicks and having players you know and having the server spawn up versions of ncks and allowing players to shunt into that you know automatically according to you know uh whether they're a party member with someone or something else um it's now getting to the point to where that's that's very straightforward to do gotcha would that extend to things like a I don't know friends list is there anything like an enemies list or or folks you specifically don't want to play with uh yeah but less so um it's

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    more for you know at least the the the current thinging for that is you would certainly be able to uh you know uh exclude people from being able to talk to you and things of that sort um we're not yet thinking that we'd want to uh that we'd want to prevent you from going to a particular server simply because this player is actually on there one other really interesting thing about version 2.0 is that it's going to add the ability what we call gym routing and basically gym the generic instance manager is the service that you know sits in the background and it keeps track of all of the different instances that are instantiated you know across the entire universe it also keeps track of you know which players are allocated to which in which instance and it controls when a player wants to move

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    from one instance to another um exactly which one he's routed to and so one of the you know enhancements that we're going to be making available in version 2.0 is going to be the ability so that when you use an Ator it will show you your destination but it will also show you the different instances within which you have other party members or friends so that you can select which one you want to go into so when you go into your hanger you know now you'll be able to just select I want to go to Area 18 you know throw me you know wherever you want to uh do the best fit but you can also see well you have three party members on this instance and you have six friends on this instance and you have 14 friends on this instance which one would you actually prefer to go to and the one

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    with only six friends might be more interesting because you're trying to get that guy to come over to your party but he's not responding Etc whatever the case may be I'm not that interesting I don't have that many friends so uh say 2.0 sounds great what looking ahead what's next the next big one uh on our side after uh the million mile high club you know 2.0 and all that is really going to be the shopping mil Stone and that's the one that is for the first time going to give you the ability to start customizing your character um you'll do that via casaba Outlet which is one of the stores that's in Area 18 right now but it's been closed off you will have the ability to go into that store there will be a variety of different uh types of clothing you know scattered about that shop uh shirts

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    pants uh jackets hats shoes you know things of that sort you'll be able to utilize uh currency there's still some debate over exactly you know what we're going to do with you know what type of currency and all that um and you'll be able to purchase these you know purchase these things to uh customize your character uh how you see fit uh this will also be the first test of the true persistence system there is Persistence of A Sort within the game right now but whether it's on the platform the log inside or whether it's in terms of how you customize your ship there are you know for a variety of different reasons the are not the long-term solutions for the overall game uh what we've been focused on you know for you know for a while now is basically building out that the the backend functionality in

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    services and database you know abstraction layers and all that type of stuff to allow us to really you know handle persistence in a in the proper way for a large you know massively multiplayer you know game like this and so this will be the first small test of that system is that those those pieces of clothing will actually you know all of those clothing transactions will be getting executed via the server um the changes to your inventory will not be stored locally they will not be stored over a you know in a web database you know on turbulent side they'll actually be getting stored in the persistent Universe you know uh database um one other thing that's going to uh allow you to customize your character to you know to a bit farther degree will be right now uh with the initial release of the

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    social module we just put in a short you know a shortcut key so that you could hit F6 to change the armor on your character and that was really a a very last minute thing that we added just because we didn't want everyone to look the exact same and so now we've kind of built that out a little bit to where uh you'll be able to go to a particular usable in your hanger and you'll be able to utilize it and at that point you can see your character and you can either select standard civilian clothing which is what you would choose if you wanted to go up and basically access casaba and start changing your t-shirt and your pants and stuff like that you can also select any of the six suits of armor that we're you know uh that we're giving you access to right now obviously that will be restricted According to which ones you own you know for the final game um we want to also allow the ability to you know for you to modify your skin

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    tone your face and your hair it's not yet clear how many of those will actually make their way into that 2.1 shopping uh Milestone um but if whatever doesn't hit there will show up shortly thereafter um but that's the short-term intends allow you to modify those aspects of your personal appearance and also you know the the you know your the the clothing that you're actually wear now when we when we dropped the social module one of the things that surprised a lot of folks is we gave them a sneak peek of the upcoming Nick leski Landing Zone and that blew lots of people away it it it was a great look at what was coming next uh is there anything more you can tell us about Nick yeah NYX um NYX will likely show up in the Milestone uh immediately after

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    shopping um NYX is it's uh interesting in that NYX has actually been largely done for quite a while there was one particular area this bizarre area that still had a lot of you know design details and artistic you know issues that needed to be worked out um but with those now resolved uh production is you know uh proceeding you know at full speed on it and we expect to have that done you know fairly soon and so we should actually be able to uh spend quite a bit of time refining and tweaking and you know ensuring that the performance is at the level that we actually want before we release it to the community in other words the actual build out of the level is uh going really really well at this point very cool and and when that time comes do do you have do you have any thoughts about

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    how people will access it will it be another destination on the elevator that's for for the short term we're just going to cheat and basically you're going to have the the magical elevator that you can access from you know from Area 18 or from your or you know or from your hanger obviously that will change you know as we get a little bit farther along and you're you know gain the ability to go out in space gain the ability you know to uh you know to travel to different systems and stuff um but for the short term we will just allow players to go in there it we'll just be another destination you know on that elevator um it's actually NX is really interesting uh from my perspective for a variety of different reasons one of which is that it actually gives us the ability to have three uh completely distinct functional areas and what I mean by that is when you first land in Nick and you come out and you go through customs and you basically go

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    down to the main uh the main area there's Law and Order there's security it's all well-maintained you know all the lights are on there's security guards there's you know civilian you know civilians you going about their business there's you know shops in which you can do business you know uh Etc there are you know hints you know internally that you're within an asteroid um that's you know you can see that from Windows that give you give these beautiful you know uh views of the outside um you can tell because you know some of the ceilings there was no point to basically building you know uh to building you know dedicated you know roofs and ceilings and all that type of stuff um and so you can actually see big you know huge chunks of still exposed you know uh asteroid you know Stone um rock Metals you know Etc um just hanging throughout various areas um but in general that area actually looks you

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    know uh it it looks you know very it looks very modern looks very built out it looks like what it's supposed to be which is an area that people you know did a lot of business they actually you know uh conducted a lot of business in that area as you start to move you know down various you know corridors and passageways away from that Central Area um you'll start to encounter what we call you know uh it's it's more it's a more dangerous Zone basically it's an area that's no longer officially utilized by you know by thece iCal and you know civilian classes of this planet and it's been overtaken by uh you know more questionable types Lots you know lots uh there's much more crime there than you would ever see in the central area of the city there's no security to discourage it um there are obviously you know just some you know some hard luck

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    cases out there um you'll see things along you know stuff that's fallen into disrepair lights that are flickering not working control panels that you know no longer operate doors that are half stuck open that type of thing to where it looks very similar you know conceptually to the central area except it looks like it hasn't really been you know uh properly maintained for you know for a decade then if you continue proceeding even farther you'll get into what we call the excavation areas and this is where Once Upon a Time decades earlier when this was a you know a an area that they thought was going to be a a a booming mining area they were clearing out all sorts of you know new Caverns drilling them out Etc and the idea was they were eventually going to put in you know all these control rooms and storage

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    facilities Etc and all that construction you know stopped very quickly uh when they decided that you know given the you know uh the surveys that they were doing that the it was going to be way more difficult to extract you know sufficient value to Warrant all the investment being made and so the original inhabitants of nxs took off and all the you know the the whatever you want to say construction equipment when was behind that was all left behind and basically these this more politically oriented you know population gradually moved in and basically what you wound up with is a a populace that tends to be a little bit more you know uh radical in their you know overall you know political beliefs versus the mainstream and this you know manifests itself in a number of different ways you know some of which is the fact that

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    they're they're not willing to basically you know uh go and try to make a concerted effort to clean out crime in the distant areas of Nyx they'd really rather just you know cordone it off and prevent it and keep it over there so it's not their you know it's not their problem to solve um and so these back areas these excavated areas are really particularly interesting because there's no there you know there's no infrastructure within there at all there there are no ladders there are no stairs there are no lights it's really just you're going through uh Caverns there's lots there's very organic feel fungus on the walls dripping water things of that sort and one of the things I find most interesting about that is as a playground where we can put everything from wanted felons that are hiding out um the most you know nefarious you know

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    uh you know criminals and stuff that would be basically you know the the Zone where they you know operate from farthest you know away from the security forces and things of that sort um this is where you'd find uh your a lot of illicit you know trading activity and stuff um would be centered back in those areas so a lot of there there's a lot of potential on Nicks for players that don't want to you know uh necessarily you know adhere to you know to the law that are willing so so when Nick ships you know whatever that is no dates guys uh what else can we expect with that uh well one of the other more interesting uh features that will come online most likely with you know with the same Milestone uh as Nicks will be the ability to Route uh purchases to areas other than on your person and what I

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    mean by that is kind of like what we were talking about earlier um when I go into a shop and I find a t-shirt that I like or I go to you know you know a souvenir shop or whatever and I have a list of items what do I do with it um obviously in the case of clothing you can just replace the one you have but what if you actually want to keep the clothing you have what if you want to you know buy you know a vase but you don't actually want to carry it around and you don't want to take the multi- minute Journey back to your ship to Stow it away and so with NYX will be uh incorporating features within the user interface so that when you're buying or selling for that matter uh items you can specify as the source or destination depending upon which one you're doing um where you want these items to go or be pulled from and so if I purchase something I can basically direct its delivery for a nominal search charge back to one of my uniquely named ships

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    back to my hanger or back to my million mile high club uh and then once I'm back there I can decide you know what I actually want to do with them we spoke to Rob earlier today and he mentioned there's a number of shops in ncks U uh whose names Escape me at the moment uh what can you tell us about our shopping opportunities in NYX uh NYX has a really interesting mix of shops because not only does it have the more formal uh commercial shops like you might see on Area 18 the more established four you know four walls ceiling floor that type of stuff uh lots of inventory clearly a commercial vendor you know um with uh with with a good number of you know Goods to be sold but it's also got what we call this bizaar area and that's where much smaller you know local Merchants um well actually I wouldn't

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    call them local Merchants I'd say they're more nomadic Merchants basically come and sometimes they're there for a day sometimes they're there for a week sometimes they've got a very you know set amount of inventory and that's it and these are guys in this one Central bizarre area where you can pick up a variety of you know uh odds and ends that you don't don't often see within you know the you know the the larger more established stores so what kind of things can we buy in this was a Bazaar yeah grand grand Bazar yep yeah so in the Grand Bazaar you'd be able to buy anything from uh cases of liquor to uh seeds that you can plant you know assuming you're a farmer and interested in that type of thing um there will be all sorts of decorative items uh plants that you can place you know either within your million M high club or you

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    know within your hanger things of that sort there's going to be food for just general consumption uh there's going to be a variety of you know souvenir you know uh souvenirs you know unique to that area and that they've imported from other areas that you could pick up um just a wide variety of smaller items of much more limited quantity than what you would typically see in the larger more established shops and not just things to customize your hanger or your shop but also yourself uh that's that's not only not only that but I'd go uh even farther so far as there's actually information you can purchase that can lead to missions there's maps that you can buy and so really anyone that goes to Nicks you really should make the rounds through all these guys and they it will vary it's not always going to be the

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    same guy selling the same stuff and see what is actually on offer and whether it's of interest to you you know on that particular day given what you're currently doing wow it's fantastic um we've taken up a lot of your time here uh and thank you for it so much uh can you give us uh one more thing before we let you go beyond Nicks a quick top level look you know uh huren you know the rest of the stand system just just what what's what's down the line for the persisent University yeah in general uh not much has changed in regards to the overall order versus what I kind of mentioned you know on the website you know uh you know two or three months back which is the next planet after NYX um is going to be Huron um that one was already you know starting to move you know fairly quickly um following that will likely be Crusader and then

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    Microtech and that's going to complete all of the uh you know the areas that you can visit within the Stanton system and what this does is it basically gives us the reason why we've adopted this approach is it gives us a lot of different uh areas within the same system to where we can get the balance the you know the balance of trade the balance of combat the balance of missions all of this stuff perfected refined um before we start to expand out to some of these other you know uh just to some of these other systems um it allows us to try to get you know the formula um narrowed in enough so that we minimize the amount of wasted effort as we basically start to go really really wide with the implementation um and uh in addition to the landing zones the next big thing uh post the Nyx Milestone

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    is going to be uh Ai and AI there's still going to be a very dedicated discrete Milestone to where you'll see a you know a Quantum Leap in terms of you know uh in terms of advancement but I would say that I now believe that the AI will appear in small bits in pieces prior to that and then you'll see one big leap we're not going to wait as we've kind of you know added additional detail to some of these uh intermediate milestones we don't want to hold back on all of the AI you know just for this you know so-called dedicated AI Milestone we'd rather roll out bits and pieces and these will be testing specific things uh you know uh in particular on AI uh how many MPC characters can we actually put within a map um without you know starting to affect performance in terms

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    of the pathline in terms of the Collision detection in terms of you know the logic how well is the multi-threaded you know uh you know the you know AI you know uh code actually you know working so there are a number of uh technical reasons why we want to get out even you know uh the you know the the earlier versions of this and get that you know working really rock solid and then once we go you know with the full-blown AI Milestone that's where we would try to show uh not only uh what we can do with the system but we would you know we would like to put 80 90 100 you know plus MPCs into a single Landing Zone and still have the performance you know uh be such that you know players on uh good if not absolutely state-of-the-art machines can still have a completely enjoyable you know experience and that actually brings up one other thing um

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    which is we've made loads of progress um um with regards to uh some of the problems that we were facing a while back and I think that very shortly possibly with the million mile high club we're going to wind up uh kicking the 25 player limit of Area 18 up to 40 players right now it's very close I don't know if we'll flip that switch for the 2.0 you know for the 2.0 million M high club one or whether we'll hold that back for shopping but one of those two Milestones will uh include you know a fairly you know significant a 60% increase in the number of players that we're going to allow walking around in those environments um it's you know on on our side right now it's it's looking amazingly good um in terms of how much progress has been made in a

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    relatively short period of time we've got people you know from all you know from all the different Sig Studios touching different pieces of this and it's really been amazing how quickly you know some of you know some of these very large scale technological changes have come together uh to allow us to basically start ramping that up and I would expect the focus on that to just continue so that by Spring by summer Etc it's like we want to just keep iteratively you know increasing increasing increasing the number of players and NPCs that you're going to be able to put into one single map it's exciting there's no other word for it it's really exciting uh Tony thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with us is there anything else you want fans to know before we let you go uh actually the only thing I would say is just uh I always appreciate like

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    all the kind of words and the constructive criticism that you see within the forums I think uh I've read so many you know emails in there where you know you'll see somebody uh stating something along the lines of and I don't think a developer whoever is ever going to read this and da and I've read so many of those I don't usually respond but I actually but but I do read a whole lot of them yes I can attest Chris and Tony and Aaron they read the forums they read the Reddit read everything cuz then they send us stuff I'll get an email at 2:00 in the morning Chris go this is a pretty good link and I'm like Chris why you're reading the forums at 2:00 in the morning and you're sending me links so yeah know it's it's fantastic I'm certain our community appreciates it yeah I I I I I love the constant involvement of the community and basically at times you know uh there it it's funny because sometimes you're doing stuff in an intermediate fashion

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    just because that's the way the technology you know comes together and so you know that this is just a temporary solution and you'll have people calling you on and going well this is not going to work for this reason it's like and there's been so many times where you're just like I agree you just got to wait a little bit longer and we'll be getting there gotta well Tony thanks so much and uh back to you guys