Wingman's Hangar ep069 . May 14, 2014

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] hey everybody Eric wingman Peterson welcome to episode 69 of wingman's Hangar what is wingman's Hangar well it's an inside look at everything Star Citizen Chris Robert's new epic space adventure we've got a pretty exciting show this week so let's just get right to it shall we we've got form feedback with your questions no videos made the cut but some might next week a look at the dog fight module matchmaking system what dog fight module what the heck is that who knows we have Tom Sawyer and Jason Spangler and they'll here to talk exactly about that so join us for that ride in a little bit we have new hires this week we have Tony zurc he's the persistent Universe game director Tony's going to be building the team a team

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   around him here in Austin to manage the entire persistent Universe I'm really looking forward to that I worked with Tony at both origin systems and digital Anvil he's super talented and I think he's going to be able to really help us out there also Alex Mayberry star Citizen's new executive producer comes to us from the wow team at blizzard hey everybody I'm Sandy Gardner and I'm here in the LA office with Alex mabery hello and uh Alex do you want to tell us how you get started in the game industry sure I got started about 18 years ago um I was going to college taking computer science classes and then this game called Doom came out um started playing doom and then uh got very hooked on Doom and then I discovered that there was a level editor for it and I I searched online this was even before the internet

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   it was like Compu serve or something and I got this level editor and I downloaded it and there were no instructions and it was like written in Visual Basic and crashed all the time but I figured out how to reverse kind of reverse engineer ID software's levels and I changed some stuff and then pretty soon I started designing my own levels and um after a number of months of doing that I eventually got offered a job at a company called zetrix entertainment to make redneck Rampage which was my first game all right and what other projects have you worked on uh after rednick Rampage um I worked on the first Quake 2 mission pack called the Reckoning I was the lead level designer and game designer on that I worked on Kingpin Life Of Crime um so a lead level designer on that as well uh from there I went on to Electronic Arts I worked on uh it became James Bond agent Under Fire

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   um although I didn't really stick around that long on that one uh then I worked for a company called Kalisto for a brief time after that I worked for the the United States Army and I developed a game called America's Army for them and then after that I went to a studio called swinging ape Studios they were developing Starcraft ghost for blizzard and eventually we got acquired by blizzard and then I got moved onto the World of Warcraft team where I worked on burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King and a bit of the cataclysm expansion and then halfway through cataclysm I jumped over to the Diablo team and and helped to get Diablo I out the door and then most recently shipped the Reaper of Souls expansion and now I'm here wow that's quite a long it's long track record and what are some of

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   the uh biggest lessons you've learned from uh the World of Warcraft in Diablo days uh really how much passion the fans can have and how much love they put into the game and you know when you're dealing with a game that has millions of and millions of people um playing the even decisions that seem small can be really impactful I remember one of our lead uh Network Engineers you know when wow was at about 10 million subscribers he brought up the point that you know even a bug that has a one in a million chance of happening it's going to happen 10 times a day in a game like wow so it really gives you the perspective of what a big giant game um you know what it takes to kind of run a game like that and and how you have to approach it differently so is that something that maybe attracted you to the Star Citizen absolutely you know sitting down with

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   Chris and seeing the game and having him explain his vision to me I instantly got what he was going for and it's it's the kind of game that really it it's bold and it's ambitious and it's got this uh you know he's he's thinking really big here and having been a part of big games like that it just really uh was attractive to me so you just started what have we what title have we got you I am executive producer all right so what what will that be entailing to you you know yet that means I'm going to coordinate and manage development uh across all the studios for Star citizens so it's it's my it's my job to execute on Chris's Vision so I need to coordinate with all of the developers and all the teams to make sure that we're making the game that he wants to make small job we were we were throwing

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   you in the deep end yesterday I noticed so how you feeling we got everything done we're all ready it's a it's a it's a big big job but it's exciting like I'm really excited about this project what is uh what are some of the things you're excited about for Star Citizen in Squadron 42 um well from the game itself I mean I've I've always been a a space nut since I was a little kid and I'd watch you know Star Trek with my dad and then I was in the theater when Star Wars came out I mean I was like eight years old and and I've always dreamed of space so and it's been so long since there's been a great space game out there so to make a to to help create a universe that's that's really exciting to me so uh are you playing any games right now I am actually just finishing up uh couple

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   games that I missed when they came out and you know at Christmas time they had the Steam Sale so I bought Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas and I'm just finishing those um I finished Fallout 3 and I'm about to finish New Vegas so it took me months to get through them all all right well I like this guy because I'm a big Doom fan too so he got me through college uh all right well thank you very much also the next great Starship episode 12 was released last Friday team shimapan moves on while one bit amoeba three Dingo and four horsemen join the other teams in the save pool be sure to vote on the team you want to save so that they get to the final also be sure to check out Chris Roberts and the latest 10 for the chairman comes out every Monday it's always good to see those questions answered for The Man by The Man himself

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   and uh those are subscriber questions so you know the only way to get get your questions answered is to well be a subscriber and you get that flare that cool flare we showed you last week and here's a look at one of the more hardcore pieces of tech behind star citizens matchmaking system matchmaking Services uh are online and they're ready to go we got it integrated in the client as well as in the back end so it's just a matter of uh pushing out to the public as soon as that we can get the servers allocated 61 when you log in through the launcher you're placed in the hanger a little uh matchmaking UI pops up and um you know from that point then we have uh you know different Maps uh that you can select to play and a couple different game types

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    like you know Battle Royale uh which is kind of like a free-for-all uh there's like capture the core which is like a capture the flag uh you know base game we're going to have a party system so you know you're you know trying to find your friends either through your organization or you know the people that you've met and you'll be able to you know create a party and then uh you can join the party into you know a match we'll have a lot of uh you know standard stats uh out of the gate such as you know your uh number of kills number of deaths um you know you hit percentage you know with the you know various weapons but then you know we really want to you know kind of come up with uh you know fun stats uh they could be you know the number of times uh you picked up the flag and uh you know capture the core

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    he's got the flag you know okay well you know get him you know you drop the flag the thing about Cloud servers is that it's going to provide us Cod location almost for free so you know a Google compute has data centers you know throughout the world and it's a a cost-effective way to uh to manage servers and kind of give you that elasticity based on demand on the different regions we have a servers called uh the instance manager and the process manager uh determines uh how active Game servers that we have in the pool and it will determine if we uh need to uh dynamically add more game servers to the cloud and uh also if we can remove you know Game servers from the cloud so a little more on that with Jason and Tom on the show later on they'll actually be our guests and now it's time for Forum

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    feedback Forum feedback hey Rob how you doing I'm great Eric how are you I'm good I'm good you ready for some of the these questions today sure have you dropped any names in here that I'm going to have trouble with I think they're pretty easy this week ah well then I will definitely screw it up from bear Rider we all know and love the Millennium Falcon and serenity will ships we own in the persistent Universe develop quirks requiring us to rewire jury rig or mid-flight repair are vessels wessels or Nuclear wessels So the I guess the the sort of quirky personality based repair thing that they're asking about not really a thing but I mean there is wear and tear things do break down you will be able to do some jury riged repairs in space and everything so things can break down in interesting ways but it won't

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    necessarily be a personality trait of your ship right I can just see Malcolm R's going what was that that thing flew off the front that was pretty funny from instant sister one Stander one one ancestor isn't it first ancestor first ancestor thank you it's first ancestor at some point in the future we will be able to assemble modding teams that can start an in-game ship manufacturing company whereby they produce new ships for the game subject to cig approval of course sorry first ancestor that's a tricky one yeah forgot to mention that one yeah sure so obviously if you're running a local server you can do whatever you want that's true um but we we do have to keep kind of tight controls on what goes in

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    our universe I mean like any other persistent Universe game you have to kind of make sure you're keeping your fiction intact mhm so we've talked a little bit about this and this may be a thing later on down the road where we let people come up with ideas and present them to a review board of some at cig and then potentially bring them into the game but there's a lot of work required to bring a ship idea into the game as an actual functioning piece of equipment the next great Starship is kind of doing a little bit of that right now yeah it's it's a lot like that right so it's the game shot so it's a first step for us to also test and see what what's out there and for people that do that too that's cool cool from black Dove what are the plans for stealth mechanics how big of an effect will Stealth have on General gameplay what are the trade-offs and benefits so a lot of times when people

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    ask about Stealth you know they're talking like Predator style or cling on cloaking device type which is not our not our approach to it at all um stealth is really an effort to reduce your signature for your so the amount of heat you're generating em in general um and can't really change your profile so that's hard to do but so the trade-off is you get equipment that is less powerful consumes less power is more efficient so you're not generating as much heat or as much em signature and then the end result is that you're harder to detect but it's not um you you lose some of the output of that stuff so you have less power you have less oomy guns so it's a yinyang balance kind thing exactly exactly and um you could I mean you could also like turn off your ship and wait for somebody but then the

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    penalty to that is well you have to turn it back on and get let it boot up again sure while when you're going to attack but so it's the trade-offs are just what do you want want to be better at cool all right so it's it's how you want to play the game it's kind of defined helps Define your ship and your setup will kind of Define you as the player from Rob Bruno well certain unexplored planets have undiscovered species of alien life I could see down the road landing on some undeveloped planet and being greeted by some spear wielding MX tribes people who deem you their God and feed you their Delicacies until you offend them and then they feed you to their dinosaurs okay then that was a lot that was just a tiny question with a lot of stuff there that's an oddly specific imagination of about what would happen on the world the wingman's weight would um would uh dinosaurs would get quite the morsel

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    these days that's true the dinosaurs would be very happy yeah uhhuh um so the of course the basic consideration anytime you say hey let's throw in some alien races is how long you're going to have to build them and the the animation team gets all kinds of crazy when you say hey here's an eight-legged animal go animate it for us right but down the road I can definitely see that happening um it's it's one of those things that takes time so it doesn't take priority over what we really need for the base game right now but it could definitely happen somewhere right it's you know again as we build this thing it's it's never completely finished we'll be Contin continually adding on it forever and uh you know we'll be listening to what people want at that point so The Never Ending Story from deino is it possible that we will be able to transport nukes or equivalent weapons of

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    mass destruction and if so would that blow up if our ship got destroyed taking the enemy down with it if it were close enough so the the self-defense bomb yeah well I think he's asking if the cargo blows up well and it's it's you know it's their punishment for somebody trying to shoot you or something that would be a really really big explosion to catch somebody else in it unless they're like sitting on top of you when up so I mean there are things there could be explosive caros and if you got hit in the cargo that would mean you'd probably blow up um I'm not sure that would do any damage to your opponents like I said unless they're right there right on top right most most of the damage will be from distance from echo7 According to a recent survey in which over 3,000 people participated 39% of us are most excited about exploration what

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    is being done to keep explorers well from running out of things to uh explore h i I actually am one of those I want to explore too I I think that that our poll results have been very consistent on that a lot of our fans are are Explorer types I think that that we keep that in mind all the time when we're generating content so there's so many different answers to this but for one the star systems were going to we building for the game are huge right and the points of interest this the really Central activity areas are just a small portion of that so there's a lot of empty space in every area and if you want to go map that and find interesting things at the edges that's a long trip so that's one thing for the people who really just like to know have seen everything everywhere that would take a long time another thing is like

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    navigating jump points you can find new Jump points but you can also go back through and renate an existing jump point if you want to shave some time off of the right the passage time um there also are going to be you know dercks we're going to have a lot of procedural content that can appear anywhere right for people to go find so and that that and the fact that we'll be able to add star systems whenever we need to to add more places for them to discover I don't think they're going to run out of things to do right well cool from Timberwolf to what extent can we interact with the goods we're transporting I'd hate to see the goods represented solely by an indestructible static not operable crate in my hold cargo cubes yeah cargo cubes crates like Command and Conquer always have those crates always looking for those things run over it and you got St um we've actually the cargo system

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    involves actually being able to load stuff into a box and then put the box into your ship so yeah you can open up your containers and look at the cargo inside U I guess if you want to throw it all over your ship you could it seems messy okay fair enough from Charles Wellington hypothetically if player a boards player B's ship kills player B and takes the ship is that ship now fully owned by player a to play with as he wishes and if so when player B responds with with a ship wouldn't that start to cause an inflation of ships in the universe so piracy yeah yeah yeah yeah um so yes if you manage to disable someone's ship and remove the occupant yeah and then fly off with it yeah you can fly with that ship all you want however um that ship is stolen so

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    people are going to be looking for you it's not like you can just yeah everything's great go visit terara and then they realize that your ship is report stolen and they spend a lot of time trying to make it into small pieces so yes there could be temporary inflation of ships but at the end of the day stolen ships are going to be hunted so very it's not scot-free okay from grimbold how will Star Citizen address the issue of People camping at areas like jump points what if a clan decides to try and enily block off one side of a jump Point into a non uee system well for one thing that's not necessarily bad for gameplay to have some areas where that can happen um I realized that that I mean for large groups that's that's an important part of gameplay is you know seeing if you

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    can take control over an area of so to some extent sure sure sure but a lot of it will be handled by our instancing system in sense that in places where you're blockading people may slip by you just don't notice them space is really big it's hard to see everything that's going on so that's that's the main way that that'll happen there will probably be other techniques we use but part of it will depend on us playing it and seeing how it works Works Cool from orth have you guys ever thought about making Arena Commander into a real world arcade game you could lease the single player code to an arcade game company who would make a full Hornet cockpit and get the game into arcades like Dave and Busters Etc that' be cool I I I like that we just thought of it right now we from orth dead anyway yeah somebody El thought of it um so that was a pretty quick no from from Mr Roberts but at the

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    same time it's a thing in our game and that that is still going to exist in the game as something you can do that's the arena that which we I don't remember which stretch goal that was but so it's going to be there and there may be an arcade version of it in the game somewhere as well so all right well thank you for that and now it's time for three somewhat Shifty characters for this week's most valuable post hey everybody Welcome to MVP most

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    valuable post I'm Ben Lesnik and I'm joined by assistant Community manager James Pew and Lead moderator will we are here to tell you what the best post at the RSI forums was this week and the honor goes to Way Beyond for his post comparing all the cig staff two characters from Lucas Art's classic secret of Monkey Island yeah like Dave hadock as Murray and Chris Roberts as the Chuck it's pretty great exactly but I don't understand our comparison I don't either I've asked so thanks won you're this week's MVP hey that was not horrible thanks guys appreciate that and we got Jason and Tom how are you guys doing good again yeah you ready to talk a little

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    matchmaking so it's a big deal um tell us a little about matchmaking now Tom you are leading the charge on that right what's going on the service side yeah matchmaking services are ready to go so you know we've uh got it in the QA environment right now and we're currently pushing into production and just uh trying to figure out how many machines we're going to start out with right and do we have to find out Jason like where we start sharding the instances or breaking them off into other like how many how many people can fit into one instance for instance part of it's from game design and how the game feels part of it's how many performance-wise since we are still fairly early in the project so we haven't done all the optimization we're going to to maximize how many we can fit on one game server and then there's going to also be how many we can fit on one machine how many in how many games

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    matches we can fit on one machine at a time now the machine you mean the one that's in the cloud yeah so that that explain how that works how does how does matchmaking work I mean how when when I log into to my machine my client and then what happens your client connects to our universe Services just like it actually does a little of this already with the hanger um and when you enter your ship and go select what you want your match to be then it will connect you to a game server that it chooses that the matchmaking service chooses that's available when it talks to an instance manager that tracks all the game server instances running and then your client then redirects its uh cry Network its uh gameplay connection to that game server and then the match starts up so have we

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    now there's going to be some optimization of this going forward right so like if if somebody's in Australia are they ever going to be matched up with somebody in England or are we doing something with some ping checks or um not in the first release but definitely planned we want to have the uh machines in basically data centers and all our main different regions so you will get connected to ones that are closer to you with lower ping times sure sure sure so how does it work then you start with a pool of cloud servers um uh and then how do we test this how we how we going to get this to I know we're testing internally but what happens when we start to let everyone else test this even before we get to there as we test internally and we increase the number of uh players then we we also use a load testing system that we've developed that runs the game client but in a headless

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    mode without a any graphics so we can put all these artificial players in to help us make sure that when we do release it doesn't Crash and Burn um then we start ramping up the number of people we're going to have in uh in dog fighting able to play it and we'll keep an eye on it as it goes up to make sure everything's okay and as we find problems we'll fix them and then continue ramping up yeah getting more and more people involved and so now Tom you had you had some help with this right um Manuel from redacted was big in helping us out he he spent a few weeks in our office helping us get that going right absolutely Manuel's been a great help uh you know we had the back uh back in uh architecture in place and Manuel was able to uh you know really take the

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    matchmaking services and just kind of plug in you know his uh you know matchmaking you know logic into our framework and uh it just it just worked you know so and and what's that do exactly what to for Lay people what does that mean what when when you say matchmaking into our infrastructure or our framework what what does what Manuel did what does that do what what does that entail well you know basically uh you know we start up X number of you know Game servers and they reg register themselves with instance manager and so the uh the Matchmaker will talk to the instance manager and say hey how many game servers are are are free for you know games to be played on or what are the different player accounts and what are the different levels you know that are currently running on on each of the game servers so the match when you you know log in onto your own computer and

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    you go to the matchmaking UI you uh you pick which level you want to play in what game mode whe whether it's capture the core or uh Battle Royale um you know you you put in your selection you hit go and your message goes up to the Matchmaker service and it's going to you know scan you know all the game servers that are currently uh you know up and running and uh find a game for it to place you into so it's going to R you essentially yeah yeah cool well that's pretty neat stuff and we should be expecting that to be coming out pretty soon with the with the release of the dog fight module and I know you know we'll hear more about that in a little bit so thanks guys it's it's a lot of work we're having fun doing it um but you know it's a lot of work there's still more to do right so coming up this week we have the next great Starship episode 13 be sure to get your votes in for that

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    all right looks really good get your votes in for the teams you want to save and get those ships put into our game there's some really talented folks out there and I know I'm excited to see uh see how that all ends and also we have a small announcement today is the fourth to the last episode of wingman's Hangar there'll be a new community oriented Show starting June 11th where we'll break the inside cig pieces out and put those on Friday in place of the next great Starship as that ends the new show will be based out of our headquarters in Los Angeles where Chris is located all of our community marketing and video production have been Consolidated at HQ I'll still be part of the new programming reporting from Austin on the studio developments from here I'm proud of wing men's Hangar and we have a very we've set a very high standard well sort of and I'm looking forward to being part of the new programming coming up there will be more details in the coming weeks and we plan to go out with quite a bang

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    so stay tuned three more episodes left so I want to thank subscribers and pledgers your support is allowed us to make this game and subscribers in particular allow us to do shows like this and all the new programming coming up uh thank you guys very much and also Man Fan gifts you guys are incredible there's no words just take a look at this hi from the UK um we're just obviously busily finishing off the dog fighting module and we got actually a wonderful um surprise here sent by Aaliyah alist um daughter of darkness and she sent us these wonderful two hampers so um we're going to uh take care of this um probably this weekend um once we finished them getting a bunch of stuff done so thank you very much really do appreciate it and um from all the guys so subscribe to our YouTube channel

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    you'll get a little email alert that'll tell you what's going on when it happens you'll be one of the first ones to know so you can get there and go first on the uh on the YouTube comments submit your questions to Forum feedback questions on the RSI forums for wingman's hanger and also any other shows we have coming up get those questions out there you know that way we can get to those and answer those for you uh also join us for the hangover show which is about 30 minutes after the show we'll we'll have a little informal look and talk to each other on the chat roll which is actually going to be replaced by uh something else this week so get on there and we'll talk to you directly and we'll have some fun and see what you thought what you liked what you didn't like and how things are going and maybe a few reveals if you're lucky and remember if you want your stuff featured on wingman's Hangar send it in we just might use it where are we going to see him guys in the verse