10 for the Chairman: Episode 58 (2015.03.30)

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] hello everyone uh welcome to another episode of 10 for the chairman this is where I take 10 questions from the subscribers um the subscribers are a subset of our community that contribute extra money every month to allow us to do a higher degree of uh community content so this show around the verse uh We've started up the wonderful wide world of star czm that focuses on community generated content um the jumpo magazine we do every month which is 50 to 70 pages of in-depth behind the scenes um information on say how we build the ships how we Design Systems

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   also has some law and some fiction so this uh you know past months one was all about how we built a Retaliator which was a pretty awesome uh read um so anyway thank you very much subscribers for allowing us to do all this it's your contributions that sort of allow us to invest more money in community content than pretty much every other developer and probably most Publishers so uh thank you um and as part of that we answer 10 questions from subscribers and so here are the 10 for this week um so first question comes from Rex Maxim who asks with the ability of having multiplayer free flight now would it also be possible to let players join a free flight game already in session yeah actually I I mean I have to check on this I don't know why we particularly would block you joining a game in

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   session uh we definitely have uh work we're going to be doing on the lobby system so you can actually go through and see the games that are played and if there's open slots you can join them and also see the sort of General skill rankings of the games so that's a sort of slightly longer term project I mean it's definitely High priorities for an arena Commander to sort of make the whole experience of matching up in multiplayer or finding other people much better than it is currently because it's not good enough at all at the moment um we got a temporary uh Matchmaker in right now we're actually going to be replacing it with the one that will also Drive the persistant universe and have a lot more features but of course all those sort of things take a bit of time um but uh you know really there's no reason why you couldn't join a free flight game already in session so I'll ask about that but it may just be a matter of knowing what the game is uh and that may just be a matter of a UI interface um so not necessarily say it all it's not happening now it's not

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   going to get it won't necessarily get fixed next week but it's definitely that will be something that will be addressed very shortly okay next question comes from saor 67 I'm planning on a hanger party for our entire organization and their guest once the social module is dropped will there be a code I can publish that will allow everyone access to my hanger for the weekend then shut it down once the party is over also with a lot of guests will my hanger get instanced so uh the first iteration of the hanger or social uh module um is going right now has a friends implementation which we're not particularly not friends a sort of um follower implementation uh which we're not necessarily um that enthusiastic so we want a proper friends implementation but right now you can you can basically give out invites to people that you know and they can accept the invite to come

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   to your hanger um in the game interface and then when they do if they go into the elevator say in their hanger they'll have the ability to go to your hanger or floor or however you want to think of it as well as go up to the surface of artop um so that's you basically send out invites for people to come into your hanger I'm not quite sure how many people we're going to get in the hanger at the moment um in the FPS module I think we're looking to try and get as many as 32 players into one instance um in the Astro Arena stuff and so we may uh do that in uh up to that level in the in the hangar I'm not quite sure because there's uh you know extra performance issues where you have all the ships as well as the characters and so we got a lot of optimization to do to make sure that we don't run out of memory and you know kill the frame rate and all the rest of the stuff so I would say that

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   the amount of player people you get in your hang out is going to be anywhere between 8 and 32 in the first iteration we don't quite know yet that's sort of um you know we're going to get the FPS out uh we're spending some extra time polishing the Planet Side social module to have more functionality and features and also have a bit of breathing room because we don't want to release the planet site social module right on top of the FPS module because uh first of all just in terms of uh code stability and changing streams in the back you just you need some time uh and second of all everyone's going to be pretty busy playing the FPS there's a whole bunch of new gameplay new feat features um so I'm pretty sure everyone's going to be pretty focused on that and uh so we sort of decided that uh it would be better to not have uh two modules sort of come out within you know two weeks or even four weeks of each other uh so that's sort of that's sort of our plan um so there'll be more functionality in the planet side and social module than we originally

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   because we're not it's not like we're doing less work we're just going to be able to include more when we do the drop um and part of that is figuring out some of our optimization and multiplayer stuff that's an ongoing task also for arena Commander uh so we'll um but basically you'll be able to invite a certain number of people to your hanger um your hanger will be your hanger so it's not going to be instant so there won't be a fact of other people running around your hanger in another instance it'll be like you'll only be able to fit so many people in your hanger and they can join and you can all hang out together and uh so whatever that party list is is going to depend on sort of the optimizations of how many people we can have in it and we are working and doing things that will all make this stuff have a lot more players um all in the same instances longer term so we're playing around with some ideas that um we can do back in the cloud infrastructure that you couldn't necessarily do in the old sort of school um you know single kind of server setup

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   um but that's a longer term stuff so ultimately we you know the goal is to be able to manage enough players you have a lot of players when you're running around envirment or even you're in a big space battle um you know you can have plenty of ships in the space battle plus lots of people on side inside the ships and uh that kind of setup would actually involve multiple servers running the various players but because people are inside a ship aren't necessarily in the the same spaces outside the ship you can sort of a portion it that way and so we can actually probably manage to get more effective player you know like basically a seemingly higher player count in one area um so you'll be like in the space area more limited on the number of ships and then uh you'll be limited on number of players inside a ship so I don't know if that makes any sense but that's kind of what we're working towards um but you know of course those are all steps along the way uh okay next question comes from abysmal Dragon who asks if we decide to

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   use a ballistic weapon that is smaller than the size slot allotted for it say a size one cannon in a slot that can hold up to a size three gun could we then use the extra size to carry more ammo for that weapon not really uh I mean I think the I think the concept on the sizing of weapons is that generally you will not be able to uh put a size one gun into a size three slot um the system allows you to have a minimum and a maximum size but obviously you know if a size one's this big and a size three is that big it just looks really silly putting a size one on something that big and it doesn't make sense and probably the sort of mounting attachments in real life wouldn't wouldn't be built to to accept a small weapon there so in general I would say that sizes uh you know a lot of weapon mounts would be maybe okay single size so it's it's a size three Mount and you got to put size three items into it you

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    know potentially in some cases you could have something that could take a size two or size three or a size three or size four that kind of thing but in general there won't be a really large slot and also the sizing doesn't like ultimately create extra C points for you to click um essentially uh you would have to have sort of an adapter item so you could potentially have uh an item that would plug in into the size three and maybe take two size one guns and an ammo box that could Supply the two size one guns we don't have that um in the game right now but the system would 100% allow you to do that kind of thing and that's kind of the whole idea of the item Port um system so hopefully that answered the question for you okay next question comes from uh ginen or jingen however you'd want to say that uh there

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    hasn't been much information of late as on support of a Linux fish version of Star Citizen are there still plans to bring Star Citizen to the Linux platform well we run all our servers on Linux so we basically compile the game in Linux uh the issue with actual Linux support is the graphics driver so we don't have an openg GL um Graphics uh uh dll at the moment uh kch was working on one but they haven't managed to get it uh working to a state that everyone thinks performance is acceptable and so that's kind of what's really held up us being able to support Linux and also Mac we're you know longer term having you we're looking at openg G next uh and having conversations with various parties about possibly doing support on opengl next um so such as you know AMD obviously who we've been doing stuff with on the graphics card side um so that's

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    something we're pretty interested in so you know I think in the future you could probably see us we're definitely going to be you know doing dx12 and openg next would be another thing we would do and then obviously that would enable Linux support and probably Mac support because I'm sure they're going to move too open GL next too uh and then of course if krych ever finished the base openg implementation they have then we would use that or if anyone else that's part of the sort of cry engine ecosystem does something like that we would do it but that's really brocking us is sort of the the underlying Graphics drivers because everything else actually runs in Linux and you know most of the people here are big Linux fans so we're quite happy to support it it's just that we have you know an incredibly long list of tasks to do um you know and some basic tasks just to make sure the engine can work and scale for the size of the game we have that take higher priority than supporting um you know one specific set of Hardware

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    but it's definitely on our list um so uh hopefully that update um helped you out I'm not saying it's anywhere closer but that's kind of where we're at on it okay next question comes from dark Ravens who ask currently anyone using gimbals or turret suffers a weapon class loss of one for each weapon how do you plan to have this affect larger ships as they cannot maneuver like Fighters and rely on turrets and gimbals more would all of my class 2 constellation turrets be downgraded to class one weapons as fixed guns on larger ships would mostly be useless so okay there aren't any classes anymore so let's get that started we threw the whole idea of the classes out um if actually classes have not actually been existing in the implementation of code for a long time um they were just uh sort of a noral clation we came up in the early sort of design days of to say okay well this would be a fixed gun this would be a gimbal gun this would be a turret this would be a missile rack uh

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    but um you know now it's it's all about the sizes and the class right so whether you're a uh you know a fix you're a weapon you're a turret that can have weapons plugged into it um you know you're a missile pylon that can be plugged into a turret or into you know just a Hardo that missiles can be attached to um or an ammo box or a fuel pod or any other thing so um so that's the first thing to to um require the design is the design I mean I I I've noticed a whole bunch of people getting all panicked about oh well you know it's this class and this size oh my ship's on got gimped and no that's absolutely not the case um and uh I mean that's part of the problem of uh you know sort of our open development process is that obviously as things get refined and changed then the normal clature will change around and how you're doing this

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    stuff but ultimately you know where we want to have the Aurora on the scale to the Hornet on the scale to the constellation on the scale to uh the Bengal carrier they're all going to live in their same relative spaces so um you know I wouldn't really get uh F caught up on sizing uh or Clash naming on sort of weapons or turrets you know like for instance I noticed a lot of people were sort of upset because they sort of felt like well uh you know I should you know um on the constellation the turret should be able to have dual class size four guns on it and you know I think if you want to take a look at like what size two guns look on an M50 right now it's they look really silly right so basically what we're doing with the balancing is now that we're actually doing proper sizes is then you know what the sizes uh that go on the ships are

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    going to be matched to the actual scale and size of the ship uh and not some arbitrary numbers that we sort of you know came up when we were sort of putting it uh down on paper but everyone's going to live in the sort of same space right so it's going to be like yeah you know the you're not going to [ __ ] The Hornet and upgrade the Aurora something the Aurora is going to not be nearly as good of a dog fighter as a hornet and and and you know the guns that are sitting on the turret on a constellation are going to be bigger and more powerful than the guns sitting on the turret on the Hornet and so it's all going to be still set up that way so you know the the constellation the bigger ships are very turret driven it doesn't mean that you're going to get rid of turrets now because of this losted one size I mean like I said the sizings all change depending on what we do so generally what will happen on the bigger ships is they will have turrets because like like your question says they don't move very fast so you need to be able to move your guns around on the turret to keep track of your target so you know

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    likely the constellation you know probably it's not really something you want to have fixed guns so we'll have the gimbaled weapons uh that are out on the sort of the outer engine parts and then the big two turrets uh and uh you know they'll be you know plenty hard- hitting I mean I would think that's we'll adjust sizes to make it all work so just remember that there's some you know language at the very top of the ship page that says you know this is all all these numbers are you know not locked in stone work in progress we're rebalancing etc etc but you know what you can be assured of is you know if I buy the the ship that sort of positioned as the dog fighting ship that's where it's going to exist when everything's ultimately balanced out um so I hope that kind of explain Plains uh kind of where we're going on that next question comes from chaplain who asks what is the heaviest level of armor that can be worn while palting a ship or Manning a cruise station and how long will it take to

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    Dawn the AR if the need arises I hate to have to fight off a boarding party in my space pajamas I think we're talking about piloting a ship um or Manning a station in general uh like light armor so for instance if you're flying The Hornet uh you probably need to have sort of flight suit of light armor potentially in a bigger ship like a constellation or something uh you know where there's you know a bigger sort of like chair to sit in to Pilot uh we may let you go up to medium armor we haven't 100% made the chance but the uh the choice not the chance uh but the rule is essentially that you sort of it's light or below to be pting sort of the small Fighters and then if there's sort of a bigger kind of ship potentially you can sit in medium armor heavy Titan you probably can't be sitting down palting ships in it um in terms of how long it takes to put the armor on uh we haven't

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    really sort of decided on the time of that I can't imagine it's going to take um too long certainly wouldn't take as long as it would actually take to strap on all the armor so we'd probably just have a simple animation where you would sort of like kind of do this and all of a sudden the armor would be in um and it may take a little longer to put the heavier armor on than to say put light armor on but we haven't come with the times for those yet um okay next question comes from anom Nom who asks with the recent set of VR heads sites being announced with various feature sets and capabilities and sdks has cig committed to one platform such as Oculus are you holding back work on the VR aspect until the right choice has become clearer okay well we're definitely not committing to one VR platform that would be like us saying we're only can commit to one joystick or One controller solution which we're not

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    going to do the whole point of Star Citizen is to um you know basically embrace all the variety of peripherals that you can get with a PC I mean that's part of the reason why we're on a PC it's awesome you can do all these different things so you know we're going to be supporting track car we'll be supporting o Rift we'll probably be supporting the valv and uh you know if they ever bring morus onto a PC maybe we'll support that too or some other versions of stuff and you know magic leap or whatever these are all things that um you know we would want and like to support um there is work that's gone towards them and there's also work that's in some future sort of builds that we have that we'll be able to share later on but they're not in the current build that you guys have cuz you know we're sort of we have three or four builds all going at once so like the team that's working on the FPS mod is working with a certain version of the

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    engine and the team that's working on the social model is working on a slightly more advanced version and the team that's working on the the um multic cruise ship combat is on on an even more advanced version as is Squadron 42 they're both on what we call Main which is the most upto-date recent version and uh then FPS and social are on slightly ones that we've sort of branched off at a certain time to make sure it stays stable uh so some of the the the new VR stuff will come in down the road so I'm uh thinking that potentially sort of some of the newer VR support will be with the multi cruise ship stuff later this year um but um again it's all about time and resources so you know we're focusing on some very fundamental core stuff like the zone system that I've mentioned before um you know finishing off the large World which is almost done now um we're just on sort of the 3D rendering camera retive stuff uh and

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    some base sort of engine uh sort of streaming stuff that we're working on so we can bring in the massive amount of data that this game requires all the time with the really heavy assets and also what we're going to do and those are sort of foundation Stones along with sort of the backend stuff that you we need for pretty much all the experiences and they obviously Trump um supporting individual um as cool as it is Hardware so but it's all part of the greater plan and they will be supported and we will not um you know basically pick um one side a party because um you know it's like I said we want to support a lot of different joysticks a lot of different hotas a lot of different you know like mouse and keyboard or um you know game pad and you know you name it uh two joysticks at once Rudder pedals um so um you know that's uh we won't we won't we won't say yep we're only on OAS or we're

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    only on you know valv or whatever it would be um okay hopefully that answers that question for you uh next question comes from ryudo who asks at the PX East FPS showing we got to see an energy based grappling beam is there plan to make a physical one with a grappling hook and wires I don't know uh definitely there'll be an energy based one potentially there could be a physical one with grappling hook and wires it's not that difficult to do in the system it's you know there's rope physics and we can have it shoot out the energy beam one's just sort of a little uh cleaner and easier to do so that'll be the first implementation so we'll definitely have that and then the second one uh who knows uh I think there's some other things that are probably higher on the priority list uh for it but longer term that could be something pretty cool um certainly visually it's cool uh okay next question comes from graus who asks

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    will the FPS damage mechanic similar to the new ship damage mechanic can we expect to see clothing skin armor get grazed burnt bruised then puncture wounds gashes then limp nonfunctioning limbs so the answer to that is yes um but it won't be uh in the FPS because uh that Branch actually doesn't have um that for the body stuff we're doing some actual Shader uh work for um special kind of material PBR shaders for characters right now and part of the Shader work will also be incorporating the ship damage Shader work into the sort of character Shader stuff so but the plan is 100% to do a lot of the similar stuff that we do on ships onto uh players in the uh you know also in the FPS we are going to have the you know your limb gets uh damaged or destroyed or ruined so you limp or you won't be able to use

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    your right arm or left arm or that kind of thing so that's all part of the plan of uh you know the sort of firsters aspect of the game uh won't all debut with the uh you know 1.0 of the FPS basically but that will all be stuff that you can expect to be coming in to add this sort of extra level of like realism and immersion and it's going to be pretty cool and you know you'll be able to see you look I'm all shut up and any it' be cool all right last question of the 10 comes from dabs who asks will there eventually be items like key cards that will restrict where crew members can go on my ship 100% yes so we already we have a system uh that's uh getting uh finished out right now it's what we call the ghost system I think I made talked to it before but it's the game object State uh machine but I don't know what

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    they uh game object State and then I don't know what t comes up Paul randelle came up with the noral c ghost so I don't know what T is but it is a game object State machine that we use and basically it's a um it's a way uh it's a modularized uh set of logic that's done built visually um that is Network aware so if you do it on one of the clients it will make sure it's located on all the other clients uh and uh you can just have it attached to um elements of your ship or any entity or item so and the game and and it's sort of a state machine that can sort of read variables and all the rest of the stuff and you know trigger animations or other kinds of things so the whole point of it is like for instance to walk around your ship and um you know you know in case of

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    the Retaliator that's actually in everyone's um hanger right now the sort of rudimentary first version of it is is there because when the doors are opening and everything that's all driven by um essentially a a early version of ghost as you go in and out of the doors it's basically got little area triggered by the door and it and it triggers the animation to open it and it triggers the animation to close it but that same logic can also say oh well this this door is shut down and there's a red light on the door or this door's open there's a green light on the door or uh you need to use a key card item into a key card in a key card receptical uh and then when you use it in there if it's the right key card it unlocks 10 of the doors on the ship so so all that sort of functionality is going to be built in uh it will be functional for squadron 42 um because we have we need some of that stuff for squadron 42 it will be for the Pu um and at some point it will be on

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    say um ships that people have in Arena Commander although not right at the start um okay so there you go um that's the 10 questions thank you very much uh for your time and listening to me hopefully the questions were uh informative uh or answered some I know occasionally people complain that it's the same question answered again and again not sure all these were exactly the same questions answered again and again because some of them have pertinent to some new stuff that uh we talked about recently uh but I definitely want to thank the um subscribers for helping us to do this kind of uh extra Community content obviously to everyone that's back the game because we wouldn't I won't be here we w't be making a game with this crazy ambition without all your support so thank you so much it's I say it every time but it's an awesome time uh making uh Star Citizen in Squadron 42 uh

29. 00:22:30

    there's going to be some really I mean uh some really fun cool exciting stuff uh you know I think you're going to have one more show from me here before I actually go over to the UK and I'm going to be over there for quite a few months um because we're going to be shooting all the performance capture uh for squadron 42 um for later this year and that's going to be fun and uh won't quite tell you about um what we're doing there and who's in it but I think people um anyway you're you you you back this game for $40 or $30 or $45 you're you're getting deal of the entry even if you put a hundred plus dollars into it with the amount of times we're putting multiple AAA games all into one it's uh and you know as as I think I've said before everything that we're we're we're raising right now just goes into making

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    it bigger and better and and more detailed and uh there anyway I'm excited it's going to it's going to be really cool I mean we very early stages right now uh but I think people can sort of see where the trajectory is going and as things roll out um you know at the end of this year there'll be a lot more but it'll still be a lot more to go beyond that uh but when it all comes together it's going to be amazing and I think along the along the way it's still going to be a massive amount of fun to play and give feedback and do all the rest stuff and and I'm having a great time making I think the team's having a great time making it and hoping you guys are having a great time participating in that and giving feedback and seeing how it goes and playing the various pills so with that said I will bid you ad du and talk to you next week bye hey guys thanks for watching um temp

31. 00:24:16

    for the chairman uh if you guys would like to uh see more episodes go here if you guys would like to subscribe to our YouTube channel and always keep up to date with all our video content go here and uh if you guys would like to watch episodes of around the verse go here please and I will see you in the verse