Star Citizen Live: All About Alpha 3.18

27 January 202301:04:581,663 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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hi everybody ah we're having one of those pre-game conversations uh welcome to Star Citizen life I'm your host Jared Huckabee and uh we're back we're back uh five five so weeks off for the holidays a good chance to recharge our batteries uh we're back here on Twitch uh talking about uh Star Citizen if you've never seen Star Citizen live before that's where we take about an hour out of the end of our week uh pull some of our developers from really important work that they'd really like to get finished before they take off for the weekend pull them over here and make them answer questions uh which is ultimately their favorite thing and do so on video which is also one of their favorite things but we always appreciate
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when they take the time to do it on this week's show our first show back we are going to be talking all about Alpha 318. the patch that's been in development since yay old days how long that's six yeah yeah I mean since 317 317 2 went out in July in July I think yeah that was our that was our quarterly Pat that was our quarterly patch we called it 317.2 because it was off the 317 Branch but if you look at the content in it that was our quarterly patch for for that it just had a weird name but yeah for the last going on seven months now um shades of of the 3.0 beard uh not standing uh we have been in this uh long uh path towards making what is easily
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the most ambitious and important and foundational patch to Star Citizen since 3.0 went out it's not even a doubt so with that we're going to jump right in and let me introduce you to this week's uh honored guests immediately to my right uh Star Citizen live game director Mr Todd Pappy hello how you doing man good good to see you good to see you this we haven't done it all about one of these shows in a while because let alone in person oh gosh we haven't done one of these in person yeah we got a little taste of it during citizen gun yeah a little bit of it but that was a high stress kind of we didn't get a chance to to uh enjoy it no nobody watches the show so we can do whatever we want so this guy was like uh and then also joining us remotely from our Montreal studio uh in turbulent our turbulent studio in Montreal uh
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Benoit and Guillaume Benoit say hi hi guys that's Benoit uh Chief technology officer of turbulent and uh uh Guillaume our development director what's your title now again director of development yeah indeed you're good director of development hey everyone uh so yeah so we are talking all about Alpha 318. um Guillaume this is your first time on the live show so before we jump into it I do want to take like maybe a few moments and introduce you to the community uh who are you and what do you do what does a development director do absolutely so we don't know Ben keeps asking and I never dare to answer him uh notice so the the development director so essentially I started the with with cig and sobilana when we started the kind of the game
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development team here in Montreal uh so uh building that theme and developing really inside the various team that are in our now forming uh our our development operations and then uh through the course of this year uh I I had a discussion with Aaron and we we started the defining what what more Global role let's say I could take uh and uh discussing with Benoit and magbude and Todd and and Aaron we we figured that uh director of development for for Star Citizen in its entirety would be kind of a good position so I kind of did my toes with uh with 318 and uh trying to manage that the release of that uh of of that release and uh and
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and now like uh it's it went okay it was an interesting Challenge and I saw where I could help so uh we kind of officialized it to become director of development for all of Star Citizen and and and working with the various Studios we have uh throughout the world you picked the right release yeah it was very smooth a very smooth onboarding yes it's been real smooth real great a a testament to your work uh you know I'm like yeah I I I I tried everything to to help okay yeah okay you know it it happens it's it's uh it's when you're building something that's never been built before and you're doing it in a way that's never been you know used to build it how do you estimate how do you ask me how long it's going to take it's
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Trail on fire yeah uh interestingly enough is coming into such a difficult release it was quite interesting because it allowed me to see a lot of the breaking points and where we need to reinforce our production processes and in our development processes so it's kind of a let's say the Silver Lining is it's is now I get tons of idea of of what we can uh we can improve and we've already been discussing with the production team on how to fix many of the the breaking points that happen yeah you make a good point it was living through the 3.0 uh uh uh Quagmire that got us a lot of improvements on the back and not just the game but into in the way that we you know make the game you know the whole quarterly release schedule came about because of a 3.0 so and that's not me
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sitting here promising anything it's just it's just moments like this uh are great for evaluating and realigning internally and stuff like that so we'll see what uh we'll see what positive moments come from that um all right so enough of the Preamble uh one of the biggest features we only have Benoit for a certain amount of time benoit's gotta gotta take off and go back to work so I want to get as much of the PES uh stuff out of the way ahead of time while we got Benoit so Benoit we've already done videos on what PES is and and how it works and most people you have a pretty decent handle on it uh from a hopefully experience you drop a thing and it stays there and whatever but let's talk about PES from a player perspective not everybody has had a chance to jump onto the PT yet not
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everybody's had a chance to log into twitch or onto YouTube and see other people who are playing it so how has and Todd you can jump in here too obviously but how has PES changed the player experience so far in 318. Ben you want to start with it since it's your baby yeah and other people's babies but yeah yeah I think in in terms of the player experience the major change is really that you know in 317 a servers recycle quite a bit either if it's a 30 000 crash or a simple restart right then the world came comes back to fresh and vanilla right so like AI get back into their position you know game world is all cleaned up there's no more trash anywhere uh and so the I think the first player
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experience changed there is that you come to uh you start coming to servers that have been lived in right so there's things happen like people stack stuff at areas they left ships and areas you can find and Salvage element I think Salvage being in the patches but great because it showed the potential of that feature coupled with persistence so I think that's the number one like change is that you no longer come to a pristine world you come to a world that's lived in and I think that's a defining element of our MMO right we're we're slowly turning more and more into what an MMO should be and I think persistence is the number one thing so that's how that's how I think the player experience has changed and will continue to change as as players get more creative about what they can do yeah I I would agree with everything that Ben says and then
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add to it like even from a Dev standpoint we're learning you know oh what we should do how we should change missions um how should we create you know game player missions that would feed on some of the stuff that's been left around or cleaned up or so it's we're doing internal looks on it but then I'm excited to see what you know players are we'll we'll do with um how they'll break the game you know the first thing is the first thing we know is that you know even on PTU the engagement from from people that have access currently has been great in finding ways to break the shards so that's been the the part of the development cycle I think that's been the most interesting for us anyway once the technology was built was to see it
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run and then seeing how oh now we have some zones that get hot because you know somebody dumped an entire C2 of boxes somewhere and then oh we didn't plan for this loading mechanism to support it right so it's it's already like uh it's already fun right to see what what can happen when the game World actually persists yeah that that first example that I noticed was you know there's a lot of new race tracks and 318 people went out to snake pad and whatnot and they saw the littered wreckage of other Racers and you and it instantly affected the way that people were racing because as they were approaching a turn they saw a bunch of Crash wrecks like okay maybe I'm not going to take this turn as flippantly as I might have otherwise you know had done so so that lived in it starts to inform decisions
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and stuff that's that's a neat aspect that you know a weird thing that that persistence uh a weird way that persistence can affect the gameplay experience toddy we're starting to touch on it before about how PES is affected development so you know we were talking about how it's affected uh players and stuff but talk to me about how it's affected design teams you know props artists you know anybody it's it's because we've had to learn internally how to work with this yeah well I mean there's the I think right now it's it's still so fresh and new that we were finishing off task for 318 and and now now that we're picking our head up from getting a lot of these live must fixes done now we're starting to look at okay how does this change you know missions how can we create like beacons how can we clean up
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the world and everything now Chris has been talking about this for a while but it's it now our some of our Dev teams can actually breathe now and and we can start working towards this so whether it be like uh creating bends that you can basically throw away and then that deletes the items from the world or even you know if a big event happens and then ships wreckage are there and now you can go and Salvage that like I think those are some of the interesting things that will will arise but then I think it'll really change the way that we're doing missions mostly and um you know for props guys I they're still going to be building the props the same way you know it's not going to really change our art or uh I think it'll change our art when we um right
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now a lot of things that we do in ships and we do with art is we you know bacon basically bake it in make it look lived in and what we'll do I think in the future is basically clean that out and so you'd be delivered a fresh ship and then you dirty it up you make it look lived in and and just like you would do if you just moved into an apartment or a house or something uh I think I think there's a there's a another thing too that we're slowly discovering I mean you can imagine this is going to happen but until you have it in your hands is that I I feel like there's many you're right on the mission side like that's gonna change a lot because just as a player your approach to a specific Mission will be able to change because you could for you know let me throw an example uh you have a mission to go somewhere you could
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prepare for that mission by hiding a ship in a cave nearby and then that allows you to escape you know or things like that this is not something that would be possible before because you most likely would lose the ship because it would get cleaned up by the vehicle manager of course now you can actually leave stuff in the game world to help you in your mission right so whether it's supplies or whatever in preparation for it or a PVP event same kind of thing right but also I think that there's what we don't grasp just yet as far as an effect on the on the design teams is the fact that you get free persistence on items would allow gameplay Loops that are built just by an object existing right so if I can like currently if I add an item to a player ship it's not necessarily
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going to persist because it gets cleaned up recycled whatever but now that it persists you could actually like imagine gameplay Loops where you attach a beacon marker on a ship and that stays with it until it's found right allowing you to track the ship and that's just free because you get Persistence of all entities and even in shards right so you could actually you find the ship abandoned in the game world but it has a tracker on it but you don't have the tool to find it so all of that stuff will sort of become naturally and influence the I think Mission design prop design and stuff and modulate how we build the game world like I really see the all these discoveries will show up once we actually release it to more players and we'll realize that there are some things that we planned that would be difficult to build or would require
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engineering and systems to be built might just be almost done already so I think that's going to be the effect ultimately I'm hoping for it I think the the cool thing about it is having it having played it a little bit is it increases kind of a density of content and and the element of surprise when you go to a location to do a mission but then you're going to stumble on something else and then maybe there's this wreck to salvage or something and and it's it's it's really interesting because it's essentially not only free content but it's content that grounds you in the reality of of this game and and kind of tells the story by itself and it's not a story that was curated by us at all it was a story like you said Jared like your story created by the players uh crashing around the the track or or or these type of stories so I think it's it adds a layer of depth
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to this that universe that is super interesting right so your first track racetrack corpses were terrifying so you've all mentioned some version of you know Benoit was like you can hide this in a cave you know we talk about you know things and forming the race tracks like this yeah you don't talk about the density stuff like this but there has to be an upper limit of this stuff so we've talked there has to be a way to clean this stuff up there's got to be a point where you know the world just becomes you you know the trash levels from Wally and we've got to bring it back so let's talk about how that works what if any uh trash rules garbage rules cleanup rules exist in 318. so we have um I don't know what Chris bolte calls it but it's it's basically like cleanup entities and it's the density management
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the density manager so thank you um but it basically regulates the density of a certain item and it's per class whether it be weapons or cargo or armor so on and so forth it's basically per class in a certain radius so that radius could be five meters that radius could be 30 meters like you know it really depends on how many are there and then once it hits that upper threshold then things will start being cleaned up and and removed but it won't go past meaning let's say somebody like you know Ben was talking about where somebody drops a C2 of of luggage or of cargo in an area well it might be that only 20 cargo boxes can be
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there well it's going to clean up everything except for those 20 cargo boxes and then from there if somebody throws in another one then it'll again it will remove one and then it'll just leave and it should be removing the oldest one and true or false I I hear this rumor occasionally inside I I has it ever been discussed a janitor or or a garbage person profession true true and um in fact we we had this discussion um uh basically what we've we've got some Montreal programmers so we just had that discussion about them working on it and basically cleaning up the The Entity class or allowing players to clean it up now it could be used for you know garbage but at the same time it could be an incinerator it could be you know some
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other function you know so it's it's basically it'll be a generic entity that will clean stuff up and remove stuff from the world but it'll allow us to use it in multiple different ways well we've got thresholding no no I'm just imagining Luigi's vacuum cleaner going around sucking up stuff so uh what happened well I want to make sure that we do some of the more technical stuff while we have been well before we leave them here how are the servers themselves doing uh I was watching the Demar rally last week and you know this thing's been going on for years and for the very first time they were playing in 317.5 but for the very first time they had an event that was nearly eight nine hours and this and none of the servers they had full they had five or six entirely full servers
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out of themselves and not one went down the entire uh eight hour period which is awesome uh are we are we looking at that kind of stuff in in 318 still is it is it is this is this a sign of things to come what is what can you tell me was this luck well I I I I mean I can tell you from my perspective I think it's we're still always striving for as much stability as we possibly can but obviously 317.5 shows you that these are Point patches on top of 317. so the amount of stabilization that has gone into that um uh you know with us going live and or going to wave one I think it was December 22nd you know to now um you know we've increased our stability score that we track whether that be on server or client side and we
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continue to do that and we have a certain bar that we want to hit but I think you know even now I I think that we'll need a three a three eighteen one and and um others just to really kind of work out all the Kinks but go ahead Ben yeah uh well I mean yeah there's uh so far Damar there's definitely been updates in 317 right that have helped in the latest batch debt because there's always like server fixes and server improvements always take priority right because they you know 30k is the enemy right but uh we all know that servers as they age uh their FPS go down depending on how many entities they have to simulate and so uh interestingly for the Demar rally this year the servers were very stable so I'm there's a there's a bit of luck involved
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but there's also a lot of work that has been ongoing to support this kind of these kind of events right that that help stability uh and so I'd say It's a combination of both right probably younger servers that we're also involved in it so that's all sort of shows like you know we always try to improve on that also being in a single zone is sort of a better um as sort of a better performance profile on on the servers because they have less entities to to load like if all the streaming bubbles from players are in the same area uh it is sort of there's a bit of a gain there I'm not saying it's major but there's a bit of a gain so that does help right so it's combination of things I'm just remembering the the gates of Entourage event when I worked at blizzard now putting everybody wins on was not a good
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idea um the client the client's gonna tell you different things right so uh one of the aspects of 318 uh it's relatively new it's kind of gone on the radar I think it's only been mentioned on spectrum and whatnot is the character repair tool uh I know almost nothing about this so we had a couple questions in Spectrum about it this week so uh Benoit what can you tell us about the character repair tool so uh you guys are familiar with the character reset tool which is available for players in 317 to it's like a panic button basically right uh and allows you to basically reset your entire character account to be pristine right based on the stuff
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obviously the hard money purchases are restored uh some elements of this that are part of long-term persistence will stay but effectively your in-game database your inventory is your ships your character all get destroyed and then they're they're rebuilt now historically that tool was needed because uh there was a lot of problems with the game stability on the on the on the back end side and a lot of players would get into situations I mean we've seen every single case uh like you know head attached to a mining laser missing eyes uh Missing Moby glass which has been a bug that's been plaguing us for a while and so the character reset tool that's available for players has always been sort of the oh [ __ ] I need to restore this unfortunately as every time you provide
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a tool like this the there's there's been performance issues linked to that tool because it has to do a lot of heavy lifting to reset your account like it's a lot of inventory items to move and restore and so often in the past couple years we've had to stop resets in order to you know fix a back-end problem or performance issue related to that because too many people were resetting for example and so as we were looking at PES one of the major changes in the back end is that it's a lot more transactional and so data corruption issues we're hoping you know I'm not saying there's not going to be problems but we're hoping that at least in its design this kind of issues is going to be
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very much less frequent and uh we also did not want to repeat the problem of the pass which was to allow a full reset which is too costly in terms of recreation of items and transferring of items and so but we still need the games in development so we want to provide players with a way to keep playing that was always the objective even with the original reset was I we want to give you get you back to playing the game right uh one of the side effects of the original reset is also that as everybody knows people have been using the reset tool for other purposes uh for example moving uh Mass moving of items back to a start location to consolidate their inventories things like that and so the back end cost of these moves is is
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gigantic overall and so we can't support them anymore and so the the depth came about still we need a way to in case an account is no longer able to play we need a way to be able to reset to to keep the person from playing and we looked at all the different kinds of issues that could happen for that and the main one being you know missing items on the playing Avatar so like if you don't have a movie glass you don't have eyes you don't have a head your character can't really play the game functionally and so we devised the new uh tool so basically the character reset tool that you have now will become a character repair tool and the main difference is that it will no longer restore or destroy your game inventories and your ships it will only repair your
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playing Avatar and so the goal is really to get you back in game and playing uh with everything intact right so uh the uh the repair tool should also be a lot faster because it doesn't have to do all this heavy lifting of moving stuff and recreating entities and whatever it really needs to find your playing character wherever it is let's say you're stuck in a rock and you can't get out of there and then you even if you force die you respawn at the Rock I don't know how that could happen but I mean I've seen worse bugs uh well when you repair we're gonna basically Search and Destroy your playing Avatar and then give you a new Avatar to your starting location that's going to be brand new now there's there's some caveats to that like obviously we won't don't want to allow you to be able to bypass prison status and crime stat status when we do that so
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there's a couple of things that we'll carry over but we're hoping that this will be a much faster or more much more enjoyable tool to keep playing and the other side effect is that there are now Todd's not going to like me I'm going to say it anyway so the there are some ship bugs that have not been fixed because you could just reset right and so the by changing the reset into a repair that will only repair your playing character then we want to make sure that we can prioritize fixing ship bugs where ship become unrepairable or unflyable or things like that so that these bugs can be surfaced and then our development director can come in and prioritize these issues because they affect players on the live systems and we can't have the argument that oh we'll
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just get them to reset yeah so that's a bit of the why the changes there so that's the long story short for the character repair versus reset now customer service will still have the option to do a reset right but those will be a bit more destructive uh and uh and you know restore an account a playing character to a full pristine state so that's the gist of it I hope I'm not forgetting Parts but yeah no uh I know there are others there are some other technical limitations to some of the items that you know people have been using reset to recover like subscriber items and stuff that are lost so I mean this version that's rolling out with 318 is not the final solution to all that right yeah yeah for subscriber items specifically there's a
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lot of ongoing discussions about how to treat them more as a as an entitlement you can sort of restore right but you know that that design is still ongoing of course and then and we'll iterate on that reset but for now the main objective we we have with the reset tool is really to get you to keep playing the game yeah in case you're starting a jazz on new part says that was the short story if you spent eight years with Benoit like I have yes that was the short version it's when he rubs his hands together you know you're gonna be there for a while uh were there let's let's go this this came in the chat it's interesting uh were there any surprises that resulted from the implementation of PES things that we
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just didn't expect or anticipate it's like oh that's weird different and okay maybe we'll keep that no not bugs but like huh you can do that too well I think I mean you see some of it but like it's the you talk about it a lot but then actually scene in action you know that's that's the part that becomes a little bit more interesting and I think you you know it's it's the oh we can exploit that now you know and and like like Ben was talking about before which is I think there's going to be a lot of things that we'll see and then we're like oh okay you know let's try this let's try that and and you know it's so I mean it's I think it'll be all right
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you know do we want to prioritize those over existing features that we're working on or something like that but what you know it's it I think it it'll just it'll fall out from you know this coming in and then us learning to live with it for a little bit and and then adjusting priorities from there I think there's diff you know I kind of always expected to have a lot of different things happening with the PES and the new features we developed but actually seeing them happen and seeing those little stories happening because I really I remember seeing a Reddit post where there was a guy in his uh vulture that was AFK and then another vulture arrived and started stripping and stripping the vulture from all its materials and like
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you you kind of wonder what AFK player's face is going to be when he comes back and his vulture is actually completely stripped almost like on four cinder blocks you know so those are all like kind of interesting stories that we've seen happening and that you never we knew they were possible but you don't really realize you could do that before you're you're you see that Reddit post right yeah there's been a lot of things and remember because it's still on just wave one it's still a pretty small samp a sample size you know when it when when 318 goes live we'll see we'll really start to see what people are doing this but we've seen people uh make art installations out of their out of their debris uh uh you know do doing the typical we knew people were going to
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write messages with the Salvage laser you know Bart was here and stuff like that so you know a lot of those things were like yeah obviously you know we've all played games ourselves we can we know what we would do with it but but it is the thing that I'm looking forward to most once 318 goes live and then it's it's to everybody is to is those surprises is to see what we haven't anticipated yeah because there's going to be some I I have a feeling this there's still some creativity left in the community they're going to shock us like some I think we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg already like uh I mean there's some great stuff going on on PTU now but I mean I I just think the surprises are gonna keep coming for me like some of the ones we've had during development was of course uh having to adjust the game systems two bit of persistence um I mean we had a pre-discussion a
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little bit taught uh reminded me of this one where um the character we have a test for character reset repair and uh but the thing is we we didn't clean up the previous player because typically right now we don't need to do anything right the the game server that has it remove that player and it's gone and so there's just a normal recycling that happens but with PS your previous guy is persisting right and so we need to find it to remove it and so uh when our when we got to the first couple waves and players were using the account recopy on PTU they would come back in game and be faced with themselves which was you know a bit uncanny and interesting but I think that
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was a that was a funny one for me like just them finding themselves hey I I did the reset while I was at this location and then boom they would find themselves that's pretty cool uh Benoit I know we're almost out of time with you I want to make sure I I get this question uh you know you know you poke taught a little bit about the ship bugs I'm gonna poke you about wave two uh uh uh we've been on Wave one for what seems to be uh a while now four weeks and stuff like this is wave two still I I understand that you're Pro you're you have some hand in why we're not a wave well so a couple of things right so just so you guys know when we decide to go to another wave there has to be a sort of a gain because there we want to keep your
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attention when we're testing on on the public test universe and uh we when we add these big waves right that adds a lot more players to the to the system we want to make sure that we have all the changes that we wanted on the infrastructure so that we get as much data as possible for these big pushes and there's been a there's a series of of tech changes that have been necessary um that have uh showed up during the Christmas break which to be honest was very beneficial because we let servers and shards run during the break and we discovered a lot of issues like shards growing out of size that breaks the loading process prevents that charge from being loaded again and that has a lot of of impact on the infrastructure uh that Ahmed is running in the cloud
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and so uh basically we've been looking at these issues and with Device solutions for them but we want to make sure they're in place before we hit wave two uh so there's two of them uh one is uh the method we use to reload a shard in the current mechanism um uh it was prone to uh to break if we had hot zones uh hot zones is basically like one area one very specific area with a large amount of entities so uh the we discovered an issue with the way we were loading and so we have a new streaming um uh system there that will basically fetch results from the persistence database and basically send them as we go instead of buffering them uh which
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was causing an issue and the second one was really uh based the second big issue is that in our original design for PES we were shooting for one large data pipeline per game environment right so every game server would be submitting their messages to this very large queue and just process that for persistence now we've now that we've seen the what players do and we've seen how the game servers are submitting their updates there's um There's issues with I'll say Noisy Neighbor so one one Shard one server is creating a lot of updates for something and then that will affect another Shard and so we've seen these Ripple effects go on and so we wanted to solve that
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before we went to wave two which uh we it's a feature we called Shard isolation which is basically each server has its own data Pipeline and they all operate sort of independently to persist to their Shard and there's no crossover right between them and so that features uh pretty much done now so we're about to run the test and stuff and then move it up to PTU so that we can see the effect and that will open the gates for waves too basically in case you're not you're not saying just so that's not misconstrued you're not saying that's today or anything right no I'm not saying that's today just not today but I mean we're getting close right we're getting there yeah we're getting close it's it's a good thing I mean the the this will give us a lot more resilience too over the over the growth of the shards which uh you
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know grow substantially larger than even the game designers at at plan which is good I mean that just means the feature is functional and those are the two specific you know uh bugs that are that are stopping us from moving the way to well there's also some other gameplay side effects that we've been looking at uh one of them is related to uh the way Insurance Works uh so we're sort of uh as far as the players are concerned it works the same way but the the way the back end was implementing restoring a ship uh was sort of reliant on on a preview the previous Technologies way of keeping ships that are destroyed which we no longer do that when the ship is destroyed we have to clean it up and so there's a new insurance system which is a good news because that's also future
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proof uh but it's the same functionality for you guys works the same way yeah and then on the game side we're just going through and fixing stuff still and making sure that you know when we go wave two wave three it says assault at it says solid as possible so but that's that's what we're doing from our our we do need the wave tube like the wave two influx of people is very important for us to validate that those changes work uh so yeah the with two is totally is still a thing just not today it's not today Chad was like yeah I don't think so uh and for those uh who want Wave 2 to come faster you can address your letters to Benoit bow say sure 888 St Laurent Montreal Quebec I have the I have a prop for this right
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there you go for those who don't read French it's complaints departments so yeah so obviously we we we we've been talking about this and Ben why I I'm pretty sure we're at your time limit are you do you have to go now I have a couple more minutes okay yeah so um let's obviously we've been we we joked at the beginning here uh somebody's like is this game live is this show live I mean yes if it was if it wasn't live my intro would have been way more better than it was we've been working on 318 for a while now uh the 318 were that's on the horizon I'm not going to say we're about to get the three the 318 that will be the next release whenever we get there uh is not the same 318 that we would have gotten if we released it in you
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know September the extra time has allowed us to add more things into the patch over time anything that was in the December that would have been in the December release is is what is in the 318 now now obviously there's other bug fixes and stability stuff that goes in you know but as of um basically end of December there's no new feature work or anything like that but obviously if you're talking about from like the September aspect then yes everything else just keeps on going into the 318 so it is a a much bigger patch than than what it would normally be and then obviously really the only kind of new tech development stuff is the stuff that Benoit was just talking about just to make sure that the PS functions the way that we need it to function
00:38:47
so let's talk so always a bunch of server improvements right that always go in because yeah constant work yeah constant work I mean we always hot fix and and try to usually the way it goes is like Ben said the first thing that comes in and is fixed is server crashes because that affects everybody and then from there it's client stability and client crashes that are fixed and then from there it's a lot of the gameplay features yeah is that not only uh fixes but there's also like entire entire pieces of content like the racetracks were actually developed after after uh after after September what 218 should have went through 18 should have been released right yeah so uh that was another gigantic thing that that was added well that was more time right but that well I mean it that was that was meant for the
00:39:36
December release you know whatever whatever name number it was but the the idea was that yes we were aiming for that in that quarter okay so let's let's talk a little bit about let's start moving we've spent a lot of time on the tech obviously the tech is a huge part of this of this patch but I do before we you know run out of time I want to start talking about some of the bigger features let's talk about racing since we brought up um starting with the the snake pit you know expanding into these six new tracks that are coming in 318. um there's some uh there's some new Arena Commander stuff we're going to be talking about on uh inside Star Citizen next week so we won't touch it there we'll let that team talk about it there but there seems to be at least from the outside looking in kind of a renewed focus on racing is is this is this just
00:40:26
a a an incorrect is this an incorrect perception or was there an initiative here yeah but I think the initiative was you know on multiple different facets so whether it be a Arena Commander or even in persistent universe so um whether that be Tony or myself like we we all um we all have uh different ideas of what it needed to be um and then uh Tony's team worked on what was considered the the basically the mission behind it um and then uh the content teams worked on developing the actual race tracks so some of that in Montreal some of that in Germany and and the UK um and then from there it was it was things that we kind of considered
00:41:14
low-hanging fruit and and things that were interesting for the content developers to to work on and then there's the AC side which I think you'll delve more into but again there there was some Share technology that we wanted to like to take a look at in the future and and we have a lot of similarities as far as the way that we want to do things but then I I think also you know Sean and Duncan and that team also want to be able to make sure that they take stuff from the Pu and and be able to use it in in other stuff as well I should try to run a snake bit with a reclaimer guys that was one of the first videos actually the first one of the first things that Manja did was was run snake pit with the reclaimer he did all right it drifted real hard um so so so yeah so there's there's a
00:42:04
there's a fair amount of racing stuff also with the time trials uh stuff that um that mft has been working on stuff that actually make that makes those race tracks more than just you know here's an area now there's you know the actual things that Mark the times yeah it's a mission you know but but again you know for this like we'll we'll take what the initial um aspect was and then be able to grow it like it's still missing some some features that I would be looking for whether that be multiple laps or um you know being able to have uh rolling starts versus you know versus only starting from an area so like there's some fundamental things you know that that we still want that you know we can just do shared development between Arena commander and ourselves yes isn't there and I have to stop
00:42:51
looking into his eyes it gets distracting I agree uh so uh we've been talking about Salvage for it seems like a a long time but I have to remind myself that Salvage is actually coming into game with this patch you know from my perspective we've been talking about for a while how is it are we happy with where where it's at yeah is it coming along I mean I think our team is extremely happy with with where it's at you know especially for the first installation like I'm I'm very proud of what they've been able to do and I think they're you know excited about it as well and seeing um the reaction that players are getting and then also uh seeing you know some of the tactics that they're building you know like if they want to go take out an Idris you know what kind of ships do
00:43:38
they need and then how much can you know then you know how many vultures did they need versus how many reclaimers do they need and and the thought process behind you know all right how am I going to earn as much money per hour you know by doing this um and then some of the multi-crew gameplay that's that's also been coming out of that whether it be the the turrets or in the back and how they operate what you know pulling out the cargo boxes and everything and I imagine that like mining before it it will continue to iterate after its first release yeah continue to be improved on yeah and it's like that so all right someone jumping it looks right I mean Salvage to be honest is really really I I think combining PES with Salvage is a super big win because the opportunities are endless at this point right like yeah abandon the ship you know and then you just somebody else just finds it and say
00:44:26
ah interesting or even some of the vent stuff like because you know the ship should stay there and you know or any sort of battles that happens those ships should be there and then you can just come along and make some money I meant for me also even like you're talking about battles but we could even use you know player battles to populate piece of the world where it's like oh we want space debris from a battle well let's just make one let's make a battle and then that's it yeah you know you got your debris I mean the this is just like all these opportunities will start to Gel really well I think adding game Loops like Salvage are is just one of the many things that will jive with this really well uh so while I'm pretty sure it was while we were on break while I was on break
00:45:13
from the show there was a spectrum post uh uh where they introduced uh a a a a a panel on the vulture in the uh in the reclaimer where you could basically manufacture a multi-tool and and and attachments and stuff from the raw uh salvaged material that you've been Gathering uh a lot of folks Herald that it is like the first the first kind of crafting in Star Citizen is that is that an accurate uh description do we just dip our toe into crafting there it is I I mean it has been but again Chris has been talking about it for quite a while and you know for our team it was just all right we've got some sort of resource and then we can you know we can spawn different items so it is um it is foundational it is stuff that
00:46:01
we want to build on uh it's just um there's a one or two other priorities that we need to knock out first and then you know we will be moving on to that in the future more crafty stuff uh 318 also includes the cargo refactor you know the first first iteration of the cargo Factor physicalized cargo and your ability to to finally move cargo from one ship to another ship uh it the cargo persisting uh after death that came along with soft death just like this has this changed the experience in 318 I I oh well I think a lot I mean it makes piracy a lot more interesting um because before you go and blow up a ship and then maybe it would have some some cargo and inject it
00:46:50
at you know what we consider 1 8 to SEO and then now you can actually go there and and it should be one to one um and then also we've always wanted ways to not have the ship completely you know blow up uh when you're taking it down so obviously with a soft depth this allows you to um to basically take it down enough and then be able to still you know have some of your items survive or some of that cargo survive so that's the I think some of the the main things that it's it's been focusing towards that's come along with some some new challenges though because now the soft death ships can land on the ground upside down and pin players inside the cockpit yeah yeah
00:47:38
there's there's some interesting gameplay that happens you know from there obviously we'll still need to look at ways of you know freeing yourself and and all of that but in some cases this is what would happen in real life and and you know um we are uh we will be working on like ship tractor beams and those types of things so then you could have somebody whoa you know pull you out and and flip you over and and to me some death is so it unlocks so much so many possibilities because it essentially takes what used to be the finality of a gameplay Loop which ship blows up nothing else happens and then you move on to something else and opens up new options new gameplay it's the start of a new gameplay Loop of trying to either board the ship or get the cargo so it's it's it was so fun to
00:48:27
see the players discovering gameplay around that that feature yeah new stories man and yeah install player stories man all about the player stories and that one also uh wasn't ready for September but obviously it was ready for December so oh yeah um that's what I'm talking about I'm gonna have to go uh Jared just my time up I hope you guys have a great end of day have an happy birthday uh it's been a while it was birthday happy birthday yes I'm uh 23 years old it feels great yeah first jumping in the industry that's right that's what I tell people I'm only 23. this is Game Dev yeah exactly that's right that's exactly right happy birthday man yep thank you everybody you guys later I want to follow up on on something you
00:49:15
mentioned you know the the physicalized cargo and stuff and it's great for piracy we we've had a number of features lately that are like that can be that can be presented as great for piracy and and so it does the uh currently in the game service beacons tend to be used to trap people you know to to lure people and trap people in into traps I don't know how to respects I don't have any stats on this but it seems like you're just as often to find a service Beacon be a trap as you are actually at being somebody you know uh actually needing help with the Advent of physical s cargo and stuff like this and and now you know it it does it make using service beacons for criminal activity even more attractive maybe but
00:50:06
I mean I think the criminals are going to do what they want to do and and so then it's the question is are you a good Samaritan are you you know willing to to go out there and answer this but it's we always want to create you know opportunities you know for players and then how they decide to use them and you know it's it's really going to be up to them how we we meld them obviously um in the future for service beacons we do want to have you know like star ratings or those types of things so you can start seeing okay you know somebody's got like a two on them right that you just yeah that was one of the oldest things Christmas Chris was talking about that back in like 2013 2014 the the ability to rate a mission you know player Mission givers and have a have like a Yelp score correct for
00:50:54
people so that's still in the plan it's just it's just a little bit lower priority on on that team we're talking about reputations uh we were talking about player reputations but there are the in-game reputations do those now persist with persistence and stuff like that so when you do a character repair stuff you're not going to lose your they should probably should have asked that one Ben while I was still here I mean it's it's basically we like we don't try to wipe you know very often on the you know for the um the player stats or the wallet or anything like that we want to make sure that the players start reaching some of the what we consider like mid game in-game you know aspects so like all of that says should act the way it was before
00:51:42
were there also changes to the armor and shields system well it was it was more that there were changes to uh basically the ballistics and the lasers and and or energy weapons and how those work with the armors and shields so it's the that the ballistics will will be able to pass through um the shields you know there there is some some damage that's left off from there and then it's supposed to be that the the ballistics basically chew through the armor quicker so it's we've done some tuning and then we will do some a little bit more rebalance associated with that we're we're not to the final stage where we're going to have the physicalized damage which was the end goal for this and making sure that the armor feels the way that the armor should
00:52:30
um but you know this is a step in the direction my first the first thing that pops into my head when you you say that right now is that again I don't have the St I don't have stats or data anybody just I'm just talking about an empirical kind of feeling it feels like most of the AI out there use ballistics yeah the second to make fighting the AI a lot more difficult um probably I mean we noticed that also you know with PES and we're actually having better server frame rate as well um and then we also did some accuracy adjustments on the AI so they might be tuned up a little bit so between the improved server frame rate yeah the improved ballistics so it there there might be some some balancing and tuning that will happen you know in in basically wave two wave three wave four
00:53:19
um but basically uh there should be some improved um gameplay associated with them yeah and there was a change to there's a change to bed log out in 318 I don't I don't actually know what that's about it came up a couple times yes so there's a change to it but again the the main thing was that um when we were in iwakati like we were starting to see some of these issues and um basically like Ben Ben was saying there were there were different um things that became very evident that we needed to adjust and fix um so we did some changes to bed log out and then it the goal is to again go back to the way it used to be um but right now you know in order for us to get out in time we needed to be
00:54:07
able to well to get out not necessarily on time but um for us to get out and get done with this we needed to be able to kind of strip down and and um not develop so many features at once so send your letters to Todd Pappy care of six Manchester Goods yard Street I've been remembering addresses today it's interesting um usually bad with addresses uh before we let you know uh one of the big things that you know that that you know brings people back you know it helps our concurrency numbers helps bring people together our Dynamic events the jump town the nine tails uh Xeno threat stuff do we know yet how PES is going to affect or change those events um well I think
00:54:55
we know that some of the stuff that let's say there's a big battle would see no threat those wrecks should persist and they should be there you know so it it's it'll allow people to go and clean up and that battle afterwards or you know um I think Luke was mentioning something where um there was some frame rate um and some possible stalls that happened so when somebody crashed a reclaimer right next to jump town and therefore you know that's when the the cleanup should have happened and so on and so forth so like I think there's gonna be some hiccups but I think the the main thing should be that something happened here and then it's up to you to either figure out oh I was part of that battle or you know oh they
00:55:44
had a battle here and and you know there's there's basically some remnants of it right and and Xeno threat uh it goes on for for a while yeah multiple stages so now uh records and stuff May persist through the phases well I think it basically the Starfire stuff gets cleaned up after phase one so um it will be really you know like the Idris at the end like if that gets destroyed then yeah then you should have that destroyed Idris out there those are some of those things I look forward to kind of discovering yes we can anticipate and we can project but yeah you can't ever be correct with these things um all right so we're just out of time I know this show is about you know Alpha you know 318 and stuff but Alpha 13 with you know it's got the PES
00:56:33
but we know PES is leading is moving on towards server meshing and stuff and we'll be covering more of that journey in just a couple weeks on ISC uh but as far as the Game feature stuff the cargo Salvage racing uh anything you can tell us about the next year for that stuff I'm not saying dates or whatever we want to go with these features so with cargo obviously the the first thing that we need to do is we need to be able to have different cargo sizes so first and foremost that's that's needed for like the whole C and and other you know major ships is is basically I'm making sure that when we put stuff in the cargo bay or or on uh ships that it it puts the right cargo on there so in this case 32 Su for like the whole c
00:57:20
um so that's one of the first things and then from there it'll be you know some of the smaller cargo so whether it be the 1 8 Su fitting on the cargo grid as well so there's those aspects that we'll be working towards cargo and then there's other modifiers on top of that whether that be volatile or you know Frozen or or you know time so on and so forth so there's those elements that we can make and make them feel a lot more interesting like you gotta go you know take 40 40 Hearts over to somebody and you know you got a certain period of time and box is frozen and you got to keep it under a certain temperature so and so forth so um then for Salvage there's obviously the whole scraping but then there's the munching aspect and getting that working
00:58:08
and and so that's one of the main things that the eup will be moving on to uh very very soon is getting that munching aspect working and then for racing um the way that we're trying to work through this is that we'll introduce a mission and and what we consider that is kind of a mission verb that that basically our our content teams can exploit um and then from there uh it will be us taking things and making events out of them or like so you know and then it's also from a Content side being able to create new tracks and and everything else because uh this is something that Louis and I are looking at from a high level perspective is you know how do tracks work in Stanton how do tracks work in pyro Nick so on and so forth so
00:58:57
you know illegal illegal tracks or or street racing and how does that feel you know compared to uh what would be you know the Murray cup you know side so um and how do you build reputation with those those events and all of that so and how do we unlock and then it's also how many per per um for location so cool any any hope for the grimex race track yeah yeah okay it's on it's on the docket it's it's something that the guys want to build so all right last question this is from this is from uh the backers Gail you're still with us right yeah 318 is this the question said almost at the door 380 318 is on its way uh it's been
00:59:48
six plus months of trial and tribulation uh the question is would you do it again hold a second I would do it again I would do it differently in some cases it's the same for me so there's a few decisions we would have maybe yeah changed yeah I I think you know because Kim didn't go through 3-0 you know like 3-0 was was a slog you know and um but what came out at the end of it I think was something special so and obviously we built on that you know since then so I think again with this this is a slog but you know what we've talked about in the beginning you know we've learned a lot of things of oh no we shouldn't have done that or oh we should change this or
01:00:37
no we did this really really well um so you know there'll be production changes development changes you know on this but I I think you know for this it's just you know it's a it's a means to an end you know whether you know 3-0 it's not necessarily like a birth but you know if 3-0 was a little bit of teenage years early teenage years this is later teenage years you know we're going through this growing process and going through these changes so it's just how do we learn and how do we deal with it 4.0 is where we get drunk yeah I'm sorry yeah I can definitely um I I wasn't there for 3.0 but uh for 3.18 I can I can say I've I've shipped I've been in difficult situation and ship difficult AAA games and and and and whatnot and I can say that the the
01:01:26
amount of complexity this release uh demonstrated and the amount of effort that the team uh had to put through is was one of the the more difficult ones I've seen in my career so it's I know it's uh it's been a while and the players are all waiting patiently uh but they the Silver Lining and all this is that it's gonna be worth it everything once we're seeing from the players who are actually in interacting with 318 it it unlocks a whole whole not new of uh of of gameplay situation and I think work I I sincerely believe that in the future in three four five years from now we're gonna see the release of 318 as an inflection point in Star citizens reality and what what it
01:02:17
delivered to the players so it's been very difficult and we would 100 do some things differently and we're we're actually right now looking at server meshing and and figuring out how we're changing some things and making sure that some of the errors from the past are not happening so we're actually taking this into account but I it's definitely definitely worth it all right well Guillaume Todd thank you so much for hanging out for an hour and sitting in the hot seats and answering questions about uh this patch that we all I think really really want to get out the door just uh there are a lot of the focus on on ISE uh comments yesterday were why are they talking about 319 when 318's not
01:03:04
out and I'm like I did six months of 318. you want three more like it's like you know it's it's because their emptiness still under development it is still being developed uh uh and stuff so we're going to continue that story this quarter uh speaking of which uh we mentioned earlier next week's ISC uh it's an episode dedicated entirely to the arena Commander feature team and their upcoming work uh uh uh bringing Arena Commander back from the from the dead as it were that's my words not anybody else's uh for 319 lots of new fixes and improvements and additions uh coming their way so you want to check that out next week on inside Star Citizen um and yeah for uh Todd and Guillaume I'm Jared uh thank you so much for hanging out with us remember to keep an
01:03:52
eye on the robertspace industries.com website and socials for details of one win uh 318 does move to uh PTU Wave 2 and its eventual live release please make it somewhat soon uh that's it soon soon no don't don't no I don't say that word I I got I got I got crap in the comments yesterday for saying that that Louisville's moving fast I mean it is it is I mean we said it was journey to 4.0 it's it's booing really good for for yeah you can't win I love you all right talk to you later everybody see ya see everyone

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