Star Citizen Live: US PU Feature Team

17 April 202001:00:081,785 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

00:00:01
Hi everybody. Welcome to another edition of Star Citizen Live. This time featured on the work of the USPU gameplay feature team. I'm your host Jared Huckaby. If this is your first Star Citizen Live, welcome. Star Citizen Live is where we take questions from you guys, the Star Citizen community, and put them directly to our developers over a live stream. As we are in the new work from home era, we are we are going directly into our developers' homes. So, without further ado, I'd like to introduce our group. We'll go around the We'll just We'll just go around the world here. Let's start with you, John. Who are you and what do you do for Star Citizen? Man, that's a big question. In terms of who I am, I'm still I guess figuring that out. I'm a senior UI designer. And I've been
00:00:50
doing it for a number of years. And I'm just, you know, basically doing I'm told on Star Citizen, getting stuff out there, nice sexy UI to look at and use. I don't know if you want to go into my work history, but that's me in a nutshell. All right. So, so you you work on UI elements under the gameplay feature team under the USPU gameplay USPU, yeah. Under this guy down here, Rob, with the much more hair than I have. All right. Spencer, who are you and what do you do for Star Citizen? Hey, I'm Spencer Johnson and my wit on stream is not as good as John's, so my jokes are unprepared. I am a gameplay engineer, so I do various coding things for shopping features, insurance features, character customizer, variety of things under the domain of USPU
00:01:40
in engineering sense. Got it. And And then last but certainly not least, Rob, tell us who you are and what you do for Star Citizen. I am Rob Braniger. I'm the lead designer, system designer in Austin. I've been the product owner of the US uh feature team for a while, the US PU feature team. Um inherited a bunch of features when we kind of merged the US one and the US two teams together into the new US PU team. So, where we cover quite a bit under our umbrella now. So, it's pretty daunting amount of work, but yeah, we're trying to keep it all alive and going, really. Uh latest is the Yeah. Now, that said, uh there are there are still more than one gameplay feature team. Yes. Like you you you are you are you guys you guys and uh
00:02:27
many other folks that couldn't join us here in the day simply because we're stuck with quads here. Uh you represent uh one team based out of Austin and Los Angeles combined uh that work on a select grouping of of gameplay related features for the persistent universe, but there are other teams in Europe who also serve the same function, but work on other features. Yeah, yeah, there there's mission feature team, there's the EU um feature team, there's, you know, uh vehicle features. There There's a lot. So, I mean, we're kind of under our respective pillars and So, that's that's my way of prefacing that, of course, uh not every developer involved in Star Citizen can speak to every single feature and every single function that's being worked on for Star Citizen. So, we're going to try to keep
00:03:14
the questions related uh specifically to the stuff uh that your team uh has worked on or is even still working on uh at this point. Um as usual, we put a thread up on Spectrum where we uh where we collect questions for those who can't join us here live, and uh those throughout the week uh can vote to see which questions they want to be uh want to have answered most. So, we're just going to start uh with those questions while we wait for some of the questions to come in live. Uh if you are watching live on Twitch, you can submit questions uh with the word question surrounded by brackets. Uh that'll help us pull it out, and of course, uh please remember if your question doesn't get picked or doesn't get asked or whatever, it's only because this isn't the team uh that can speak to that particular question. So, starting with the threat here, it's a quantum travel quantum travel question. It says, are we going to get
00:04:02
specific quantum travel waypoint marking in the future? Now, I'm assuming that means the ability to kind of find something or set your own point and then have that in your history, kind of go back to it. Um yes is the short answer. Uh that this is something that we I I would I kind of tie this to kind of the the whole data running, you know, type of experience exploration, being able to kind of sell those off. Um and so I I would expect this around that feature timeline, but this is definitely something that we want to be able to do uh in the near future, sometime. Like it's yeah, it's exploration is being talked about a lot more heavily now, so it is definitely coming. All right.
00:04:49
And uh I I would assume uh being able to mark waypoints and stuff would as far there's the development of the feature, but then there's having to implement it in a way that in which backers can understand it and it's easy to easy to to to use and that usually falls under UI. John, we hear a lot about um UI touches every aspect of of Star Citizen. And Star Citizen is also very UI heavy heavy game as well. Yeah. So I you know, so sometimes uh you know, a feature featured feature work uh tends to be a feature work has to have the relevant UI to go with it. So, a lot of times, even if the underlying work is complete, uh finding a way in which to integrate it with all the other systems so that UI doesn't become cluttered and stuff uh can be a
00:05:38
big challenge. Mhm. Um We've had No, go ahead. Uh we've had several conversations about this internally, whether or not we're going to execute some sort of management app in Mobileglass for these things or if we'll integrate it into a much more robust star map. There's a lot more functionality that the star map could use. We've had a lot of discussions about that and the direction we want to take that in. So, if I were looking forward to this future, I might look forward to it there or in the Mobileglass somewhere. Okay. 100%. Next question, let's see. Will asteroid belts block our travel such that we have to pass through them out of our out of quantum travel or will we always be able to warp through solid rock? I think the answer to that is pretty
00:06:25
obvious. I'm not going to lie, this is a topic that comes up about every two to three months in our PU update meetings. It's something Chris is like, "Yeah, so when are we going to get that?" So, it is definitely going to come. It's a little more complicated than just putting collision on every single rock because there's you know, obviously hundreds and thousands of them in asteroid belts and and that's you don't want to slow down the game just for the sake of one asteroid belt, but um yeah, it is in the plans. I'm not sure what tech team is actually going to be doing that if that's going to be like someone like Marco's team, the procedural team or if that's that's on like the quantum travel team. I'm not sure. I'm sure we'll be involved at some point just with our quantum travel work, but yeah, that that's definitely going to
00:07:13
require a bit of tech that we don't have at the moment. Uh next question is about service beacons. Uh since some of us use service beacons to pay friends, will we ever see a better option to directly pay another player? As in maybe I'm a pirate holding them up for a fee or an option to send list a beacon privately to people on your friends list. Funny you bring that up. We are literally working this quarter on uh player trading app uh I'm so excited about because it's the beginning of being able to trade items and things like that. However, it will be limited to money to start. Uh but that's that Yeah, I don't know if people are aware, but we've kind of focused on the this friends and social aspect of our game again this quarter, uh kind of trying to
00:08:01
bring that back up to speed here and um in my opinion, like player trading is is a huge part of that, right? It's just the social interaction of "Hey, I got this. I'll give it to you for this." And uh you know, so with our physical inventory, it's going to it's definitely going to come with some restrictions as far as like item trading. Um you know, maybe being in the same place as somebody else. Um you know, you'll be able to essentially wire money to somebody anywhere in the in the universe, though. Uh so you can just send a gift to your buddy, and they don't have to be on the same server. It's just it's going to be friends list driven. So if you have them in your contacts, shoot them a shoot them a payment, and there you go. And uh we'll almost certainly be hearing more about the player trading app as it's developed further on ISC this quarter. So stay tuned for that as work
00:08:48
continues. Um Spencer, what are you working on right now? Right now is a flurry of a thousand different bugs as we prepare to get 3.9 uh 3.9 out the door. I which one of the most recent ones was that uh quick buy bug, but I don't know if I want if I want to talk about it now or if you want to wait for the ISC feature. Yeah. Don't spoil the feature. Oh, I didn't say anything. Don't don't ask me questions. Things are coming. Yeah. Yeah, it's sort of what you'll see at the start of every quarter is the you know, the spillover of like these are really important issues before we go live, and they're always all over the place, and they always sort of pop up from like when new features go in and new pieces of tech come in, old things start
00:09:35
to break. So even though our team hasn't personally done work on the uh character customizer feature, any feature work on that in in months, there's a bug right now where selecting your gender isn't persisting into the PU. since we have a microservice architecture with a lot of new services coming online all the time, sometimes you see problems there. So, I'm just all over the place right now on bugs. That and the the new shopping features we've added are also spitting up a lot of bugs. All right. Um how will cargo decks differ from normal commodity screens? Uh that's Cargo decks are more of a location as opposed to a replacement for commodity trading. Um
00:10:25
think So, originally, and we're still moving forward with this vision, we had the idea of a cargo depot. And that's that's kind of like the cargo network that supplies a planetary area, right? And all of its moons. All of the external externally shipped cargo would go through these major cargo depots. But, we also wanted people to be able to store cargo. And this is kind of where it gets into player trading. You know, if you have a large bit of cargo, large items, things like that that you'd want to trade to somebody else, you'd have to go to a cargo deck in your location, store it there, then trade ownership to the other person. The other person can come uh pick it up from that location, right? And it's to kind of prevent people from uh like like money instantly shipping,
00:11:14
you know, billions of dollars of goods that don't have to go through pirate space, right? It's uh to keep that kind of physical nature of the world that CR always wants to try and preserve with the gameplay. Um so, it's a location. It's going to have like cargo depots may have the the guild manager the the the trading guild dude there that you can go and get special missions for get membership in the trading guild um things like that you'll be able to rent storage space it'll also have you know like cargo ships that you can rent if you don't have one you can rent one for a bit through these places so it's it's kind of a a location that we're trying to put into stations so it would just be a deck that's somewhere in the station
00:12:02
that you can take an elevator to and go and and start dealing with the stuff there so and I would expect these things to kind of get inserted into like starports or things like that too we haven't really discussed exactly where they're going to go in the the major landing zones yet but certainly needs to be a part of it. Yeah those are the cargo modules are still under development we saw the first clips of them in the sprint report last quarter and again another ISC this quarter you'll see more about them coming up. Um Does anybody on the team work on VOIP or FOIP or FOIP WOIP or FOIP? Uh I mean I I I do that's that's mostly one of our other programmers Ken on John's obviously done some work on the the UI in game
00:12:49
and one of our other UI team members that's not with us now Kim so yeah that's a yeah why why do you ask Jared why? Uh the question is simply do you have any are there any there been any updates recently on VOIP or FOIP that you can share? Uh VOIP FOIP is probably coming back around in the near future there are there are some issues that have surfaced I think mostly because of either some core audio changes or um you know the the SOX stuff that went in last quarter that we're trying to fix right now before 3.9 goes out uh so we're actually literally doing play tests and investigating some bugs and we're compiling as of yesterday and we talked about it today. Um, so it is the intention that yeah, we
00:13:37
want to we want people to stay in the game and instead of going to Discord or Slack or one of these other things that we want our social services to be uh, as stable as possible so that you you have no need to go anywhere else, right? Uh, it's part of the purpose for redoing the friend system this quarter and it's it's to kind of set us up uh, to to move forward and and come back to that. Uh, can't say when it priorities are kind of shifting around right now so it's it's hard to say exactly when but yeah, at some point. Okay. Uh, you mentioned the friends list, this is what the next question's about. What improvements, if any, are coming to the group system after the new unified friends list? Oh man, do I even want to say it? Yeah, my my big thing is to try and chat into
00:14:26
the front end. I think that's um, so one one of the goals for the friends efforts this quarter was to allow people to see, create parties, um, see who's online, uh, easily add people, connect to people, get that two-way handshake, have a unified friends list so we don't have like platform contacts and spectrum contacts, right? We wanted to bring that all under one umbrella and just make it easy for the players to get into the game uh, as easily as possible, right? Like people with their friends, too. With their friends, yeah, with the people that they want to play with, right? So, um, we added stuff to easily just right click, join contact, you can like shoot off to their server immediately, right? You can party jump, you know, easier now. There's like if you miss the the boat on the the party jump, you just
00:15:13
have a join leader button up at the top of the party window. Like we're trying to do everything we can to kind of reinforce that, get people playing together who want to be together as as fast as possible. And part of that game loop, in my opinion, is jumping into the into the client and messaging your friend, "Hey buddy, I'm online. Add me to the party, you know?" It really to me kind of completes that loop and and we should we'll have access to all the same chat functionality that we have in game as far as the groups and party chats and all that stuff. So, it should be pretty easy to to throw into the front end there. Um So, yeah, that that's that's my my next big one um is to kind of complete that game loop and then from there it's, you know, I don't know if I even want to say but
00:16:01
I'd I'd like people to be able to create orgs in games, you know, like those are my future thoughts on this. Um just to to really kind of create the backbone of the the social structure here. So, right now there's things we're doing on the website that I feel like it would be great for players to be able to pull that in and manage it in game. So, Yeah, and you know, it's worth mentioning that these these front end UI features are finally starting to come in um for friend stuff because we're part of we're going through this arduous process of moving that over to building blocks, you know, our new UI tech features so that it's actually possible to do things in a not duplicated system and like, "Okay, you know." And now that that's rolling online, the features are starting to come. And as more building blocks features come online, you'll see these uh new UIs uh improve in terms of functionality.
00:16:49
As we get uh as we just get more and more tools. That's been the benefit of these the building blocks. We have gone through and iterated on that new front end friend stuff so quickly compared to what it would have been done in Flash. Like it that would have been a couple quarters of work to to try and get that into Flash. And we change the whole design of it right now this afternoon if we wanted to. Yeah, it's it's that that easy to kind of bounce stuff around. So, um it really came together very quickly. Like we we got a little bit of a late start this quarter and we still kind of got it in before the end of the actual official quarter and Yeah, it's PT right now, so it's where it is. As someone in chat just mentioned if we're trying to use these building blocks stuff for store purchasing in that flow, which is exactly what I'm working on right now. Um, and that's part of a
00:17:40
long process of converting all of our screens that has just started actually. So, the prison deposit kiosk is the first shopping kiosk that is using building blocks like totally. Um, and we're going to be iteratively like doing, you know, a couple every quarter, one or two a quarter like, all right, now with this screen is using it. Now this screen is using it and getting down the the the process. Each one's getting a little quicker, but it's part of a long sort of a sort of vision of updating our our shopping experience. Yeah, and it it's a company-wide goal as well. I know they're working on stuff with the ships and mobile glasses going to get a stream and relatively soon. So, those are other teams, of course, but yeah, it's it's a huge initiative for us to kind of convert this over. And once it's there, it's it's setting us up even if we may not
00:18:28
redesign the experience right away, it sets us up to be able to rapidly iterate on it in the future. And that's the that's the great part of it. As a follow-up from the chat, are there going to be increases to the friends limit? I so, yeah. I believe it's gone up to about 800 now, which should We ran some tests. Basically, what's happening uh, before we go live and and we're kind of trying to message this out as well, but um, we are merging the platform contacts and the spectrum contacts together before uh, right around the time that we go live. And then once that happens, we'll you'll you'll have up to 800 slots that you can fill. And I I think nobody even got close to that when we were running the test group. I do want to add that the 800 is where
00:19:16
the current testing is. And of course, as this rolls out wider and as more people get into it, if that number has to come down, it will come down as we start to maintain performance and all that good stuff. So, that's where where that's where the current testing is at. Um, what else do we got here? uh, the the REC shop in game has not been updated for a while. Um, I can't test the possible loadout of my ship in Arena Commander. Uh, are there any updates to REC you can tell us about? Uh, that should be you updated on the PTU right now. I actually went through that myself. Um, that has definitely been checked in. So, uh, if it's not there, if you find something that you're missing, uh, let us know cuz as far as I know, I've grabbed everything that should be in game, uh,
00:20:03
that's at least available in the PU. Um, does the feature team plan to allow us to sell cargo from stolen ships? At black marketplaces, sure. Yeah, it's it's a matter of ownership and I don't know. Ashley Spencer, you might be able to speak to the the ownership transition and where that change actually happens. Yeah, I think there's a couple directions that we could take that and I think there needs to be both design and technical questions. Um, because there's certainly like some stopgap things you could do just like, okay, well, we'll try to check to see like, you know, what was the last few ships this player was like flying and stuff and who owns them and etc. but and as I'm sure everyone knows, every time you interact with any screen that involves ships, you only see the list of ships that are in your account that you
00:20:52
personally own. And I think that the best way forward to get that feature would be adding a uh, a system behind the scenes of tracking like player associated vehicles. Which which we have like a little bit already, uh, like Rob, which we I used something a little bit like that for the the last prison ship feature we just added. Basically a way of tracking the last vehicle you flew that we know you own and we know has a quantum travel that you can use to get around and stuff. And So we want to expand on that and have a way of saying like here are all the ships that I am somehow associated with right now and have an interface for like your friends to allow you to be like this person is associated with my ship right now. Like it's cool if they fly it. And like maybe sometime in the future like it's cool if they spawn it for me at a subterminal or they could
00:21:39
see it in their cargo list while we're either in the same party or same group or you know, some some list of features there. So yeah, I think that would be the first step forward is making this proper player associated with ship system. Right? And that can drive several features including selling from stolen ships cuz the way you'd be associated is I have stolen this ship. That's my association, you know. Yeah, ship permissions is something that we've been talking about as part of like that social structure, right? And maybe at the org or the party level or something. You know, you can say this person this person can access it. Despawning and spawning again is a little bit different. It's a little harder problem I think to solve, but And some of the work that's going into the cargo decks is specifically about that being able to drop cargo off there and then you have set it for another
00:22:28
person and have the ownership switch from from you to another player. It's like that. So yeah, ownership is a ownership is a is a strange topic that touches a lot of aspects of Star Citizen. Just I think it just in life of in the PU. It's figuring out who owns every little thing you know, in in the universe. It's definitely a conversation that we'll be circling back around to more than once. When buying items in the game there is no good way made statistics on how one item is better than the other. For instance, a quantum drive of the same tier could be more or less efficient, but it could be quicker on spool or jump. Is there any plan of showing these statistics in game? 100% plan, yes. Wanted wanted it for a long time.
00:23:19
this is part of our building blocks conversion is to figure out how we can actually get these things that we've talked about for a while into the UI. Um it's going to definitely come in waves. Like the the first thing for me is trying to upgrade this experience of just buying and selling items. I think item stats is is probably one of the the higher priority topics to address first. Um just so you can at least see them and even if you have to flip back and forth, there's no that you can't click on two and compare and you know, like that that's additional functionality, but just getting the stats there is is certainly my higher priority on that list. Uh and then having a quick easy way to compare two items or to one on your ship or maybe even to one that's not even at
00:24:06
that location, right? So we we got to figure out how that user flow needs to work a little bit better, I think, before we just jump into that. But um it is extremely important. Right now we're baking item descriptions and stats into the descriptions of the text like which is just horrendous. So yeah, we we want to move away from that as as quickly as possible. Localization guys will Yeah, I I think everybody would love that. Um one of the follow-up question from the live chat about the building blocks. Um as more of these shopping kiosks and everything come online as they converted over to the building blocks, they're now these interactions are now visible to other players around you. The question is will we ever be able to reach out and and push somebody's button as they're
00:24:54
trying to use the the kiosk? The idea is no. That's extremely trolley and we don't want to in me the troll in me is like, "Please." Yeah, it sounds so fun until it happens over and over and you can't do anything. No, Yeah, this is exactly why we had that conversation the other day, Rob. Yeah. Yeah, so just talked about this. It's yeah, funny the timing on that. Yeah, I I don't think that's a good idea personally. I I think it's just kind of see where they are. We'll have the Jerry be troll option for sure. Uh No, it it We want We want to kind of broadcast the the state what it is, but yeah, we were talking the conversation that Spencer was referencing was um should I be able to see how much money they have or how much, you know,
00:25:43
of a certain thing they're trying to buy or cuz eventually, you know, like they're going to go get their ship and maybe fly off and should I follow them? Should I, you know, loot them and you know, it's do we want to give away that much information? And I I think There there needs to be a certain level of privacy there, but we do want to try and at least, you know, oh, they're on the commodity screen and you know, they just being can purchase complete, right? Like We want to kind of show some of that, but not And there's also like there's a little bit of confusion about what information you might you might display. For example, when things come online in the future of having like a concept of discounts for like other players going to be paying a better price because like they're in like the you know, the Casaba members bonus program or you know, whatever. They have a voucher, coupon, something.
00:26:32
Um they'll be seeing a different price than what you would be paying. So, you going to be seeing the price on the screen that they're paying or the one that you'd be paying? Um there's there's a lot of weird questions where it's not, you know, certain what exactly you would want in that scenario. And then you know, the privacy concern like Rob said is is a big thing. I think it's all solved by having Steve Bender create a cover your ATM screen animation. Yeah, along with like furtive glances over your shoulder. We just get the No. Touch the screen with your nose. Maybe like a privacy hologram. There we go, like a privacy hologram bubble. will we ever get the ability to sell stuff back to shops, components, ammos, etc.? Uh you know when you buy something by mistake and then return it and can sell it back,
00:27:21
maybe even at a lesser value? Yes, that is definitely in the plans as well. Um It's partially implemented. It Yeah, it's actually technically possible now. Um Sort of. I put it in a certain case anyone tries it. So right now uh the problem lies with the the the way that we set up the shops are very specific to uh single items. Um And when I think of the sell back feature, I don't I don't want to have to go, "Oh, I need to take this item and go sell it over here and this item and go sell it over here." If it's a weapon, I want to sell it back to the weapon shop. If it's a ship thing, I want to sell it back to the ship shop, right? Um and we we can't group them by item types right now. So just weapons is a is a full sale thing. Uh and that's the kind of functionality that I would
00:28:09
wait until we have before we So we don't have to go through every single shop and you know, add a bazillion items and you just can't buy sell. Like no, just here's a here's an archetype of a shop and there you go. This is what you can sell back to them. Um and yeah, they it's more the way we kind of looked at it uh at least in previous conversations was that commodities are the the profit profiteering, right? It's It's what you go out and make money with. Items are more of a money sink within a game and this it's true of most MMOs, right? The You can go and sell it to another person for a profit. Uh that that's free enterprise is is always available there, right? Uh and that's where the player trading system comes into play. Uh but as far as selling back to shops, that's that's more notably a money sink in in most games and I I think you'll see something very similar to that.
00:28:59
Uh back to quantum travel for a bit. Uh will we be able to quantum travel to moons directly instead of first going to the planet? That breaks all the rules of the nav hierarchy that we instituted when we worked on quantum travel last. Um it's We want to make routing a big part of this and and I don't I uh short answer is is no. I I think that that kind of breaks some of our fundamental rules and if we allowed that then we'd have to kind of rethink and re-engineer how quantum travel is set up and especially with routing and how that's supposed to work. Got you. Yeah, it's uh Uh when you say nav routing, you mean being able to set up a final destination and it goes beep beep beep beep. You know, yeah, that's the planet's our
00:29:46
route. Yeah, 100%. Um so, if you think of our solar system as a hierarchy, there's the star is the root of the hierarchy and then you've got the planets uh or things that orbit that star as the next level of the hierarchy and then things that orbit those other things, you know, as a child of their hierarchy, right? So, you have to go and get inside the hierarchy before you can see uh the the other neighboring uh members of that that group. So, if we allowed you to kind of bypass that, uh it goes straight to it, it kind of breaks that fundamental concept. Um so, it it's it's why we put in the nav routing to begin with, right? All right. To make that easier. And on the other side of uh quantum travel, uh quantum enforcement. Is there ever going to be a way to determine where there is a lot of
00:30:35
quantum quantum travel traffic to efficiently place a trap or is it always just going to be sit at and uh hope somebody hope for the best. So, that's that to me is where long-range scanning comes into play, which is is something that needs to be worked on moving forward. Um I I certainly would expect that for sure. Something I want as a pirate is I want to set a trap or see where people are going back and forth. And you kind of saw the beginning of that with the Tony Z's quanta demo that he did at CitizenCon. We're starting to be able to track where everybody is, where they're going, are they QTing, are they just sitting still? Uh so that we can figure out how to present that data to the to the players, right? Because
00:31:23
you're on your local server. So, should you be able to see people on other servers? Eventually, that's going to be one big server mesh, right? And then we're going to try and get as many people playing together as possible, but uh there there is some technical limitations as to how that uh gets done, but that's that's certainly like yeah, we want to be able to show you heat maps maybe on your star map, and here's you know, maybe known pirate areas are kind of in this, you know, cloud over here, right? Or uh between these two locations. Um so, yeah, I would expect something like that at some point. Uh when when that is is is probably further down the road, though. Right. Somebody asked I was looking for it here. Um You've used you guys have presumably used the new the new friends service and thing. Uh how you feeling
00:32:11
about it? I am excited. So, I'll tell you a little story about a play test we tried to do a couple years ago. And man, we got to start there cuz it this has been a um something that that is I think been a bit of a sore spot for at least for me because I I want to quickly jump in and just go go test something out and get a crew together and go try some try one of the ships and we spent about 2 hours with 10 people in a room who could literally talk to each other and had a hard time getting on the same server at the same time. And that that was really frustrating. So for me we we did a 50-man playtest to just kind of put it in comparison. We went through the process of friending everybody, getting into a 50-man party and were in the server together. Uh
00:32:59
and and that was about 35 minutes. And that was the entire process from start to end. Um that to me was amazing. I I think this is going to start really encouraging the group play uh in our game. I think it just makes it so easy the fact that I can right-click on somebody and guarantee go to their server assuming it's not full, right? Like the these are the kind of ease of use things that I think are are going to be game-changing. Uh I really hope to see concurrency, you know, kind of start to spike up a bit. Um So yeah, I'm I'm super excited and I think this is a massive difference. The difficulties involved in getting together with your friends in game uh previous to this, I I have to assume turned I mean they turned some of my friends off. I mean, get them in the game and then we want to get into a group together in the same session and
00:33:46
the amount of time and effort that that took uh it was very difficult to maintain their interest. So this is uh the social system uh especially the front end one right when you log into the game, I think it's critical for onboarding new players, keeping existing players happy, allowing them the confidence to suggest a game to their friends and and be able to have a play session that evening with no problems. So that would that was really the main kind of anecdote we were taking forward when we developed this. And that's and that's the one that most of our further development on the on the future uh will include. How do we make this easier and fun? Yeah. Uh a lot one of the things that fall under an umbrella we refer to as quality of life quite often. Just just just improving the day-to-day experience. server beacons. What's the next What's
00:34:34
the next step for service beacons? Ooh. we had put in some work on the MPC refueling uh beacon just if you run out of fuel. Uh and and that was important because we want to try and regulate some of the the distances that these ships can travel cuz we're starting to think about that new player experience a lot more and how do we keep people a little closer to maybe their starting planet uh for a little bit longer, right? Um and fuel consumption is part of that, but um so we had a bunch of work that's there that we're going to pick up uh pretty soon. We had some other priorities come in. Um getting the screen converted to building blocks. So this whole beacon creation process uh is all currently in flash in our mission manager right now. And just being able to get that converted over to building blocks will allow us to more quickly add new types of beacons, filters,
00:35:23
uh all these other things that we wanted to add from the beginning, but it was you know, it's just such a pain to do things in flash. So um replacing that screen uh with the building blocks is probably our first step. And then that kind of unlocks us uh the potential to start adding new ones as we want. Is a refrain we hear uh quite often. Building blocks unlocks so much and it has already unlocked so much other features uh going to 3.9 like the personal inventories system and the personal interaction system and stuff like that. It's a building blocks is when when we first we first showed it gosh, however many months ago with Zane when he was in LA. It's like a year and a half I I I know it's like it was the hardest thing about doing the thing. I was like, "How do I convey how big this actually
00:36:12
is for our development?" And I I think we got most of it, but uh yeah, it's it's it's been one of those those big milestone things for I know every There's all the flashier ones like OC you know, OCS and and stuff like that, but but man, what what Building Blocks does for the overall development of everything else. It's even more impressive when you consider just how new it is, and we are basically putting it through its its its trials now in production, and it is holding up great. Um and I I just can't wait like uh further down the line as we add more of these robust features, we'll be able to do so much more uh with it. I'm really excited. Yeah, they're still not a complete tool set yet. They're still There's animation, better animation. Yeah, Building Blocks itself is still being developed, but yeah.
00:36:59
Yeah, yeah, and I mean they it took them about a year and a half maybe of of just work to to kind of replace this entire UI system from Flash. But now that we're going to use it like Ash seeing it in action now that we kind of went through this front-end process was just mind-blowing. And it's And it's still in its infancy, right? We're like, "Hey, can we get this feature to me?" Like, a bunch of feature requests came out of this, so I will say that it's very interesting to see how quickly leads like Rob have adapted to uh adapted their expectations in terms of uh iterative feedback. So, previously when we worked in Flash, it'd be like, "Hey, could you change this thing this week?" And I'd be like, "Well, okay, well, I guess I could do it." And now it's like, "Hey, could you change this this afternoon? What about tomorrow
00:37:45
morning? Uh okay, we have another hour. Can we change this this this?" Send me a screenshot in a minute. Yeah, yeah, but you know, it's it's it's a different workflow, but it's not stressful. It's actually really all these changes are like, "Yeah, give me 20 minutes, half an hour, an hour, half a day." Like, it's it's been great. But it's just amazing how quickly people adapt. Oh, yeah. that's not the first time I've heard some version of that story, John. And not not with Rob, but with other people. And that's hap- that's happening all around. Um let's talk about the character customizer a little bit. Um this question says, "Are we ever going to see seed numbers for the character customizer? I want to have the same look every time without having to tweak my character after after a wipe." Now, I I I should mention that the goal is as a as a
00:38:36
project going forward is to minimize and reduce the number of wipes. You know, no more wipes every patch. Something like that. Like that is the ultimate goal is to reduce the the the sheer number of wipes to to to none if at all possible. Um but as far as on the rare occasion when something like that might happen, what do you think with regards to the seed numbers? Spencer, do you want to take that one? So, there's a couple things. Um for one, it it is not a challenging problem to to solve. In fact, for the the core of what people are probably most concerned about, like the facial structure, cuz that's uh so floaty, you know, a continuous amount of changes is not easy to to get the exact result again. That's actually just 48 numbers. uh that define that. And so, the number
00:39:27
of like characters you would need to have this seed is like I think it's like 200 characters, which is like not something you could remember, but it's very easy to copy and paste. Um and I would actually personally really like to see that feature added of it being able to like copy and paste this and insert that seed. Not um like Jared said, not because you know, we want to get back to where we were after wipes, because we're trying to get rid of wipes going forward, but I think it'd be really cool to be able to share this with your friends. Be like, "Yo, I just made John Cena." Like Look, you can't even see him. Yeah, right. There's just no character there. There's a design risk of like do we really want everybody running around the universe looking like John Cena, you know, the exact same face copy and pasted a million times? So, I think it's Yeah. Now, somebody's done the created
00:40:14
wrestlers on several WWE games. Uh I I I can I can speak to the danger of exposing that information. Yeah, so I think it'd be fun and really great. And at least that aspect of the DNA changes not super complicated. We We'd need to do a bit more for remembering and serializing your gender and hair and skin color and eye color all those things. Uh If I recall Yeah, I think it's really more on design if we want to schedule the time to do this. If I recall, we just we had this we had a conversation that included uh the ability to share your character structure and design with other other players. I mean, we hadn't even been discussing it in terms of wipes. We had been discussing it more of like your organization wants to set up a clone army or something. Like how do you how do you do that most effectively? players want to play as twins.
00:41:00
Yeah, or or whatever. Or a family, like a family owned freighter or whatever. Mom, dad, kids, that kind of thing. Um which is actually really really really useful. I I think there's several ways we could do that. It's It's not in our current plans right now. I I think it's It's just a because character customizer was kind of, you know, we we put a pin in that uh back in Q3 last year. For the moment, right? It's not It's not done by any means, but uh it's Yeah, I'll think about it. Think about it. Maybe we can like do a store seed number and that can get saved out to our long-term persistence, you know, variable somewhere and maybe we can restore it or, you know, so that's I think there's options there, right? Like do you want to have to copy and paste a 200-digit number and what does the UI for that look like, right? Like uh you know, so it's maybe there's some
00:41:48
more graceful ways we can do that, but yeah. I I I just I think it's more important to focus on the long-term persistence side of it, right? Like that that to me is what It's what they're really talking about, right? So it's how do we ensure that this is, you know, going into a service somewhere that doesn't get wiped as often uh if at all, right? Cuz there's some things that we definitely don't need to wipe unless data changes out from underneath it and it's just not possible to to put it back and that's that's usually the cases where you know, we end up getting into a situation where ah, we got to wipe the DB again, right? Like but um hopefully we're we're figuring out how to avoid that, you know, as we code this long-term stuff. here here's one that comes up every once in a while. Uh will you will you return manual quantum travel without forcing us
00:42:37
to use beacons? How are we supposed to explore, Rob? All right, so I can give you a scenario where you can go and explore that doesn't require that. Like imagine a day where you can scan at a long range, find anomalies, how far you can go, you know, searching for these anomalies deep in the space uh would depend on your current scanning gear, right? You can find things, those create markers that you can go to and as you go out in the universe and the we're we're procedure really generating derelicts, asteroids, content, maybe a pirate base or you know, maybe some uh nebula mining areas or you know, it's I I don't think it it's necessarily required. I do like the concept of it though and I and have for a long time
00:43:26
because I want to point towards something and then kind of go, right? go check out what's over there. Uh so I do think there's merit for it. Um that's a that's a conversation we are we are circling back to quantum travel uh in the near future. I was actually supposed to go out to the UK to discuss uh how we kind of change this and and make it some better quality of life experience and you know, maybe more interesting for our longer term or longer distance travel uh experiences um in May, but that's not going to happen now. Um so I'm at home instead and uh we'll kind of prioritize some other features instead uh until we can kind of have these conversations, but uh it's certainly a topic I'm going to bring up um moving forward. Yep. Not so much a question, but a a
00:44:15
suggestion, I guess. What are your thoughts about there being an in-game issue council report tab on like the MobiGlas? Hm. So to maybe streamline some bug reporting. Is is is If we were to consider something like that, would that be something that would fall under your purview? could. I I don't know. That's somewhat of a new topic. Um That's a cool idea, though. Yeah, it's hard because we always want everything that's in-game to be diagetic and of the universe. And an in-game issue council would distinctly be out of game. I guess it would take you out of the universe that that you're playing in, I guess. It's it's something it's something to think about. It's definitely not that cuz you could directly like easily send client information to a track. Like it just spits out the log right to our
00:45:02
servers and Yeah, there's There would be definitely a lot of benefit to that. It's stuff that I know that they're like Turbulent and Benwa's team, you know, with that the hex tooling that they're doing is going to incorporate a lot of these like customer service tools and I'm not sure what the issue council support is going to be on that, but once they get set up there, I think it's it's certainly much more reasonable to just integrate to that into the game and send your logging and messaging out to the same tooling that they see on the website there. So it's it's doable. That's a little outside of the USPU teams realm, um the next questions,
00:45:49
this isn't a question for your team, but I'm going to answer it here. The question is when will the ship stats on the webpage be correct? I'm going to say that actually I was just talking with the community team, which is Tyler, Olf, Molly, and all them. I was just talking to them earlier today about that very topic, which is why I'm going to touch on it right now. Um, and they're working on a plan right now. The issue with that has always been about finding a systemic system that can be sustainable because as with all the ships that we have and with all of the micro changes trying to do them by hand isn't a vi- isn't a viable thing. So, we're we're we're working on getting the the right hooks that are necessary to to to try to find a systemic solution. Uh, nothing to report specifically. Just that know that this is a this is a concern that we
00:46:38
share, that the community team shares with you, and they're actively pursuing it. Again, with no timetable as as always. it's in our hearts as well as yours. I I can speak to that just cuz on my side we've had to write our own tools. Like Jake Mayall has written some tools to strip out the relevant data because we're you know, we've got the objective pricing, right? So, uh, it's it's definitely not a small task to kind of be all inclusive for every stat that the ship has. Like some of these things are amalgamations of another stat, you know, that consists of X, Y, and Z that all comes together into a single thing that it it detects heat is a great representation of that, right? Heat generation is three or four different, you know, values that are getting calculated into the total heat. So, there there's a lot
00:47:27
of stuff like that um, that yeah, it's just figuring out how to best strip that out. can we group with the new friends with the new unified friend system? can we group together before going into a server? Yeah, I mean that's the whole point of the the so, if you haven't used it yet, basically what happens is and and we start these new windows open. So, there's there's I guess this side. There's a contacts window and a notifications window and there's buttons to open and close them, but what happens is as you add new friends through the contacts window, it'll pop up an add window screen. Uh you can start typing a name, uh which currently has to start There's two names that you show up in there. There's your nickname and then like your handle. Um you can type either one of them, uh but it does need to be
00:48:15
from the beginning of that name. Once you get them in your contacts list, you just right-click, add to party. When they accept the party invite, you'll see a party window pop up. So, your group, your party is now there for you on display. Uh you can see who the party leader is. You can transfer party leadership. Um you can still do party launches as I mentioned earlier. So, the again, this whole effort was to just make this easy and understandable for somebody who uh is just trying to get in the game quickly. Am I grouped with them? Yes or no? Cool, if they're in your party, they're a different color in your contacts list. So, as you're scrolling through up to maybe 800 names, right? Uh do I want to add this guy? Did Did I add this guy already? You know, like one thing we ran into in the 50-man play test was uh crap, who's in who's in the party? And so you like go back in the party and
00:49:02
that's when we're like, "Oh, we got to color code these." So, we can easily tell who's in your party and who's not. presence is another thing, right? So, you kind of see if they're in menus or if they're just uh online, which means they're only on Spectrum, uh or if they're in the game somewhere, uh you know, in PU or game modes. Like it's again, make it easy. Who can I invite? Who's quickly available? Um get them in and go. So, TLDR, yes. Um let's see. We're We're just about at time to wrap up here. what's been uh one of the questions uh from the thread there was uh what's been your favorite feature to work on and develop so far? I guess we'll just we'll
00:49:49
just go around the group there. John. Oh. Start with John. Certainly the friends system, the social system. And I'm excited about the work that we're we're going to be doing on that in the future as well. Like I said like my anecdote before wasn't a lie. I've got friends that I want to get in here and playing with me, but I've been a little little hesitant because the onboarding experience hasn't been particularly good. And now I think it's particularly good. So, I'm looking forward to getting some of some of those people in and looking at the amazing work that everybody else has been doing in the game. Uh and that's really what our job is to make all that stuff much more accessible and visible to the users. So, that's my favorite one so far.
00:50:37
You can't pick his favorite, Spencer. Good. Yeah, it's unfair advantage of going first. Yeah, so actually my answer is due a a little less in the future and more to the process. I would say the character customizer is probably my favorite one to work on. Specifically like character customizer experience cuz I was not the one who implemented like the actual face morphing, but rather the whole front end experience of It's definitely the funniest to work on, too. Yeah, right. Like making that random button was pretty fun especially before we had symmetrical like yeah, symmetrical faces. Uh yeah. Um so, that was a ton of fun just for playing with, but the process of making that was the most enjoyable, too, because the core of that work was done with me myself, John, and one of our other designers, Calyx,
00:51:27
um with you know, lots of ancillary parts and helpers and such. And this is actually before we were under the purview of USPU for most of that development. You know, like Q2 Q3 last year. But that was most enjoyable for me because we were actually able to iterate on it multiple quarters. I'm sure if you guys remember there was Technically there's been three live versions of the customizer, but And and I did work on all three of them, but ignoring the first one for now. So, when we redid it with DNA initially in Q Did it go live in Q1 of last year? We had like those like radial sliders and stuff. do when questions even when they're in the past. Can't can't can't can't can't keep track I certainly can't keep track of them. Yeah, I certainly can't do it. So, uh we did that, but we weren't super happy with it. So, we spent more time to reiterate on it and we had a really close-knit team of only a couple
00:52:14
developers and like personally like I could iterate Yeah, John. I could I could iterate with John and Kalex and even though I'm a programmer, I like to pretend I'm a designer sometimes. Be like, "Well, guys, what if you did it like this?" And it's like we organized a little and that was one of the jobs that was most fun for me. Small team doing lots of iterations to make the best experience. And obviously, you know, we had the the benefits of this being a very isolated feature that's separate from this year's cluster uh yeah, of of PU features, but the process itself is what made that one so enjoyable to work on. Right. The the character customizer almost got to cheat in a way because it's it was completely separated from everything else where everybody else has to develop their feature and then integrate it with everything else, which is where bugs often come from. The character customizer got to got to exist in its own little world before, you
00:53:02
know, folks even loaded into the game. So, you you guys kind of cheated there. Uh you'd think that, but now we're relying on so many microservices that they break all the time and I get bugs and I'm like, "Yeah, it was the loadout service. It was the variable service." We don't do those. And Rob, how about you? Oh, man. I've I've been here for too long and worked on too many things. Um This it's been 6 years. It's crazy. Clearly you've been here longer You've been here longer than I have. Clearly the stuff that you worked on with Spencer and I. I mean, that's Yeah, I'm not going to lie. a lot better with me joining. Yeah, I mean There's something to be said about, you know, the I I've had the most fun working on projects that have again kind of been an isolated thing that the team doesn't have to go to a bunch of external teams to get support
00:53:52
from. Um It just the the iteration time, the the turnaround speed that we can do things is much better. Um I had fun working on the quantum travel stuff. I had fun um you know, trying to figure out the the mission givers, I talking with Tony on the the economy stuff has has been a blast. Um I've kind of my role's kind of changed and morphed over over time much more trying to work with Tony on on future type schedules and and plans and trying to keep these guys, you know, moving on a day-to-day basis more so than making things as much nowadays. Um Which in it in and of itself is been kind of fun. I've always enjoyed the
00:54:40
games industry cuz it's always something new and different, you know, every project. So it's um Yeah, I'd I'd say those things. I'm really happy with the friend stuff. I I've wanted to work on the social system for a while. I look forward to what we're going to do with with that. And just I I look forward to seeing how that's a going to affect the game and just the numbers that we're seeing. Excuse me. So it's I Yeah, I think anything that I've worked on where I've gotten to actually see a tangible you know, results or comments and and thanks from the the fans has been just a joy cuz that's why I do, right? Like I make games cuz I want other people to experience things and have fun and uh so you know, to to see the fans on Reddit or you know, somewhere else on spectrum
00:55:28
or whatever kind of reacts well to something that we did was was cool. One of the best parts of working with Rob actually is when he whips out Photoshop to give feedback. It's It's amazing. Those are my doodles. It's really the next were MS Paint. The next SCL needs to be just him in Photoshop. I will actually pay money for a ticket. I would say I've been I've been amused by Rob's promotion emails. When a member of his team gets promoted, here's a little inside baseball game development. When when a when any member on a team is is is promoted to a new position, the the the leader of that team will send out an email to the company and, you know, say congratulations this person and then talk a little bit about why that that why they got the promotion and and and
00:56:16
the stuff. Uh Rob tends to uh the best the best I can I can I can align it to is like like like an old Jewish mother who's very proud of her booby. And and and and he It's often accompanied by some some remarkable Photoshops. Yeah, it warms his heart. Honestly, I haven't photoshoped any of those. Those are all just pictures that I get. So, I try and Like I ask friends of friends, right? Hey, send me some pictures and you got any good ones? And everybody's always got those few late-night ones or the you know, the out in public doing something silly pictures and so I've done, you know, the the deep thoughts by Jack Handey. I did that with somebody who was quite a character and he was just like, like all these different poses like, you know, sitting on nothing in a train, you know, in Germany, right? Like, I
00:57:05
wish I had a chair. You know, like stuff like that, but uh sitting is nice, but chairs are better. Um So, yeah. Have fun. You got to have fun with it. It's a big deal for them. It's It's always It's always a blast. Well, that about wraps up today's show. Um for those of you who were watching live, again, if we didn't get to pick your question or address your question, I'd simply because this isn't the team that's that's that's to working on that feature. We saw a lot of great questions about a lot of features that just aren't here for this team here. Um, I will say uh the most prevalent question was uh where's 3.9? Or give 3.9. Uh you may have seen me doing the show. I was just
00:57:52
like, "Hey, can I get an update on this while I'm here?" cuz obviously I'm not checking emails and conversations while I'm here doing the show. Um the latest word that I can give you and I'm going to read this verbatim here so I can so I don't mess it up. Uh 3.9 is very very close. There's a decent chance we open wide this weekend. But of course it's it's obviously if we could commit to that we would have committed to it yesterday, the day before, the day before. Um stay tuned to more information, but we're very hopeful that this weekend is when 3.9 will go live to to the wider PTU. hopefully we'll all have something more to do this weekend than watch Netflix, which is what I've been doing. I've been crying in the bathtub. I've been crying in the bathtub just like from morning to
00:58:40
Yeah. Just rocking back and forth. That's not necessary. It'll be a nice awkward All right. All right. Yeah. So uh so uh that's John. That was Spencer. That's Rob. Uh I'm Jared. Uh thanks a lot everybody. Uh next week uh we should be back with another episode of Calling All Devs uh instead of our weekly live stream. So stay tuned for that. yeah, take care everybody. Uh keep an eye on Spectrum. Uh that's where any actual any announcements about about uh 3.9 uh will actually be patch notes, stuff like that. And um yeah, if you if you see uh any of your Evocati members any of our Evocati members our Evocati friends, uh be sure to give them a a salute. They've been putting in a lot of hard hours uh trying to track down these
00:59:29
these desync bugs and everything for us. So um Yeah, everybody's Everybody's working hard on both sides to try to get this out of everybody's hands. So, thank you guys. Until next time. Thank you so much. Appreciate it, guys. See you.

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