Star Citizen Live | Tech Talk with Benoit Beausejour

5 February 202602:04:093,424 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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Hi everybody. Welcome to Star Citizen Live Tech Talk with Benois Bose. I'm your host Jared Huckabe. And if you've never seen Star Citizen Live before, lucky you. No, it's where we take usually about an hour out of our week and we chat with developers on these special shows that we do with our good friend uh chief technology officer and all around swell guy Benois Boseour. Uh we usually take a bit longer. Last time we took three hours. The first time uh the time before that it was close to three hours. It was maybe two and a half hours. This time we're clocking in at about two hours because we have meetings that we have to go to, you know, but about at about two hours. So, um, yeah, I ran out of gas. What else do I do in
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the intro? >> Oh, I got to introduce the person. So, uh, I've mentioned this person in Benoa Bose a few times. Uh, so let's go ahead and meet Benois Bose. Benois. >> Hi. >> I have to say I'm impressed with your pronunciation. >> It's been like 12 years now. >> No, but it keeps getting better every time. It's better. I I I I I practice privately. >> There you go. I know. Thank you everybody. Hi everybody. >> Tell everybody who you are and what you do for Star Citizen. >> So I'm Beno. >> You want me to say it again or no? Okay, good. Uh I am the chief technology officer at CI. So >> I guess the best way to describe it is if it has a computer chip in it, I'm kind of involved in a way. So, I run the engineering teams, uh, Star Engine
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Group, uh, and I meddle with all areas of the game, trying to get us forward to our 1.0 release. Metal is a good word. >> Yeah. >> Uh, my blood sugar is weird or something. I can't see with my glasses. I've seen better without my glasses. So, we're going to take off my glasses. Although, I'm going to have to do the show like this. [laughter] Now, I can't see anything else, but I can see this. It's important. All right. So uh on these shows on these the these special tech talk shows I think we are going to cover a variety of topics. So the these topics have all been discussed uh ahead of time where you worked out uh Ben W as involved as he is uh with so many aspects of the of the game still needs to be afforded the opportunity to check in with other directors and get updates on what they're doing and everything so that we can pro provide you the most up-to-date and accurate
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information. So, this will be a this will be a show that's less about taking questions uh from the chat or from the community and more about just a very candid conversation about the current state of the game, the development, where we've been, where we are, where we're going, that stuff like that. So, I've divided the show up at this point into sort of three things. I'd switch teams for Benois. [laughter] >> Oh, that wasn't in chat. I was just talking myself. [laughter] No, that wasn't Chad. Um, uh, send a DM after the show. Uh, that's not appropriate. Uh, so we're going to start the show with updates to existing endeavors. So, this is the third one of these we've done. We've we've talked about a couple of things. So, I want to update on a few of these topics that
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we've been covering through this before the second section where we get into some new things that we haven't discussed. >> So, let's start with the biggest one, which is server mission. >> Yeah, >> we're now a year on. We talked about it ad nauseium leading up to this thing. Uh it's now been out a year. This is probably the last time we're going to talk about it for a while again until dynamic comes and we're not going to put any dates on that. So So let's just let's put the story of server meshing. Let's put a button on the story of server meshing. Sure. And I'll break it down into four sections. >> How's this gone? H how's this last year been? Well, so like if I recap like uh almost same date this year, last year >> almost, yeah, >> was when we actually launched 4.0 and server meshing actually went to the live
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environment. And so yeah, it's it's kind of the one-year anniversary of the of the tech being available for all players. Um it's been surprisingly solid. Uh I I like to say that this way because it's a very large system. uh but it has been uh it has given us just good foundation for what we had to do last year in terms of the content drive that we've pushed forward uh the performance improvements that we wanted to deploy. It was like we we were expecting a lot more turbulence with the release of server meshing than we've had in a year. it's been a very very stable system uh overall and so I would say like you know if I look back at the year obviously there's always problems you
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know with new technologies but it server meshing itself has been very very very solid for us okay so in the quite frankly years leading up to it talking about it it began to get this mythology that it was going to be this silver bullet that it was going to be this one one one stop uh fix that was going to fix so many issues. >> It didn't fix every issue in the world. It was never going to fix every issue, but I want to talk about what it has enabled for us in this last year. So, what are what are some of the benefits that we can draw direct line from server meshing that we've experienced in the last year? >> Well, like if you if you walk back to the the start of an experience before 4.0, so before server meshing got introduced, um you know, a server crashing, that was
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the end of your session, right? You would lose your ship, you would lose your cargo, everything would disappear. You'd have to reconnect, restart the client, start over, right? Uh I mean, anybody who's lived through the first years of development of the project know how intense this was, right? And so the first thing that uh that server meshing brought us is is server recovery. And so because of the fact that the replication is separated from the simulation, when a game server crashes, which is where most of the crash risk exists, >> uh well the sim the the state of the replication is still good. So we just tell you, hey, we're getting another server. You stay there and when it comes back, we can recover exactly where you were. You don't lose your ship. You don't lose your cargo. You don't lose your materials. Um, and I think that's been a very very big, it's a kind of the
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unsung hero feature of server meshing. Uh, it helps with, you know, engagement, playing longer sessions, finishing missions. Uh, and so for me, that's like one of the big big big uh pluses that, uh, was brought in with server meshing. Um, on top of that, and we we did have some crash isolation to be clear in 324 and before, right? But what what server meshing really brings also on top of that is crash isolation. So if a server is in charge of the crusader area and he's the one running into issues, then only that area is affected. And so the player who's, you know, bounty hunting in pyro or something like that, he's completely safe from from this crash. Uh and that just the perceived stability has increased a lot uh based on that on top of all the work we've done to
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prevent servers from crashing in the first place. Uh but just this this whole setup has made the game a lot more stable in in that sense. Um so that's just the kind of meat and potatoes of what meshing has brought us. But the the the key bit it brought us also is much larger player counts. Uh and so we used to be limited to 100 players uh per server which had the whole universe to simulate. Now we've got a series of servers simulating the simulating the universe. So we oscillate between caps of 600, 700, 800. We're still experimenting going higher uh with this depending on multiple factors that cap changes for the moment. But uh just the fact of having more players in the same shard means you can have an event where 200 people show up at one area. Surprisingly enough, we've also
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discovered things through this that sometimes game servers actually perform better with more players in one area than one server simulating the whole universe would because he has less entities streamed in and now it's all about updating the components in that area. So, we've seen we've seen certain uh events, you know, cuz players always find a way to, you know, organize something that's should be a problem, but uh there was a 400 player uh uh party uh in one of the bars on New Babage and we looked at the server performance through that and it was actually very very decent. So, we expected a full meltdown, but it was actually good. And so, that enables that experience, right? Obviously, there's a million other problems to solve for this to be a really good experience, but from a server meshing point of view, that was a big win.
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>> Um, >> you've got a 500 player meetup coming. I just saw some >> I know it's like that becomes a kind of common thing and we love it because that's exactly what the tech is meant to enable. >> Um, and then obviously the the two uh other things that meshing has brought us this year is two new uh solar systems. And so for years we had been stuck in Stanton expanding the Stansson system, more POIs, more planets, more things. And now suddenly we were able to branch into Pyro which was everybody at CIG was really looking forward to that. It was like it was internal tension at when are we going to launch this thing? I've been working on this for a long time. And so that was really a relief to be able to get >> you know players to cross the jump gate. So the jump gate technology obviously comes with meshing and so expanding into
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two systems in one year >> being able to add yeah pyro in January you know tech preview was you know December the year before but it went live in January and then next goes live in November same same year it's it's >> it's this most common question you you know we've been doing this for a long time now here forget other places we've been doing it just here for a long time and one and one of the most common persistent questions is about the pace of development and and you know you know people have been waiting very long for certain things justifiably so and and and we always and we've always we've always maintained that you know it's development kind of works on a it it builds it builds and it builds and you get more efficient after you build the tools after you build the foundations you stuff like this it gets more
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efficient you can do more later on this year because of server meshing we were able to kick out two star systems and and we're still going we're still expanding depending on nyx. Uh every patch this year will expand nyx even more. Uh it's the the one in the one in March is looking to uh is looking to expand a bunch of the service stations and and and our first big content drop uh which I'll go ahead and say right now is supposed to be Rockcracker. If you watched uh watched uh what was it called? Citizon Direct, >> me and Names. um you can learn more about that, but we're we're currently working towards that is our is our March release and then and then on on on and on just continuing to build out Nyx until I think in the road to 1.0 presentation at Citizen two years ago
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now uh well a year and a half ago uh uh uh Rich Tyer acknowledged that Castra would be our next system whenever that comes online. So it's just this technology >> it's unlocked the capabilities to do what they're doing. actually we can actually you know start to deliver so many of these things that we've been talking about and working on behind the scenes. Instancing has some role in that. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. Yeah. Completely. >> Um there's one more thing that server meshing brought us that's not to be that's not negligible is a very substantial gain of performance on the game servers in general. So like 324 game servers were running, you know, we had a very low bar for acceptance on FPS for game servers because we just had to deal with so much. >> Nowadays like server FPS is is, you
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know, magnitudes higher. So that actually allowed some of the content we've already produced actually shine because it was working properly. And so that's because servers have less to simulate. We can optimize their workload. We've also reduced even I mean we've talked about this before but we've reduced the size of the game servers because they just have to simulate one area and so overall we're trying to we've meshing has improved server performance by big magnitudes. Um yes chat no my head is not smaller. My hair is just bigger. It was very windy and rainy today and it's just whatever. Uh no I haven't had a dye job. It's grayer than it's ever been. Uh, no we are not taking questions from chat but I I will comment on every one of you commenting on my appearance.
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Um, so that's static server meshing. We know the next big uh stage of of server meshing is dynamic. Uh, what can you tell us if anything about that? Well, so the the dynamic dynamism in >> dynamism dynamism >> dynamism I guess. So we've we've run we're running out of words internally to define what the next step of server meshing is. Currently we're working on quasi dynamic server mission server meshing which is we're trying to iterate on the static mesh right to bring it uh uh so that if an area is empty right and nobody's there we can spin down a server and if people go to that area we can spin up a server to achieve all this the all of the mechanics required for a full dynamic mesh need to be there. So like mass authority transfer between between
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servers because when a a server goes out and it has x amount of entities that it currently has authority over those >> it needs to give that to another one and that obviously you don't want that process to lock up the m the the parent server. >> So that whole mechanism is is being uh is what we're working on at the moment. In fact, we've done over the break the team has actually reached a milestone. We were able to run with our internal testers a test of quasi dynamic server meshing internally. So that's good. I mean it's the first test so you know a bit rough but it it basically requested I think 200 servers to run the mesh. That was a little bit of [laughter] but yeah [snorts] our ops teams Ahmed specifically I got a call from Ahmed immediately but anyway so so so [laughter]
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wait so I you've been calling it quasi dynamic and I've been trying to workshop a new name for you and I've just got just a little bit of dynamism but so so you did your first test of just of this quasi >> Adamic like hey server you try to determine how much you need and the first thing it did was ask for 200 more servers. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Well, >> you know, >> a little bug in the assignment system, but >> that sounds like human nature, >> correct? >> Uh, so that's what we're working on right now. That's the next step for towards the full dynamic mesh, right? Obviously, the goal with the dynamic mesh, just to recap it, is that instead of having a a a subdivision that we pre-make in advance, like currently every patch, we look at the territory assignment is what we call it of like what's coming like, oh, we have an event
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at this place and you know, most players are going to go to this system and so we adjust the mesh, right? And uh sometimes we get it wrong and it's a very manually intensive process and we don't want to keep doing that. So the goal with the dynamic mesh is to be able to just adapt to where the players are, the cost of the location they're in, to be able to provision compute dynamically up and down. So there's also the unfortunate cost equation in this, right? The current static mesh will always provision a server for every to every territory that's configured. And so there's a little bit of savings we can go and get there. But more importantly, the dynamic aspect of it is to be able to always make sure that the proper compute is available for players when they're in an area doing something, right? So that's the goal. >> Uh Chad's debating whether the servers
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have actually achieved AGI and have played the game and just like [laughter] like we've played the game, give me 200. U so that's server meshing. Yeah. Last year uh uh last year was coined as the year of playability. >> So uh uh we've just we've just backdoored a whole bunch of play uh playability improvements that server mission which dropped last year enabled. So we've had all of those improvements last year that made the game far more playable than it was in any previous year. >> But that that that phrase has has been used. It's weaponized. It's it's thrown back every once in a while every time somebody encounters any kind of bug whatsoever. So So I want to talk I want
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to talk and that's not entirely unfairly because everybody's everybody's bug that they're encountering is the most important bug in the universe at that given moment and and that one is not resolved because they're encountering it. >> I want to talk a little bit more about what we did gain last year. So, it's whe whether whether that's the the transit system stuff, the the 30ks finally being killed, the the creatures and boss fights and stuff. Uh when you tell me, how did our year of playability go in in your head? >> Well, so I think that you know, obviously coming from the server meshing improvements, uh there was also some failings at the beginning of the year where we saw I mean transit became a very big problem. That's an example of a
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system >> only because we tried to use it. >> Yeah. Well, yeah. Or tried to serve you but badly. Uh but the uh you know that's an example of a system that was built years ago that wasn't properly scaled over time. And so when you added dynamic gateways for the transit system plus the meshing situation that became a really problematic system and so that was I think the first order of business once we launched 4.0 you know, was like we need to really take action on transit. And so we talked about this last year, but we did create the transit heroes group uh which was a a coalition of uh volunteers. Uh well, they got volunteered. Volunt >> volunttold. Yes, exactly. uh to come and give a bit of oversight on this to look
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at the system to see okay what do we need to actually you know have stable elevators and trains and you know make sure that that's always available because the traversal of the game if that doesn't work then the game doesn't work at all right if you can't take an elevator to get out of the habs then you know >> you've got >> good luck right >> so uh the transit heroes team I think has done a fantastic job they haven't re-engineered the system in in that strike team, but they really focused on self-healing strategies, right? If a manager loses a carriage for some reason, for any reason, well, just create another one and get this this thing rolling, right? Uh now, they couldn't fix in this effort. They couldn't rebuild the system. There was fundamental flaws in how it was engineered uh for for server meshing support and so but at least they got it
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into working condition. So, I do think like if you look at the game now, >> transit is no longer the big problem. used to be, right? Like it actually functions when you need it. Uh now that said, >> most times >> it fixes itself, right? So there it's still getting in a weird state, but it fixes itself. So >> uh you know, we've done more about this and we'll talk about that later. >> We're building the transport system. >> Correct. >> Concurrently. Absolutely. >> So while this team is while this team is repairing the transit system, we're building a new bespoke transport system. >> Right. So, so transport is basically the the fix for this, like the real fix. >> Let's get to the let's get to transport when we when we talk about what's so what what what else did we get last year? >> Uh, well, I got a list here that I I worked out a little bit with Yen's uh just to gather up because the game is so
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big. So, >> so I'm going to I'm going to limit you a little bit on this time. You you've got you've got >> Okay. >> You've got I'm going to give you five minutes. >> Sounds good. >> I'm going give you five minutes. >> I'm being time >> because we because we do want to get to the new exciting hot. This is important. >> Okay, so we talked about 30k protection. >> My clock. >> Okay, >> go for it. >> Go. >> You should be a producer. Okay, 30k protection. Uh transit improvements, right? To make it stable, h a stable tech base for the content teams. What doesn't show is that to achieve the content we shipped uh in 25, we actually froze a lot of the technology to give the content teams a stable base to work off. before it was a bit more of a mayhem. So, we did that. Um, we uh uh as we built all of this content last year,
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so a monthly patch was a very heavy cadence. >> 10 patches last year. >> Yeah. Uh, you know, I think that what's really cool is that we've built kind of a library of locations and events that if you start playing Star Citizen today, there's that to do, right? It's like that. We never had that before. like a real set of locations that have like a full-on, you know, >> uh, storyline to follow. So, that's really cool. Uh, in these locations, we're able to ship some creature, some new creatures. So, a lot of new creatures and boss fights. So, we had the first couple boss fights this year, uh, you know, with your mandi, Stormbreaker. Uh, so that's like a brand new, you know, design discipline for us to design boss fights for multiplayer elements. So, that's that's new. Um, spawn and hanger is something that we've actually been able to enable this time. So we tried to enable it in 20 end of 24
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and that was a bit of a disaster. 25 now spawn in your hanger is there. So if your anger is available, you spawn directly there. That's actually a very large quality of life improvement. I play the game a lot. You know, not having to go to the Habs is fantastic. Uh we've been able to put weather in key locations, including some of those big hero locations we talked about. We're hoping to do more, but you know, for now it actually is there. Um, two new star systems. We talk about this jump gates, which is a whole, you know, a game on its own. Uh, the way it functions is actually super interesting. As you're going through, the zone is moving and you're moving within the zone. It's really a fun system to go through. So, that's that's in. Um, we fixed the goddamn bounty beacons, [clears throat] which is one of the coolest loop in the game. I love it.
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And, uh, you know, that was obviously not working. So now we've actually got them to work again which is a big a big win. Uh quantum interdiction was in the same uh the same bag where now with a server mash having proper interdiction was kind of difficult. So restoring it was an interesting one. We had to actually build systems to allow that because the not every server has a view of the entire shard anymore. And so in order to interdict cross server you needed to have special tech to do that that fix also quantum linking. Now routing is still >> there's still issues right it's getting there but that at least there's been some quality of life improvements on that side uh that we've done this year freight elevator ongoing [laughter] ongoing ongoing >> we'll have we'll have a whole section on >> but there's been a lot of I mean if
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throughout the year freight elevators have received tons of >> compared to where the compared to where they started when we attempted to >> yes >> push when we pushed them to the forefront or an event in yeah compared to where we started >> but let's >> we talked about server FPS and stability from from the meshing uh and the cleanup that we've put in place uh also we've pushed a at the middle of the year at it came for you guys at the end of the year but actually we merged it at the middle of the year but uh a whole new tech base including at least a year of graphics update including Vulcan uh coming into the game now uh that's that was what will allow us this year to do some some pretty large changes as well. Um, the first weaponized mech. Uh, so the Atlas came in. So that's also a really big
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boost. We still don't know if it's a vehicle. John Crew and I have a this ongoing feud. He says it's not. I say it is. >> You're dipping into content here. I'm not going to let you count the I'm not going to let you count the content. >> Oh, that's fine. >> I'm not although exists. >> The the jump jets are were a feature. I said the jump jets were feature. Um, >> give you half credit for the >> correct. Uh, [laughter] thank you. Thank you. I will take that. Uh, comm's notification got a big facelift. Uh, that's something that we want to use a lot more of and so we needed the proper tech to be able to render that properly. Uh, and not just the quip lines, which you know, you need, you know, you need more immersion than that. So, that was actually a pretty big thing with facial animations and tracking. And so, that's that's in there. and then cross shard progress for
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events. So, uh, you know, what powered a lot of the content this year was a new service in the background of the game called the scenario service, which, uh, you know, uh, whether you're doing, you know, clean air or, uh, the resource drive last year, the cross shard progress of these events is tracked by the scenario system. And so that's how we were able to show tables about, you know, how many resources and resource drives, stuff like that. Exactly. >> Um, that that's a that's a pretty good list. You you just got lit. It says 502. >> Yes. >> Look at that. Look at that. >> On time. >> Um and you didn't even mention like item recovery. >> No, I did not. >> I didn't mention it item recovery. Um >> and there was one other that I had until I got distracted by my own clock. Blur. >> I got distracted by my own clock.
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Basically, you you know, it's it's it it's it's hard. Let me think about how I want to say this. If you've been watching this show long enough, you know that I'm not above taking a few taking a section, in this case, five minutes of of the section to basically go through some talking points that I won that I that I think are important that I I I think I think people want to hear it is we have had things like the year of playability thrown back at us in comms and we you see I tune into a Twitch stream or YouTube stream and I you know and some somebody gets a very a very a very frustrating experience. I was looking at an experience of of of of somebody, you know, you know, just going to town with their whole sea and they
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they went through a jump point and it took them trying to go to one system. It kicked them back out to the next system. Then the thing crashed, then they got back in and the spindles were they tried to open the spindles, but the spindles were closed. Looked closed, but they were actually open. So, they were they were sing they were in the right they were in the wrong state. tried to get refuel, tried to go to refuel. The refuel thing wasn't working and then stowed the ship and spawned the ship and it didn't come back on the docking port. It came back in their hanger full of cargo and it's like this. It's like we acknowledge that. >> I'm sitting here I'm sitting here saying we acknowledge those things but there was so many massive improvements last year. There is this is you used a used an analogy last time we did with this
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about about I think it was the the the big freight container the the the big giant Suez canal shipping things that you don't just turn the direction around. You don't just spin the wheel and suddenly you're facing a new direction. It takes time to move these things and >> the efforts of your teams and the people under you, these strike teams, these hero teams as you call them, uh to turn that ship, this ship that we call the persistent universe around in the last year, has been phenomenal. If I'm allowed to have a personal opinion, being the shill for the company that I am, has been phenomenal. We haven't gotten everything. [clears throat] We haven't gotten everything. We still got another year. We still got another year. We still got another work continues. Yeah, >> but I want it's my show and I wanted to take five minutes to acknowledge the tremendous work of those teams and a whole lot was accomplished last year in
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addition to the amazing content work. You know, I said 10 patches and I realized we actually had 11 because we kicked engineering out. >> we kicked engineering out in December. So, it was actually 11 patches. You know, 11 patches in 12 months is pretty crazy. So you allow me to have a moment to have to have some time to sit there and sing the praises of those people because I've I've seen where we were >> and I know where we are and we're in a much better place now. >> Still is just the beginning of the >> still places to go. >> Yes, >> that that scenario I just described was like last week and we have still places to go. >> Yes. But that doesn't mean we don't acknowledge >> I think it's a testament to kind of the systematic approach we've taken to solve some of these issues instead of uh previously we used to just assign
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tickets to people and they would you know find the fastest way to solve it and now we kind of work as a team with the teams in quality assurance that are basically the arbinger like no it's not fixed I can still repro right and these guys have been going through a systematic approach for it I think that That's that's paid off a bit. You know, >> we get better. >> Not always, >> but we try and in this case in this case, we've definitely gotten better. There were there were some big changes to to internal infrastructure and stuff in the last year or two. And we're seeing the results of that stuff. All right. So, now let's go into some specific updates here. So, let's talk about the transport system. We don't need to talk about trans transit so much anymore. The transport system is what will one day
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>> replace this thing. Uh I I've heard talk about there being a tech preview I assume. Talk to me about the transport system. >> Well, so Transit was a problematic wasn't designed for server meshing. And so transport is a rebuild a complete rebuild of the transit system but using uh more server native uh d uh sorry server meshing native approaches for how different pieces are going to manage elements are streamed out and streamed in. >> We're also moving away from some previous misconceptions that were put into the transit system. Uh, for example, one of them was was responsible for trains going into space. We don't want trains to go into space. So, >> you might not. >> Yeah. Well, I mean, as unless we do a
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space elevator, >> astro train. >> Yeah. Astro train be great. Um, so the state of transport, right? So, um, at the end of last year, >> so I'm going to pause. >> Uhhuh. >> What's included in transport? So, so what? >> Oh, so what are we what are we talking about? >> Transit. Transit and transport manage elevators, in ship elevators, trains, anything that has to move when you press a button and you call it. So, okay, it's a network of carriage, peripheral, and gateway. Okay. >> Right. So, you take an elevator to go to your hanger, >> that's transit, >> you take a tram, >> anything that's automated. Anything that moves you not under your control, >> right? And he's the one moving the carriages, right? So he needs to deal with carriages being streamed out you know like prediction for that stuff. So uh so transport is a rebuild of the
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original transit which has been as as we talked about problematic. So the state on transport is at this point we are you know it's functional. So we've uh the team at the end of last year actually completed the first transport link which was we we and we tested this internally with our QA teams extensively at this point. all of the new Babbage Habs links. So, we took one link in the universe, that one, and we tested the crap out of it. Right now, that's a static link. So, it's going this when I say static, it means the two points that the elevator goes to exist. They always exist. Uh now, uh so we know that works. Then the state at the moment is we also support hangers. So these are dynamic gateways because when you're if you're
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online and you're at the location, your g your hanger will spawn there. That's a dynamic gateway. When if you leave that gateway disappears so the system needs to deal with dynamic gateways. The previous system >> did not >> candidate and the candidate was the piece that wasn't great. And so we've got internally at the moment new Babage uh we've got hangers and HAB. So the state of transport now is the team is working at converting all of area 18. So we're talking habs, hangers, transit trains, all of area 18 to the transport system. Um so we're going to go to tech preview with that. That's our plan. And the reason why we need to go to tech preview is because we need players. Uh we've tested this internally. We can't muster as much players as we want. So, we're going to
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try to see if you guys want to come and help us out test the new Babage Transit for real uh on a tech preview to validate all the assumptions that are in the system. >> So, we're going we're going to we're going to launch a tech preview and ask people to just come and ride the elevators. >> Come and ride the trams >> and their hangers. >> And their hangers and hope nobody dies. >> No trains in space. No doors opening to nothingness. Uh you know, that'd be great. Uh, no passing through the floors in the in the carriages. >> The the the the single most exciting tech preview we'll ever do, but incredibly important because because it's a tech preview that doesn't just affect 18. It's one that can literally affect quality of life in every single landing zone on board every single spaceship because that have elevators and stuff within space stations. It just
00:34:01
it's it's going to be this little thing for 18, but it ripples out to everything. And so after a tech preview, if everything is validated, there's one thing too we want to try to avoid is the train prediction taking like you and 32 seconds to come in where the train says train arrives in 1 million60. You know, obviously we hope that's >> I just thought it was a metaphor for the project. [laughter] >> Am I allowed to say that? >> At this point you are. Uh so the on the after tech preview we're going to scale this out to every landing zone and we're going to see what which patch this will load in. But at that point we hope to bring transport in and completely deprecate the transit system uh from the game and and nuke it from orbit. >> Cool. Yeah.
00:34:48
>> And that's next week. [laughter] >> We don't give dates. Best effort, but it's looking good. like this tech preview is going to be where we're going to evaluate really like where we're at with scale because the issues of transit typically come up with scale most most of the time. >> Fair enough. Um I told you we get back to freight elevators. >> So uh what what can you tell me about about freight elevators and and what what what still needs to happen? >> Sure. So the the Fred elevators are way more complicated than we can imagine because they get affected by other systems like hangers, like planetary locations. Uh there's also multiple flavors of them, top loading, side loading, and they all operate very
00:35:36
differently. So this year we've had issues at the beginning of the year clearly with the freight elevators like losing items and uh obstruction blocking them from functioning. Uh >> you said the beginning of the year but that really came to a head in July where we had even an event that would rely on them which was you know in retrospect. >> I know. Well, it's it's we we knew there we knew there was we knew there was a collection of issues, but we also all of our data said they were only >> localized localized. It wasn't until we went to scale. >> That's right. >> That that we realized, oh, this is actually even worse than we thought. >> Right. >> It's also coupled to a couple of things and for that event specifically, which was, you know, we concentrated missions in key locations. That's one thing that has been in our discussions all year was
00:36:25
how we distribute missions, right? How we, you know, if we if we launch a new mission tomorrow morning and we send everybody to the same spot, that is problematic. Not just because it's not fun because it's a traffic jam, but also it causes other issues. And so that that we learned a lot from that on the design side, I think, overall. But the so Fred elevators though the so we're pretty happy with the some of the core mechanics but there's still very egregious issues that we're tracking. So there's roughly 73 total issues that we've we know about. Uh 51 of those have been resolved. So I've asked our uh one of our teams in uh our Nathaniel Fischer resident expert freight elevators uh to track that. So the the rest of these issues are some of them are are really problematic. One of them we actually
00:37:13
discussed you and I just before the show was, you know, how uh if you're turning in Wiccolo items, you need to put >> you have to be put things in a box. You have to be able to put things in a box. >> Correct. And so >> you have to be able to put things in a box and have it suck up that box. >> Yes, I agree 100%. And so that's one that's going to be one of the first ones I think we need to look at. The other one is a bit more pro problematic because we don't have a proper repro for but sometimes there are lost items that fail if there's like a a backend slowdown when things get stowed. So we have a couple reports for this not many but the ones that we have are are critical. And so you know this is a kind of a rule we've set on the CGP team. So Yensz and I are pushing this to everybody. Like the golden rule for everything related to freight elevators
00:38:03
or or anything that touches inventory is a player should never lose an item interacting with these systems, right? We need we need trust in them 100%. And so that's why we're tracing on those issues. So there's still a lot more work required on freight elevators for different edge cases. Uh a new one that we started seeing in 4.6 which seems affected by another change, but is sometimes like putting stuff on the elevator, not on the grid, will cause it to disappear, >> right? >> Which is kind of a physics cleanup conflict. So, I know we're looking into this right now because that's a that's a big one, but uh and then uh everything that has to do with stacking. So, having a stack in your inventory that you want to untow onto the freight elevator, that mechanism from a backend perspective, right, >> is actually a creation. I know that
00:38:50
sounds weird, but you have a stack of 10. That's one item with a stack of 10. You may bring it. It's a creation of nine. So, that bit is not stable right now. We're trying to improve that uh that mechanism. >> It it it's it's hard because there's there's a lot of the chat right now is is debating Wiccolo at the moment. And and >> why did I say his name? [laughter] >> Well, if I say it three times, he shows up on the screen. Uh but a a not insignificant part of the dislike for Wiccolo is directly related to that freight elevator. It's it's just there's no it's we have a section later on we got we we asked around we'll get to but I'll give you a preview but we we we we started talking like what is what what is the single greatest quality of quality of life thing that that we that
00:39:40
we can do that we asked I went around and I asked a couple head honchos here around the company because I I was curious. I I did an interview before like like what is what what to you is the single biggest uh uh quality of life thing we could do the single biggest and on more than one occasion shout out to Yens I'm going to spoil it here >> not losing items just >> just not losing items just just that seemingly simple >> benign >> innocent little thing like if if if everything else is important everything else is super important everything else is super necessary It absolutely is. But God is my witness. If we can just make it so people don't lose their items like so, so shout out to the heroes of the freight elevator. Uh hero Hero Squad, I
00:40:30
thought it was strike squad, but you've rebranded it during this call as Hero Squad. And I like it, >> So, we'll do it. Uh, and everybody, the people on item recovery, the people, the people in the new inventory, people who are working on the inventory system right now, it's everybody working to fix that because that's just the most the single most demoralizing thing in the world to me. Um, speaking of item recovery, >> we launched V0 or V1 or whatever the heck we we called it, T0. Um, I'm hearing that there's a T1 on the horizon, >> Talk to me about it. [snorts] Well, so the obviously tier zero was a fairly large change to the game so that uh in the case where you die in the verse, instead of having to run a corpse run to recover your items, you would actually
00:41:17
respawn with them. This was mainly done to, you know, we're in an alpha game, you know, we needed to do some compromises. So, we looked at that. So, item imprint, there's multiple names for this at this point. item imprint uh uh item recovery tier one uh entitlements 2.0 those are all sort of related. So the gist of it is and this ties into you know some other subjects but um is that currently when you play the game right and you look at your ASOP terminal I think I've said that last time but I'll still go through it again. When you look at your ASOP terminal, the list that you see there is the list of entitlements that you own. Which ship that you own, you have a right to, right? Then that's cross link with the actual ship. Do you have a that you know
00:42:05
this entitlement? Let's say it's econ. What is it in the game? Right? And where is it? And that's how the ASOP terminal shows you the list, right? So that's why you're able to have a row when there's no ship and it says retrieve or deliver, right? That creates the ship. then deliver brings you to ship on the platform. Those entitlements currently they don't live across patches. We recreate them. The first time you log in, there's a big process that reconciles your account, grabs your web purchases, grabs your LTP records, and recreates those entitlements. obviously long-term persistence has always been kind of a diff it's a difficult problem to solve. It sounds simple but it is not I assure you. Uh in order to facilitate all this and also
00:42:53
other item recovery needs we're we've decided to basically persist those entitlements across batch. So these things will never get wiped anymore. And so losing a ship is not going to be a thing. That's not going to be pos technically possible. We don't we never really delete entitlements. And so you have insurance on those records so you can claim insurance. The only way to lose a ship will be if you no longer have insurance on it. You still have the deed for it, but you can't claim it. So, item recovery is a rework of the entitlement system. Uh, it touches on how you claim insurance on ships. Uh, it allows snapshotting of ships, but also FPS items so that these live with an insurance loadout that we can we can keep and recover. and then will give us the ability to recover or claim your
00:43:41
your even FPS items. So, think of it as an insurance system for FPS items, right? So, this whole mechanic ties into LTP as well. Uh we're also hoping through the system to solve some of the issues that exist with, you know, taking components off of a ship, then claiming the ship, losing the components, and or in some cases being able to duplicate some default components. This whole loop is a you know insurance has always been a problem designwise for how this functions. So item imprint v1 allows you to imprint items save that state and then recover it on death or when you claim insurance. All right. So, I have a couple questions here based on Sure. what I heard. You keep mentioning insurance. Are we are we talking Are you saying that insurance will be in alongside V1 or just Yeah, exactly.
00:44:30
>> Correct. It's the I say insurance because that's the same kind of loop in terms of what the services are doing. >> Uh to do this, but basically it's a snapshot we recover from. >> Gotcha. >> Exactly. So when when item recovery v1 comes out, it'll still be much like it is today as far as everybody will just have global. Everybody has LTI on everything at the moment right now until until that very specific gameplay system is implemented. So this is not that >> you're using lowercase I insurance. >> Lowerase I. Yes. >> Sorry, I just needed to I'm like I >> I didn't think ship insurance was coming. >> Yeah. So, just just to clarify that before before folks go off. Um, you're saying you're saying that because it's a change to the entitlement system and everything will just get snapshot and
00:45:16
moved over. When you say people will no longer lose ships, you're talking about that whenever whenever a patch comes out, people come in and they're talking about the ships that they've earned in game, the ships they've either bought with AEC or stolen or whatnot, those will those should persist. If we have an entitlement for something, >> we no longer wipe that between patches at all. We keep it completely. >> So that's should give us a lot more. In fact, it is exactly the way you would expect it to function right now except the way the systems were built in the past didn't account for that. And so there was cases where you could lose something that you own uh because it was left unto stowed in a shard or you know something like that. And so now with the entitlement system we keep that cross batch. So, the first question I have in response to that is how will people get
00:46:06
rid of things? Because because quite frankly, I I might go joy riding one day or I I I might buy a I might buy a thing for AEW and fly it and then decide I don't want it. I don't like it and now it's just sitting there staring at me in the ASOP. If if these things don't go away between patches now, every time I I want to try to I try a ship or I just move away for a ship or or John Crew nerfs the hell out of the ship and I don't want to fly it anymore. >> God damn John Crew. >> Uh I might want to get rid of it. Will there be is is there going to be a mechanism for getting rid of these things? >> Well, not with item imprint, right? As part of this, no. But there are uh I don't want to go too much into details into this, but >> I can give an example of like you have a ship filled with cargo that you stow
00:46:58
into your location inventory in New Babage and you claim that ship, right? In the current way the system works, that cargo's lost, right? That ship will get deleted and you're done, right? You get a new one, >> but it's the same entitlement, right? With the new system, we have the ability to also show you ships that you own that had an entitlement on it. And so what that means is you could claim that ship. You'll get a new, let's say it's a Caterpillar filled with cargo and you're like, I need to claim it for some reason. You can claim the ship. The other ship will be bricked, right? That's how the design is functioning. So it's no longer usable, but you can still retrieve it. You can still retrieve the brricked ship and get it. And then if you destroy the ship or tow it out, then it'll go away from your entitlement. But there's going to be more system of
00:47:45
course to remove that as from your ASOP terminal longer term. But not in this phase, but longer term. Yes. >> Yeah. I'm just thinking about the I'm thinking about the the the long-term players, the the the people who have been here for a while who have acquired a rather massive fleet already. And >> I'm a victim of this, >> you know, and you you start you start buying ships and it's I'm guilty, but there's just sometimes I don't I don't want this anymore. I don't I don't want to I don't want to look at a I don't want to look at a I don't know a rock DS anymore. [laughter] Just want it out of my ASOP. I I I I I I bought it mistakenly from Astro Armada. I just had a momentary memord staring at me in my ASAP for the end of time because you've done a wonderful
00:48:32
thing with item recovery. you know, Versist. Yeah. Some things are saying we don't want your ships anymore. >> I'm just saying some things aren't meant to be persisted. So, I I I just want to take this opportunity to to to just convers. >> How much time do you got? [laughter] >> Uh Jared hates the Rock DS confirmed. Oh, you haven't been watching for a while. if you're just getting that confirmed now. Um, Jared, you're not supposed to be going on shows and telling people you you hate certain ships. It's you're supposed to be championing everything. I'm like, >> "Yeah, I hate the Rock DS. It's just It's just
00:49:25
>> It's comfy though. It's got to get >> Hold on. Let's just do everything the first rock does, but require two people. Look, I've never lied to you. I never will. It's it's the it's the only promise I've ever made, people. you've been mentioning long-term persistence. So, let's let's just wrap up this >> the the the story this storyline of of of of losing of losing stuff, keeping stuff. Uh, the last time last time we had this conversation, uh, you talked about utilizing this this this this entitlement system to this. Is that what we were just talking about or is there more stuff? >> There's more. So, we're I mean there's a lot of work ongoing on this on the long-term persistent side. So, just for those who don't know what long-term
00:50:12
persistent is or LTP um is a mechanism we put in place to allow you to keep things between patches, right? So um the every patch we basically destroy like when you come into four to seven when it comes out uh that's a brand new database right the whole thing is fresh and then we recreate things. Now why do we recreate things? It's because these things are still changing. So the hornet you had in 4.5 is probably different than the hornet you have in 4.6. Item port locations have changed, materials have changed, serialized variables and all the data that goes with it has changed. >> The gold standard Aurora that we just launched is technically an entirely different ship. The the whole entity is different.
00:50:58
>> Exactly. >> And what under the hood to the to the backer it looks like, okay, you just added some you added some fins and blah blah blah, but under the hood, it's an entirely new set of entities. And so, um, in order to, uh, allow us to keep stuff, we've built this system on the side that kind of keeps records of what you own. So, it says you own a hornet, right? Um, that system has always been kind of a not I don't want to say a crutch because it did function for a long time, but we've outgrown it quite a bit. Uh, there are also many cases where you would we would remove records of things that you own because they're in play in a shard. that's been uh proven to be a bit of a bad decision overall. And so that's why we've had uh multiple issues over the years of like players losing ship entitlements in the new patch or having
00:51:47
more items than they were supposed to get like you know some people have shown some screenshots of demultiplication of things uh between patches and so it's been a big issue right so with with the item imprint work we're tying into that we're reducing the footprint of what LTP manages by a lot because it will no longer store your entitlements we just keep those as is. So that's one big bit removed from that system. >> Um the other complexity on that side is that it needs to manage nested inventories and that >> back to the freight elevator thing. >> That's just completely crazy. So, like, you know, I have a handgun stored in the glove box of my Merlin that's attached to my Connie that's parked somehow inside of my, you know, Idris and stowed
00:52:36
in my location inventory. Well, I need to give you a record for that gun, right? And so, that system needs to reread data and store it. And it's it's really complicated >> which is why people have gotten into the habit before a wipe or before not wipe but before a patch >> and slip. Huh? >> Just already I just I know you people. Uh but before a patch people stow things in in certain inventories to have their best chances. >> Yeah. To kind of set it up, right? So um on long-term persistence ultimately we don't want this system, right? Ultimately we want to get to a point where we don't need it. Um so step one is to reduce its footprint. So that's I part of item imprint is is that so
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that's a big deal. Um but the next steps are very start from the very low level uh and will require some comp. We need to be able to migrate your old hornet to the new one. Right? Uh or at least be able to know it changed enough. I need to give you a new one. Right? or being able to just migrate the shape of the hierarchy, the item port locations and the serialized variable formats on these things. Now, the thing that's you got to think about the way the ships are built, right? The entities have components on them which enable them to do something. I'll give an example just for the layman. You have a health component on an entity that says, "Hey, I got a 100 hit points." when that reaches zero then we destroy the entity
00:54:14
or something else happen it destroys itself right that component is written in code there's a game programmer that's maintaining this we actually have a health component and does way more things than this but just to keep it simple so a game programmer is programming this and he needs to persist the value of health so that when this ship is now either put in an inventory then brought back into the game that the values of the health components on the parts on the individual parts have persisted and we reload it. Right? This is true for everything in the game, right? We have serialized variables and components across the game. There's, you know, I think your character at the moment has like 800 serialized variables on it or something like that, right? So, those are all different component. Are you crouched? Are you standing? Are you, you know, uh health of all the the limbs, you know, stuff like that, right?
00:55:03
So the programmers between patches they just change that you know I removed this one you know and I put a new one in and then because you know some of those variables it doesn't matter if it changes. Yeah, >> some of them matter, right? If you change that like it's the it's a different shape, it loads a different CGA model, whatever, right? So that's the big problem about how we need to forward migrate is we need to do this at the very low level. So currently our network team and our online teams are working at this mechanism to be able to differentiate the important from the important SVS, the serialized variables on components. So that's all across all components in the game. There's over 1500 2,000 components individual code components in the game. Uh, so you know, for example, I don't need to know if
00:55:52
you're crouched when I stow you in your inventory, right? I don't need to know that, right? But I need to know that when we're running and you you're crouch, right? So we differentiate the two and then we have a mechanism to migrate the data format from one to the other. But when we get that functionality in and reliable, what that means is that we will just keep the database. And that is huge because now that means there's no longer a process between patches that transfer stuff or moves it around or recmputes things. It's just it's the same database. We're just moving its version forward on demand. Now, we've looked at multiple different options for that. Some of them were like, you know, just migrate people from one to the other, but then we'd have to keep five databases behind. It's just impossible. And so right now we're
00:56:41
working at that option. And that's the longer term vision that we have for that. So first reduce the footprint of the LTP system so it just manages some things not all and then work on the real fundamental issue which is we need forward migration on all this data. How many times in your life has a errant random unexpected serialized variable been the cause of >> in your life? >> I mean it's crazy. This is the single most important thing because like in case you guys don't know every time we do either well full patch is easy because we patch server client hybrid everything goes in one at once. Uh but when we uh perform hot fixes and god knows we've done a lot of hot fixing this year right? uh that's part of our process now, but there's like specific steps where we have our our our live QA
00:57:30
team need to do compatibility checks and uh any change to any serialized variable added, removed, change the format, change the data, whatever incompatible client. And so getting our our our processes in place to catch those before they get introduced, right? Uh is really taxing because you know there's always a oh yeah also fix this bug and that make the whole hot fix incompatible and we can't launch it. So we have to backtrack, change our approach, whatever. And so that's the kind of thing we're dealing with. This will also solve that if we we can make it. And before somebody says, "You should have just made a simpler game." Benwa, [laughter] >> have you considered just making a simple >> simpler game? Yeah. Yeah. >> Cool. >> Um, all right. I want to move into our quality of life section here.
00:58:19
>> Uh, we talked about it a little bit uh before because I just we've just we just talked a whole lot about not losing things and all the efforts being made to not losing things. But there are other major quality of life things for me personally. >> After the not losing the things, it's social. >> It it it's social. I the ability to group with people, the ability to communicate with people, the ability not to communicate with people, the ability to just to just be like, "Oh, hey, that's a bad person. That's a bad person with bad thoughts and bad intentions and boop boop and kick them into the pit from 300."
00:59:08
>> Sure. >> And whatnot. Never to see or hear from that person again. Right. the the the the all the tools for joining up. Finally, people have been creating and managing orgs on our website since 2013. >> Yeah. Yeah. 13. >> And this is 2026. And those orgs still not in game. >> Um >> what are we doing? >> It's it's we're we're reenacting a little play because Ben Juan and I have had this conversation almost verbatim for a little time. I I'm just doing the conversation we had in private uh for you guys right now. Um so my question Benois >> friend person whom chat has dubbed brother my brother
00:59:55
>> from another mother >> when Benois when please dear God in heaven above or down below who do I have to talk to? >> Sure >> give me something good for social. Yeah. Well, so what is it now? It's all a blur. Uh a social universe, right? The last panel that we did at Citizen Con >> that outlines the vision of what we want to do with social. Um now with the year that we just had, >> uh we had to take a little bit of a detour on that initial plan, but right now we we have we have completely formed the social strike team. And so a bit like the heroes team, right? The social strike team its only mission is to execute this plan. Right. And so um
01:00:44
>> sorry don't bury the lead. There is now an official dedicated team on this >> social strike team. Yes. Okay. Exactly. And so this group uh is currently looking at all of the components that make up the social systems now. Right. Uh fortunately for us the work didn't stop on this side. Even though we couldn't enact the changes in the game the on the backend side of things there's been a lot of progress on social and so even though the systems look primitive in game their capabilities have have grown quite a bit even in 25 >> uh we do not using >> so we do have a block list that we uh leverage now it's simplistic but because we didn't have the UI resources to do it completely but uh moving into this this strike team right covers all areas of social so Um the plan is to go into four
01:01:35
different uh pillars for it. So the first order of business is uh the comink app. So the comink app is like one of the oldest mobile glass application we still have. Uh it's kind of an eyesore because it's like from a dark you know ghost of future futures past. It's like from 200 I want to say 1918 at this point style-wise. Um very old technology still use the legacy even UI framework that we had in the game. So we're completely eliminating that tab. We're bringing in forward the social uh application that we've shown at Citizen Con. So that design is moving forward. Um so replacing that chat widget, right? So the the entire chat experience in the
01:02:22
game, we're completely overhauling this from the top at the moment. So we're right in the process of changing that uh and hooking it up to the new systems. Uh revamping things like you know social notifications. Currently in our mobile we only have one kind of level of notification which is like ultra important. So to have a proper social experience, you need to have these like, you know, system updates, system notifications, like someone joins, someone leaves, whatever. Uh looking at things like combat log and all this the stuff that we've looked at in the in the social universe panel. So we're actively building this now. Uh and that's going to be the first we don't know I'm not I'm not going to say which patch is going to land in. So our schedule is twofold. There's a content patch schedule and there's a feature schedule.
01:03:09
The features have to be have need to have leeway because it depends on where they're going to land. But that's going to be the first update to social will be come link app, right? So rich party information friend tracking chat app. So we're working on this right now actively >> for a 2026 release. Yes. I mean it's like you mentioned it's kind of urgent at this point that we do something there. Um this will automatically roll into the next keep your dad here. Come on. [laughter] >> On the the next uh milestone for the social strike team is going to be
01:03:57
looking at the party finder mechanic, right? which basically allows you to uh advertise your party uh and then get people to join in. Like let's say you're looking for, you know, a gunner and some FPS guys for your mission, then you can advertise that. If you're looking for, you know, friends to go do a specific event, you can do that as well. So, PartyFinder, we're hoping is going to be a way for you to find friends on a given shard really rapidly. Also, tie that in with your friendship and your contacts. Uh so that will be kind of we're building on the first release which we'll have now friend and info tracking into that and so that's going to be super interesting. That's the second system we want to bring in. Uh and then obviously the final not the final number three of four right is the org system. And so uh in that space we're taking the
01:04:47
horses on the website from 2013 and we're uh moving them completely. Obviously, the technology we used to build that in 2013 are obsolete. They're, you know, it's it's a really old system. So, we're bringing all of this data back into a game service to manage orgs uh to surface that obviously game side. So, now have org management screens uh have your organization chat in the game uh and then actually be able to create your organization from the game as well as well as surface it outside. So, that's like okay now orgs are in the game. That's the first that >> that's that's the whole name and then the org you know. >> Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Like and this will probably I mean we're still having internal discussions about how that surfaces you know in our game. Nothing is you know always set in stones but you
01:05:34
know probably going to tie into uh FPS scanning radar uh you know additions to the when you fly your ship to identify others with scanning and so the orgs will be part of that. That's it. Visibility in game chat in game for your orgs. Actually having your organization communications. Yeah, that's that's a whole another series of conversations, you know, weighing immersion versus running around and seeing it burns when I PVP. >> Above people's heads. It's like >> So, >> let me solo her. >> Ju just [laughter] >> fun fact, I got to write the original guidance at Blizzard for that back back in 2004 [laughter] for World of Warcraft. Yeah. I I I got to make the original list of >> these are examples of really bad uh guild names for to train game masters way back when.
01:06:25
>> chat, you've been saying it. It's next on the list. >> VOIPE. >> VOIPE. If you're doing all this all this stuff, VOIPE, >> we're looking at VOIPE. [snorts] >> Such an important element. >> Sure. It's all part of it. >> Uh uh uh Graham tells me it's entirely your fault. >> Graham is >> I don't want to say it. Graham did [laughter] Graham did not say that. He heavily implied it though. Uh no, >> Gravis is Graham is more savvy than I am. He didn't he knew not to say it outright. >> Yeah, that's right. We love him. But uh but he's wrong. No, but uh Okay, so VOIPE, we're doing improvements there on the backend side of things. So VOIPE is mainly, you know, right now heavily affected by the shard size. So the original design for this was really made
01:07:12
for the 100 servers and so we haven't had a chance to go back there at all. As part of this work, this team is also going to look at uh the infrastructure for voice voice transmission um and we're going to try to you know make it scale to the proper thing. So one element that we're we're talking about on chat and comms is is that um we're probably going to be moving away from the uh server chat. So what the the the original you know global 600 player chat and move into regional chats like a true MMO so that you know it's tied to the region that you are uh maybe multiple channels for that and so VO will also be affected by that because it also powers proximity chat uh and so proximity voice sorry so we're looking at voice transmission from the top to bottom we're changing the whole the
01:08:00
whole back end for this to make it scale there. >> What do you have against Baron's chat? Baron's chat was dope. >> Baron's chat was I I mean I mean apparently Baron's chat was so dope we implemented it here and have had it for the last 10 years. >> That's right. Correct. >> So correct. >> Sorry. >> We're also like out of this there's also some uh movement on uh player reporting for bad behavior. So, not just blocking, which is, you know, is is something that we we have now, but that we want to expand on, but also like player reporting on for other players that are, you know, either bad behavior, profanity in chat, things like that. Uh, obviously, we don't at CG don't have a a large, you know, moderation team, uh, in game. Uh, so we're going to need some automated help there that will come and,
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you know, clean up some of these elements. So, we're we're trying to, you know, really uh tackle communications, you know, from the top there with that strike team. so there's social, there's not ever losing an item. Shout out to gameplay engineering director Yens. Uh, that was that was his that was his major one. And then that was that was his uh one. Uh, didn't feel strongly enough to come on the show though. >> No. ends. >> Yeah, next time. Next time we do a duo, >> let's sign him up right now. >> So, not losing things. >> social tools. We'll throw VOIPE in with social tools. >> Chat, partyfinder orgs is what we're going in order >> as as far as far as major quality of
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life. I want to ask you, you personally, I I'm I'm allowed to say things personally sometimes. Uh I do it often on my live shows >> and then get in trouble for it afterwards. Ben, I want your personal thing. If What is your big bugaboo? What is your big quality of life bugaboo? The thing >> personal. >> I've got two. I've added one. [laughter] >> Scope crate. >> Yeah. Okay. So, I would say for me in terms of quality of life, I I love to play the game in a kind of a larger setup. Uh, so I have I have a kind of a a flight seat that I like to operate to play the game. And this thing has roughly 13 devices connected to the
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game. Managing bindings is literally the worst. And so that's my pet peeve. If there was one thing that I could do for my own game experience, like other than like the in-game elements, it would be completely control bindings. uh you know currently we did we we rely on device order for some things and so like literally you need to have like a kind of almost a common order for the devices on the on your machine. Uh sharing these profiles is very difficult. Uh being able to bind onto multiple devices you know to you know to really benefit from that. Being able to bind on multiple like the same action on multiple devices for me is super key right. That would be my absolute personal thing. Quality of life to solve would be
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device handling in general. >> And you're announcing you've created a Hero Strike team for this. [laughter] >> No, I wish I could just do that, but it' be cool, you know. >> So, that's not something coming soon. >> Well, there is work being done on the control systems, right? But not not not that I could say it's coming soon to Star Citizen. [sighs] Yeah, unfortunately there's a lot of work there [laughter] >> and while you're at you know while yeah you know it'd be nice if it stored them and saved them you know you know h having a system for actually configuring the made sense and whatever that's all great and what but if I got to redo it every patch >> yeah I know >> so >> saving them cloud save across machines would be great right >> yeah yeah exactly [laughter] to me then >> I mean it's the kind of thing where like
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we we do I do maintain a couple of of rigs at CI and people always changing bindings, but the problem is I can't reapply my bindings because it's not the system anyway. >> So, there are there are there are sits in the office. >> Uh there's sims in just about every office at this point, aren't there? Yes. >> And Benois is a as if he didn't have enough to do. It's it's his little pet project. He's he's he's he's intricately involved in them. It's a it's every time I come by and he's at a he's at a sim pet, I'm like, "You have more important things to do." He's like, and it's always like, "SOMEBODY CHANGED MY BINDINGS." [laughter] SORRY, PETE. I I knew the the emphasis on it. It's just the number of times I've walked past this man who it just like >> So, yes. >> I mean, it's because Yogi and I always are fighting against what the best
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binding is. You know, mine is clearly better, but you know, [clears throat] >> so we've decided at some point we'll just fix the binding system so that we don't have to argue. Just a little bit when you want. >> And you had a second one. Uh so my second one for inside the game is that we're [sighs and gasps] I've always found in general like uh you know like mission chains is a thing that I like I feel we our gameplay is always onedimensional right like you do a thing you finish it missions so we're I know because I know of things right I know we're working in on an updated mission system >> you're talking about the limitations of the existing missions you're not talking about the quality of the work of people that are working on these things. You're talking about the tools that they have to work >> the system around that doesn't allow us
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to do these massive quest chains, right? And I think that that for me would be a huge quality of life because you could go onto a long adventure that takes you across multiple things. And so >> Elliot Malty was about to be on the corner of the building right now, [laughter] you know, talking about the tools that that that are missionable. Exactly. >> Exactly. So, I know we're working on we are working on a on a an updated way to make missions that is a lot more uh scalable for that, right? And for me, that's like like a big quality of life because I feel you can go in a in a long on a longer adventure and I think that's a big quality of life overall. Okay. I I think that's I know that that's one that a lot of people would would would would comment on. I mean, what they're doing within the tool set that that that they've had for so long.
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Um, I think we should talk about a little bit of why that Well, maybe not why, but we can acknowledge we can acknowledge that the tool set that was originally developed was not robust enough. It it was it was it was not it was not in line with the directions of a proper MMO. Right. Uh I it's it's no trying to decide how how candid I want to be here [laughter] and whatnot. It's a mission system. It's a mission system that can't give you a reward for doing something like like we we we built the first version of the mission system where you do a thing, you achieve a goal and we can't hand you a thing,
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>> right, >> in in your and that that it's I'll just use that simple example as as as as a as a coloring of the limitations of the existing mission system for however that was built and why that was built and who that was built and everything. We've made changes internally to fix it. We've made changes internally to to to adjust it, to replace it. It's currently underway. >> What they've managed to do with the limitations has been stellar. I was just I was just uh uh I was just seeing stats about this. The event that's on right now, the event that's on right now built with the existing system, built with limitations, has our highest concurrency in the last two years outside of an Invictus or an IAE. So it's like it's like they're doing tremendous work. They're doing tremendous work with the
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work with the tools that they have. >> We've got to unlock those tools. >> That's exactly right. >> We've got to unlock tools for them. >> Exly. That's for me. That's the quality of life update >> because if they can do this with that. >> Imagine what they could do >> if they could actually chain these things together and and and and and segment them off and and have one continue after another and and stuff like this. So and tie into reputation, economy, you know, so that it actually is one big loop, right? >> All right, cool. >> Now that I've saved your life from LA, mall be killing you. [laughter] >> Um, let's talk about some features currently in development. >> Crafting. >> Uh, tech preview just happened recently. >> How's that going? >> Good, actually. Uh, I mean, I don't want
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to say surprisingly good because the team did amazing work on it, but it's it's it's been going super well. I mean, there's a lot of work left, right? But I think that we got what we needed from the tech preview. Um, and it wasn't a complete meltdown, which is, you know, always a good thing. Uh but um you know the the team is working really hard to try to hit potentially a patch soon with crafting which uh you know I really believe that crafting is such a big step for Star Citizen as a whole. Uh you know it it it's just uh it will be a different game with the crafting system in place. And so, >> uh, the work that those teams are doing right now to bring this to life is
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incredible. I think that we're leveraging the technology that we have to, you know, be able to create runtime items with different, you know, properties and things like that. And so, so far the the first tech preview has been surprisingly uh, solid and and a success, I would say. And so, now we're writing the cotails of that tech preview to, you know, try to see for a launch window for crafting. And you can't have crafting without the inventory rework. >> Correct. That's right. >> And and and that that we I actually I rarely ask a question I don't know the answer to already. The inventory rework is in the same tech preview, right? >> Uh I don't think it was I don't think it was >> because if you can't So So you can't have crafting without the inventory rework, but the the tech preview for crafting doesn't have >> technically you can. They can be. >> It would just be really bad. >> Exactly. It's it's just it's more from a
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game design point of view. Uh but the the inventory work is going really well. Uh I mean some of the people have been reposting screens recently on the original concept, right? Uh that was shown. I mean it's starting to look like that. So that's pretty good. Uh >> when does that go into tech preview? >> We're hoping very soon because like at this point the every version that I've seen is fully functional and so we just really want to solve one thing. This is one and you say quality of life like if I have a third one to add to my list. Right. The speed of rendering of icons in the inventory. Right. >> Right. And so like right now you open your inventory and there's always a moment where it's rendering RT like the render to texture icons for each of
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those. Now in case you don't know this is a full 3D scene that gets rendered flat right there. Like we have versions of this in previous concepts where it's full 3D. Mhm. >> It's, you know, super nice, but >> takes forever to load >> and the the user experience is not great, right? And no matter the amount of work we're going to put on the UI and the functionality of inventory, the speed of the UI is is really a thing that we need to improve. And so that's the part that we're still iterating on now. We've done massive improvements, but there's still, you know, we need to we need to dial that in perfectly because that's the the part we really want to solve. >> But you feel good about it? >> I feel good about it. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. You feel good enough to say 4.7 in March? >> I think so. I think so. >> Don't put the camera. When he says when
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he says that, you got to put the camera on him. No, you look at the camera. You say inventory. >> I think inventory is going to be in 47. I think so. [snorts] You're going to put the small text after this, right? >> No, this is live. [laughter] This This is live, baby. No, no, no, no, no small text. And so if inventory rework is 47, I'm not going to push you on crafting. It's a much it's a super complicated thing or whatever. But but >> and the teams are working really hard for that launch window if they can make it >> for that launch window. >> We're we're pushing really hard for that launch window. >> You're push you're pushing really hard to get crafting in 47. >> In March. >> No promises. >> No. Pushing hard pushing pushing pushing hard is fair. Pushing hard is fair. And it's in line with what I' I've seen.
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Yeah. >> I've seen. So I won't correct you on that or whatever. You're >> Now, we don't know what surprises are ahead. Yeah. >> But yeah. >> So keep keep tech pre keep tech previewing. >> Keep tech previewing. Exactly. >> Yep. And for for for for your part, >> keep logging in to the tech previews and keep testing. It's it's I cannot stress this enough. The the the more involved folks are in those things, the more likely we are to be able to deliver them. >> And the feedback is really key. Yeah, most of the feedback's okay. Some of it's [laughter] some of it's trash to be completely honest. Small small amount of it. It's just it's just what >> Hey, it is what it is. >> Hey, the candidate goes both ways. How's instancing going?
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>> Very good. Actually, the we actually had a summit this week about instancing uh about getting all of the levels set up to support it um at this point. So maybe I can do a quick recap on uh what we've discussed on instancing before. So talked about server meshing, right? So instancing is basically a an additional system on top of of of server meshing which allows us to take an area of space and give it to a a server in the mesh to manage, right? Doesn't matter which one. Uh the geographical if I want the spatial position of this thing has doesn't matter, right? Um so for example when you go to your hanger right now that is an instance right so what we're we're doing is we're taking this system that manages this and we're making a true instance manager uh with it. So we
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currently have the backend service completed for this. Um and so uh what that provides is the mechanism for creating an instance that you uh that is associated with you or your party and having you know rules for how many this instance is made for how many players enforcing player caps and party caps for that instance managing the life cycle of the instance. So, hey, we want, you know, go back to my wow days. I mean, maybe that's dated now, but like your molten core instance lives for 10 days, right? So, the instance manager is in charge of doing that. So, that systems in place now. And so, the teams are currently working at how the entrance to the instance is going to work, right? So, well, we know how it's going to work, but like how it ties into level.
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So, level designers put in, you know, an entrance way. At what point is are you crossing the boundary? What brings you to the instance? What brings you out? Uh transport is a requirement for instancing. So just ties into all the discussion we just had like transit cannot bring you to an instance but transport can. >> So basically we want to power that up there. So you can imagine um an area of space that you walk into through a SAS or an elevator or a transit train and when you come out you're in instance but you don't even see >> you never see that loading >> demarcations exact exactly now you're inside the instance you play inside the instance you can gather items inventories whatever boss fights etc and then you can exit through another transit link and that's it you're back in the world
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>> so if we do this right if we do this right you should never be aware that you're doing it. We we might have to put some kind of indicator on there because of like like like raid locks or whatever. We know we talked about municipal works, you know, and like this. So, we might there might have to be some UI stuff that that to to tell you to >> Yeah. Some some screens will show you like, oh, you can't enter this >> cuz from an experience, we're it's it's there's no load screen there there. There's no hold on, please wait. We're transferring you to, you know, whatever. Like you say, it's just it's just you're going to go and suddenly the world around you is going to melt away and you will be in a section of the universe that is dedicated entirely to you and your party. >> Exactly. To play it, right? And then, you know, we're also talking about at the moment how the instance manager responds to the mission system because
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we might want to be able to change what level you're going into when you pass the the threshold or things like that. And so, um or the access rights, right? So if you think back, man, I keep going back to wow. This sucks, but whatever. >> In the good old WoW days, you know, you need to do lower black rock spire and at some point someone has a key. That's the requirement that unlocks upper black rock spire. >> Well, we have we're thinking about mechanics in that vein. >> That allow the mission system to lock or unlock or access rights to an instance. And so all of this is currently being managed, but it's going really well. most of the networking uh capabilities that we needed have been added already. So, one of them is that currently when you go to your instance, the way the server actually tracks that is we we put a flag on
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>> on your character that enables you to stream in your hanger and actually view your hanger when you go there. And we remove that flag when you leave it or when you go elsewhere when the hanger uh is removed. And so in uh in the code up to now, we only had the ability for a single one of those on your character. So we could only give you access to one instance, but we need to be able to give you multiple access to multiple instances because we might have areas of transit that cross like one instance to another instance, things like that. We're going a bit deep with this, but at the moment those mechanics are are ready. So the networking bit is done. So now we're really about crafting the first experience that we want to do with instancing >> and the first instance content will be Siege of Origin. We announced that >> Redux Sri Redex says France.
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>> Um some uh you know that's that's scheduled to come online. Uh we talked about it during Citiz Direct. Uh that's that's that's one of the that's one of the content drops that are scheduled for this year. >> Yeah. Um, basically everything you should, you know, we've been talking a little, we've been talking more about a schedule than I probably intended at the beginning of this thing, but everything you saw talk about stuff. >> Sorry. Everything that you saw at Citizen Con Direct last year is scheduled for 2026. >> So, uh, and we announced at the beginning of the the year with the first ISC that we're now going we've now moved to a bimonthly, that's once every two months for those who like homonyms. I'm not above recycling a joke. uh uh content length. So if you know the the first one was in January, we've already stated the the second one's in in March. The third one will be in in May like it
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like there's like there's always a a patch in May for very important reasons. >> so forth and so forth. So you so when you when you it's one of those things where when you look at the content for Citizen on Direct, you can sort of start to reverse engineer where where things go. I'm not going to tell you. I'm saying you've got the tools. You've got the tools. You can pretty much kind of >> gather where everything is going to be and I'd like to see uh your schedules. And that's just content. That's just the content stuff because that's really what we talked about at at >> I can tell you like from being with the team this week working on instancing. Everybody's like super stoked. Like it's it's like the energy is really high on like oh man you know how you enter it, how you exit it, what gameplay is going to be in it. There's also a big piece of this which is like some designers, you know, in this case can design an exper
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uh an experience that is repeatable. Most of the content we've produced this year was, you know, there's a PVE experience for it, but it's fundamentally in a PvP zone. So, that is giving them those tools to make something that's fun and repeatable as an experience. >> And uh I mean I I just the energy is really good. >> No, no, Chad's like Squadron 42, whatever. I ain't talking about Squadron 42. I made one very plain spoken, reasonable comment about Squadron 42 the last time we got together and it got press articles, so I ain't saying nothing. [laughter] I'm talking about Star Citizen. Star Citizen. Star Citizen. Um, where we at?
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I want to inject something. >> Inject. >> I want to inject something. Yeah, let's go. >> Something we haven't talked about. It came It came from the chat. It came from the chat. >> Um, regional servers. >> regional servers. We We have never had a conversation >> about reg, shape, or form about regional servers. It was there in the chat and whatnot. And I think I'm I'm put you on the spot here. >> What What are they asking? Uh it just says regional servers when ju just what what what can we do to help the people who play in the various regions of the world have a better experience? Is that the answer? Is regional I guess what I'm asking is is regional servers the answer or is there some or are we going towards something else different that I've literally never asked you about? >> Well, I don't know in this case if they're asking for what I think they are but let's talk about regions. So we are
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we already have regions, right? So when you play the game, you can pick one of the global availability regions that we deserve that we service. So obviously the US, North America is one. Um the Europe is one, we have uh East Asia, Australia, um I forget the other ones, but I think we have another one. So typically we look at user data, right? And if it if a an area reaches critical mass right at some point then it's worth it to deploy shards there. So and have shards hosted in that region. So uh we do it like between US and EU. Obviously they share our common backend. So your inventory system is is hosted in one central area but then the actual game servers you're playing on for latency
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reasons is going to be closer to your area. right now. Um, you know, we we are revisiting our region kind of distribution for a couple reasons like we've done some pretty large without naming any uh any details here, but we're we've we're in the process of doing some pretty large migrations uh you know in in how we host the game. So there's even if it's a bit transparent, there is a lot of changes happening there. And so we are revisiting our our our region map uh kind of at the moment. But typically the way that we've done this is we look at player data and if we reach critical mass in an area then it's worth it to start deploying some shards there. But it needs to be more than one, right? Because deploying one shard in one area is problematic because um you know there
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are cases where a shard goes into trouble for some reason uh and before a hot fix actually deploy that shard is no longer usable. So we need to have you know it needs a mass to be able to go there. Yeah, exactly. A proper cluster size >> uh to be able to get there. And the short version of that is you're currently undergoing conversations about where >> Yeah, we're we're looking at that because we we've done some changes. So, we have access to more regions than we used to. So, we're looking at that, but I can't promise any changes. Again, it's it's completely based on player uh player using the service. >> So, during the keybind news conversation, you know, every once in a while I'll check Teams just to see if I still have a job during the shows. Um, which is which is another which is another joke I get I get accused of making quite often and repeatedly, but
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it isn't a joke. I really do scroll and check. Um, Jeffrey P. I added an R there. Bearded >> bearded. >> Didn't mean to add a >> What did bearded CI say? >> He sent me a Jira >> for keybindings. Exporting custom keybinds to XML doesn't export all >> 2013 or what. [laughter] >> He's just sending me Jiraas now. I don't know what you think I'm going to do with this, Bearded, but thank you. Thanks for watching, Bearded. >> Thanks, Bearded. I I haven't talked to Jeff in a while. >> That's actually a guy we should talk about if we were going to reevaluate regions. Maybe get him on the show next. >> You want You want to talk about Jeff? Let's talk about Jeff. He can't do anything about it. We know he's working. >> Yeah, that's right. >> So, so what do you think he's hiding behind that beard? >> We're we're we're in the final stretch.
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We're in the We're in the final stretch. We only have a handful of topics. >> He does have a big beard. That's not a joke. He's not called bearded for anything. Um, VR VR kind of came out of I mean, it's one of those things we've been talking about it. We we talk about it here and there. I mean, let let's let's be real. We've talked about a lot of things over the years. >> I mean, we've talked about a lot of things over. >> I mean, we used to have VR in 2014. [groaning] >> I say air quotes that air quotes. That's that's like saying I'm a baseball player because I've played I I played a couple little league games. It's let's it's >> a long time ago. >> I think it was Oculus Oculus Devkit one >> is what [laughter] was supported at the time. Anyway,
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>> and I used it for 45 minutes and ended up in the fetal position for the next three hours. VR is not for me. I want to preface this by saying VR is not for me, >> but it's for a lot of people. It's for a lot of people. And uh uh at the end of last year, surprise, a a not a fully blown or fully cooked, fully developed feature like like we would normally refer to them. Some what what how do we refer to it? An experimental experimental feature of VR. >> Where did this come from? What's what's going on? [laughter] And and do it without saying the word Santa silven. >> No. No. Sure. Yeah. Well, so the there are a lot of developers at CI that really like immersive experience and work, right? And so, uh there's a contingent of developers uh you know,
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also one specific one that have been really trying to get the star engine to properly support VR. And so, you know, as an experiment and to build that, uh, you know, the the these guys and, you know, I'm going to, you know, Sylvan in specific has been really pushing hard to try to get, uh, you know, Star Engine to work in VR. Uh, experimented with multiple different approaches, you know, over the last couple months. uh settled on the open XR approach and was actually able through his own you know passion and then support from his other colleagues right to you know get stuff fixed so that we could support you know VR in specific cases and so um you know that's that's how we decided at some point hey you know what like this is
01:35:25
actually pretty cool let's let's release it right like we have a a unique chance at CI to be able to work on a custom engine and and you know working on custom technology and So encouraging that effort, we decide to release an experimental mode to see, hey, let's see if people like it. And uh I mean the response has been uh pretty impressive overall. I think that it's a the results that we're able to get in VR are are a testament to some of the decisions over the years that were taken and how the game has been made. And so, uh, there's there's a lot of little things that just shine when you now put the VR headset on that, you know, maybe if you're playing just on the PC, you're not going to appreciate as much. But, you know, uh, and, you know, I'm going
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to go Chris Roberts here, but Chris, you know, always insisted on, you know, taking the difficult approaches to build certain features, right? >> Mhm. >> Uh, there's a lot of things like, oh, we could have done simpler on this one. But yeah, but we did the hard road and we actually delivered it. And so now when you put the VR headset on, well, you've got reverse IK in the seat, right? And it's like and it's the kind of thing that now all these decisions have paid off in this VR. >> It's a pain in the ass in 2017. >> When when when when poor Evo was sure was was on it. And now so many years later, it's like, oh >> that part was plugandplay because of it. >> Yeah. And I mean the even internally the arrival of VR even before the experimental mode with ship was you know tremendous. Like I spent you know a couple of hours here around our our VR rigs uh next to my sim rigs to with the
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ship team going like oh I want to see my ship in VR let's go let's go and then you know cuz designing for VR is a bit different like sense of space changes and whatever. So that's really a truly an experimental mode that we've been pushing. Obviously, there's a lot more people around Silan to help him out and and get this there, but you know, the the I think that this is a testament to kind of the technical framework that we have at CIG that allows that kind of of effort to not go unnoticed and you kind of show up in the game. >> Chat's currently arguing about whether VR is a low priority or high priority and stuff like this. It's >> and the priority at this point doesn't matter because it's we're just it's an experimental mode. Y >> it's a bit like eyetracking. It's a bit like, you know, all of these side projects, right? Like head tracking, eye tracking. >> It's not an initiative on the same scale as the inventory rework or as crafting.
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It's not it's not it's not a full initiative. It's it has not taken a priority over absolutely something else. I've only got a couple more questions for you and they're they're kind of the big ones and yes people, it's about the thing that you want you want us to talk about. Saving it for the end. I've been doing this for a while. Um, but I wanna I want I want to take a few questions from the chat right now before we get to it because we're actually doing okay on time here. >> All right. >> Um, is the inventory rework is it just UI or will it actually apply any additional functionality to stacking and unstacking and stuff like that? >> There's additional functionality but obviously the big of the groundwork was the UI you know uh usability but if you look at the mockups right you also see equipment. So it's not just inventory, it's actually equipment plus assignment
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on your character. So the paper doll approach u there's also uh some other elements like proximity inventories that are part of that which are pretty large functionality wise and I think will have an impact. >> So it's not just UI there's there's a lot more client architecture also the way the >> the way the UI pulls the data caches the data and displays it. uh, more Twitch drops. There will be more Twitch drops this year, uh, already in that. Uh, yes to medical. Why didn't Levki mold situation have us rescuing NPCs with medical ships? We'll talk about that in two weeks when we've got uh Elliot and Torsten on the on the show here. We'll talk we'll talk about that whole event and stuff. So, we'll save that question for them so they can speak about their own work. Um, [laughter] when Nicks won this year.
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Uh, that's the thing that got me in trouble. The thing I I I I did I I I I hope and I it got articles. CR spokesperson says he hopes this will be whatever. I'm like, "Oh, yeah." [laughter] let's see. There's the There was a gosh, there was there's one more. I can't find it. There was one more question I want to sneak in before the questions that are already on here. Um, all right. This section is called final hot seat stuff is >> I just read final hot stuff. >> You missed a [laughter] word. Um things that are happening in the game today. Economy exploits. Economy exploits. And if if you're
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watching the show and you're and you and you're wondering why I'm talking about economy exploits, it's because I'm going to get to the next question that you've got. The question you've had the whole time. So >> yeah. Let's talk about the economy exploits. >> What's happening? >> There are exploits. [laughter] >> Be better. [gasps] >> Well, so uh you know in terms of the economy in general, right? Uh there there's a couple I think it's up we're up to seven or eight right now. So we first of all we have a strike team on this at the moment, right? Looking at all these different things. Uh there's a couple of ways in which you know there's been potentially duping uh ways to earn rewards it's not supposed to have.
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>> I think we're beyond potentially. >> No. No. Well, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Okay. Fair. >> And um and so we're looking at all these exploit vectors, right? To fix them obviously that needs to be prioritized. Uh the big conversation that was spawned from that is like you know we're a game in development but we're also delivering life service right and so >> we don't have a framework for this in that internally we don't when we get exploit reports we don't necessarily automatically prioritize them. Uh so the conversation that was spawned was like okay well there are going to be exploits right it's it every game has a series of exploits for its entirety of of its life right no game has no exploits and so the question is more how do you respond for
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it right and so historically exploits have always taken a lower priority to ongoing development right >> I'm going to jump in you're tense switching between past and present here I want to be clear you're talking about the past right now >> the past He's he's he's tin switching a couple times. It makes it sound like he's talking about today. It's like we're talking about the past guys. >> So in the past, right, it's a exploits would fall be bugs like any other, right? >> Depending on the severity sometimes they got escalated, but we didn't have a process for this. So now the conversation is about when we do get an exploit report, how do we deal with it? Like how do we escalate it? How do we respond to it? How do we deal with it? Right? And so for the current ongoing exploits that we know about that have a damaging effect on the economy currently, we're we're dealing with them
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the same way we've dealt with the other hero strike teams. And so we're looking at each one of them and confirming the fixes, right? Because sometimes, you know, >> you fix an exploit, there's a second vector right away. So those are complicated fixes sometimes. So we're we're dealing with these things right away. But the the big thing that also this puts in light is that even a a minor exploit at the moment has a tre a very large effect on the economy because there are many limits that are not in place. And so at the moment we're also looking at overall economy design and limits around you know selling inventory capacity uh exchange limits ongoing active tracking of player trades and or large purchases
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things like that. Now we want to make clear that we want the economy to be fun and you know movable but we also need some protectionism behind it. And so that's what we're looking at at the moment. Now, I don't have all the solutions. I didn't write them down or, you know, show them out. But this is the spirit that we're in at the moment on these e economy exploits. >> You're you're you're you're >> you're being very diplomatic about something. I I want to point out some of the struggle with talking about this. >> We can't tell you how we're doing. >> We can't tell you what We can't tell people what we're doing. Yes. Because because every single every single let's let's back this up a bit. So an exploit exists. An exploit exists. We
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whatever timeline you want. We we'll just make it simple. We we'll make it real simple and just and do days for the point of conversation here. Exploit exists on day zero. On day one it comes to our attention. It comes to our attention. By day two we figured out we we we figured out what's causing it. would cause it on day three. We could fix it potentially potentially depending on the severity like but we don't automatically do that because there's stuff to be learned by leaving it in certain cases. We we we f we find more information out about who's doing it. We find we find where it's coming from about other vectors. We found like any bug. >> Okay, we found this cause but sometimes there's five other causes for every bug. So you find this cause of an exploit, but maybe there's four other causes for
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that same exploit. And if we patch this one up right now, we may hide the other ones and we won't discover them for much much later. And so go there's this incredible dance that I get to I I get to see I get to sit here and watch. You know, I I get to sit here and watch you guys you guys do occasionally. I I speak up with a thing and you're you're you're very kind to humor me here and there from time to time, but I get to watch you and and and the player experience team and your programmers and everybody involved do this amazing dance of of of finding these things and researching these things and and and working out how they happen. And >> we can't it's one of those things we come here on a show and I want to talk about it. We t we were talking about this last night, but we can't go through all the methodologies. We can't discuss all we can't discuss all the solutions because then knowledge is power and if
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you know if if they know what we're doing then they can around it. It's it's this incredible incredible dance >> that is frustrating and it can often look like we're sitting on our hands doing absolutely nothing. >> And that's an unfortunate frustrating side effect of the proper way to do this. >> Yeah. Well, every everything time it touches security, anti-che, economy, exploits, it falls in that >> it's going to fall into that area where we can't be as as transparent as we'd like to be. >> And they're saying in chat now and they're not wrong like like like like like cheats and exploits have sunk so many games. It >> it it's it's we we they have to get a hold on them. We have to get a handle on them. We have to we have to fix them and whatnot. And again, but it's this it's
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this dance. It it can't always be right away. >> It can't at least that's one of the things that alpha affords us. It it's we have to we we we take the time to make sure that we do it right. Take the time to make sure we research. Take the time that we're actually finding >> all the bad actors and blah blah blah. It's just at this and at the same time it's annoying because you want to go to Reddit, you want to go to Spectrum, you want to go to Twitter, whatnot >> and just scream we're on it, we're doing it, whatever, but you can't tip your hat anything. You can't you can't you it's because every every >> well I put my colon eyes colon emoji sometimes on stuff on spectrum just oh you know you can't say we're actively chasing this one because then the people are using it scatter and we don't find
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them. It's like this >> it's it's one of the hardest aspects of game development communication >> especially for a project like us that prides itself on on being as open as we are. You know, people will be like, "Open development? I can't believe you're not telling us. That doesn't mean it's open." I'm like, "Open development means we're more open than any other person, any other company in the history of the medium. It doesn't mean we share every single thing, every single moment the minute it comes out." I do sometimes and I get in trouble. >> But [laughter] but it's it's really difficult. I I >> It's a difficult balancing act for sure. >> It's terrible because there's been so many moments when I want to go out and scream, "We got this. We're on it. We're we we're we're doing this. It's fix." But we just can't. You can't because it makes it harder. >> It makes it harder to do. >> Well, yeah. And you're going to miss
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things. That's the main thing. [sighs] >> But, you know, Hey, can I uh can we flip seats for a second? Because you know, you you just grilled me for what? How long have we gone been going for now? >> Almost two hours. >> Yeah. I Well, I have one question that I want to switch seats for. You ready for it? >> You want to ask me a question? >> I want to ask you a question. really on one at least one. >> I can see you looking at your laptop like you got notes. All right. What >> I have my I have my note question right here. >> What do you have for me, man? >> So, is the battle cruiser actually happening? That thing [clears throat] actually going whiplash. [laughter] Just whiplash. What does that have to do [laughter] with anything? >> You know, it's whiplash. Let's go.
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>> Let me see if I'm being yelled at already. Yeah, check this out. >> All right. I am not doing >> I am not actively being yelled at. >> Good. >> yes, the battle cruiser is coming. it's a triedand-true manufacturer. Uh, not one of these new hotness manufacturers. is one of the older uh manufacturers of the verse and it sure and I I I did say this last time so this this is not new information. The manufacturer thing is new information but uh um our big giant military combat themed event that we do every year around May is probably a pretty good
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time to expect it. and and and and and and it will be the and and and as we said before uh it will be the it is our intention to make it the last concept uh we do we made it through 2025 without a concept uh with a single concept promotion uh we do not have a single concept promotion scheduled for 2026 other than this battle cruiser we don't have a single concept promotion scheduled for 2027 um that this will be the last one it's it's an old uh Kickstarter thing >> and so yeah so >> it's happening It's happening. It's happening. We're going forward. Um I'm not going to tell you anything more about it now. Uh but yeah. So, okay. Um >> is it big? >> You got anything more? That that it get your one out.
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>> It's very big. [laughter] It's very very very big. Um >> that's all I got. >> That's all I'm going to say. Okay. Okay. So, [laughter] so, so just sneak it right in there. Just piece of [ __ ] [laughter] That's my one for the show. Um, all right then. Fine. Wipe. >> Wipe. >> We were doing so good. >> Wipe. Wipe. I held them off. I held them off. Wipe. >> Right. So, okay. We're not planning a wipe. We're planning >> Good night, everybody. We're planning so we're we're looking at targeted actions, right? But we're not looking at a wipe for the moment. And so we're we want to keep on rolling. First of all,
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there's a lot of some of the work we've discussed. Obviously, I can't share the details of what we're doing, but that needs to be completed. Uh so for now, we're not we're not uh intending a full blanket web at all. >> No, this goes back to what we were saying before about the biggest quality of life thing. all this all this work going in to to long-term persistence and to and and to item recovery v1 and stuff. It's about the freight elevator. It's about making sure you keep your stuff. >> Making making sure you keep your stuff. Making sure you keep your stuff. Making sure you keep your stuff. >> So you we we've got tools. We've got logs. We've got >> a lot of logs. >> We got a lot of logs. We got a lot of information. A lot of information. So, so, so it is our it is our intention to do a targeted correction >> to those areas that
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>> are problematic >> and and and and preserve as much of the >> gotten gains of the everyday >> Star Citizen as possible. >> So, so no blanket wipe. >> That's right. Okay, >> So, we've answered that. That's done. >> [laughter] >> What else you got? [snorts] Just hit me with a battle cruiser. Oh, I got a message. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Where's I skipped out? Was the battle cruiser mentioned? Mentioned in seal just now planned. Lol. Planned by somebody.
01:53:15
Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. [laughter] All right. Uh, no no no no no comments. No no no comments about the size other than it's it's big. It's big. It's just big and it's cool and it is so so damn cool. >> Um, all right. That's it. Oh >> no. >> Yeah. One last question. >> Tell me something we don't know about. Tell me something. Tell me something we should be excited about that we're not currently excited about. >> Give it give give us something nobody's expecting. [snorts] that's hard. You're putting me on the spot now.
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>> I'm putting you on the spot, mister. >> Is the bader coming? [laughter] >> Uh, okay. Um well, one thing we didn't talk about in detail uh that I could give background info on is um Genesis. >> And Nyx one, right? I mean, we we've we're obviously working on this. [laughter] That's no surprise to anyone. But the ma the one thing that I'm excited about is that we've um we've kind of conjoined development on three separate things uh in order to ship the best Nyx experience that we could offer, right? And so obviously Genesis is part of that and the planet tech that's behind it. Um but
01:54:52
also uh the Staritect work. And so for those who don't know, Staritect is a way for us to be smarter about building planets and the human populations that are on them. So settlements, buildings, dro centers, LZ's, name it, right? So historically, we've placed that by hand. And uh so Staritect is a way for us to give designers control over the planetary scale of how these are distributed. And it's a it's a fairly fundamental change to how the game is made. And the third one is what we call the population control manager. So >> currently you have AIS in the game, right, that are sometimes hand placed, sometimes dynamically spawned. We've
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talked about >> spawn like a gazillion times the spawn button. >> Yeah, that's which is my biggest pet peeve by the way. You want that's my trigger point. If you want to trigger me in a meeting, just tell me there's another overspawn issue. But anyway, so population management and control is a third component of this. So we've I'm excited about this because as we're working towards next one, we're we're aligning all those three things into one strike team to deliver that together. So uh I'm excited about that because those are like three major development piece that Star Citizen needs to scale that we're bringing in together. So for POP control, instead of having all these handplaced, either handplaced or dynamically spawn AIS uh in key areas, that's a system that will basically
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manage the server capacity of AI agents to be able to distribute them at the right place, but also spawn the right AIS for the right jobs, manage the priority of these spawn requests, all that stuff. And so it's a it's a such a much more scalable system that will allow us to really like build up a dense universe than we've had before. So I'm excited about the fact that those three projects are part of the same kind of drive at the moment. That's the first thing I would say that you guys don't know about that we're going to bring together. Um the second one uh I mean there are some hints of this in the game already. So, if I know some some of the techies look into the game client, try to find some stuff. I'm not going to go into more details about this, but uh you know, we talked about sim rigs. We
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talked about, you know, how the experience in the sim rig is. So, VR is a great thing if you have a SIM rig, right? Obviously, having the headset on is such a more dense experience. We're also working at improving our peripheral support. So being able to feed information, non-damaging information to peripheral manufacturers, so be able to enable them to make custom star system experience for the sim rigs. And also we're looking at uh we're currently in the process of looking at uh motion motion platform support uh for the game. And so I think that's something we haven't talked about specifically, but I'm mega excited about it because API opening up that uh opening up basically the motion systems to be able to leverage that, you know, on the on the key elements. So I think that's
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something that I'm super excited about because that's just another level. >> There's that new Corsair keyboard that's got the stream deck built into it and stuff like that and like this. Um, >> so thoughts about those would be my my two >> anything for player facing for in-game >> new some something I'm I'm going to I know about something it it's treating this like it's a big thing it's not. We just did the big thing but um spawning. >> Oh yeah spawning. >> Well so we talked about spawn in the hanger. >> Right. And so to build spawning hanger we had to build a new workflow right to be able to determine can we spawn you there is there a requirement for you spawning there right so the requirement
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in the case of spawning hanger is is your hanger spawned right uh that's also extended to ships right but what we're trying to achieve now I'm not promising this anywhere but is spawn in place and so we're trying to extend that workflow for spawn in place so that you know you just log in the game you spawn where you were. And so that's something that we're passionate about and we're trying to get in there. So >> yeah, log in, log out, spam on it, >> anywhere. >> Not not not a you know, you have a bed in a ship, you have you have you don't have a bed in a ship, >> you just just wherever you are, >> get out. Correct. >> Get back in. Come back right there. >> Yeah. Surface of a planet, you know, spawn in place. >> As long as you can still spawn there,
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>> right? There's going to be rules and limitations, but we're looking into >> That is also a big change for the game to me. Yes, a huge, huge change. >> just >> Well, I'm happy you raised that up. I was going to forget about it. [laughter] >> I've got you, Barry. >> All right. And at that, we managed. It's 4:57. We're right there at the end. >> Hey, right on time. >> Uh, what do they say at the end of Hot Ones? You, you know, tell everybody where they give everybody your socials. Tell everybody where they can find you when you do next. I mean, >> um I guess here in many months [laughter] >> uh we're here until the uh yeah, heat death of the universe. >> Um Ben Wong, >> thank you. >> It's a pleasure. >> Thank you as always for for for coming back. We're doing these about every six
02:00:27
months. It's what we we we we agreed when we did this run about a year ago, >> It's a good run. >> And so so we'll see we'll see you again sometime this summer. >> Yeah, probably. Absolutely. >> Um, I just want to say, you know, it's it's it's this is our first back. It's actually our first SCCL since IAE. We did the all ships Q&A and then we we didn't get to do a whole lot of uh last year because of a whole bunch of other changes going mostly in my life. Uh we're going to have a lot more uh this year. Uh, we got a we got a group of like four in a row coming in like April, I think. Whatever. >> Um, the chance to have somebody at your level and your involvement, take the time out to come be here, answer quite
02:01:19
literally any question I put you. You didn't beg off of anything. You didn't you didn't do this. So, I I spent the part giving giving the tech teams their props and the programmers their props and the strike team their props. something I want to be I want to say here and give you your props. Thank you so much for being here far more than I will give yens >> who won't [laughter] >> come on the show. >> It's a rendevous now. That's it. >> I know. I appreciate it. >> I love the anti. >> I I love coming here and and chatting about Star Citizen. And if you ever meet me and a Bar Citizen, it's the same thing. So, you know, just do it live. >> Uh thanks so much, guys. Uh what is in the orange box? So, that was at the beginning of the show on the Twitch version. and it won't be on the YouTube version. Uh, but that's just toys. It has nothing to do with work. We were we were just nerding out a little bit at the beginning of the show. Um, thanks
02:02:08
for watching everybody. Uh, we're back next week with a behind the ships uh, special on the on the next uh, spacecraft making its way to the Star Citizen persistent universe. >> John Crew going to be there. Uh uh John Cruz in there and Ben Curtis is in there and Torstston Lyman is in there and and some other people because I'm not really good with names. Whatever. The second I started calling out names, I knew it was a mistake. >> Chris Danks is in there. So >> who >> Batu? Batu's in this one. >> I filmed with Batu. >> Yeah, [laughter] >> he's great. >> Wow. These they really run together. Sorry everybody. Uh but yeah, that that's that's that's next week. Uh an exciting new uh spaceship spaceship Mon uh making its way to the persistent
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universe next week in those little uh middle things. We talked about it in ISC, the big patches in January and and March and May. It's like this and then these these interesting little content drops in the middle. Uh so we're we're going to add a new ship in the middle of a patch drop and for the first time in the history of our project, we'll see how that goes. >> Let's do it. Just kidding. There's a press article. It shouldn't work. Uh, so thanks for watching. Uh, I'm Jared. That's Ben Wah. You're the amazing Star Citizen community. Where? What are you doing with the cameras? [laughter] Oh my god. See you. See you later, everybody. Bye. Thanks everyone.

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.