Around the Verse: Episode 2.06

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   this video made possible by the ICC Stellar surveyors and subscribers like [Music] you hey every everybody welcome back to around the verse I'm Sandy Gardner and I'm not that is Ben Lesnik this week on the ATV interview Jared sits down with Tyler Witkin from QA to discuss why quality assurance is more than just playing video games all day and we take our first look at Starbase Santa Monica clatt Imperium games new headquarters as

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   you know it's all hands on deck to push out Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 uh we're very very excited about 2.0 this is the uh the first building block upon which the persistent universe will be created you all saw a fantastic demo of some of the features at citizen con and there's there's more to reveal uh we are we're getting very close uh I know there's some rumors going around oh it's going to come this day it's going to come this day the truth of the matter is that right now we do not know the specific day we kick off builds every day with bug fixes um it's kind of like baking a cake you know they once they come out of the oven we take a look at them see if this cake is edible or not and and I eat it all no yeah you you look you eat a lot of cake I do I do I like my cake well once we have a delicious cake we will put it on the PTU to have you guys try it out yeah in other news it is time

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   for another monthly report monthly report is our very very detailed look at what happened on Star Citizen the previous month here from all the uh Studios and outsourcers and there should be some cool screenshots in this one too and don't forget the community team is coming to Austin September 8th at 700 p.m. at red porch will be attending a bar citizen hosted party woo Austin hook them horns and all that uh going to be a heck of a Time come on out I hear there's seven zero people going 70 that's that's more people than I know so yeah I guess check the weather yes uh you know here here in Santa Monica we don't have weather but in Austin there's always uh rain and even occasional cold so bring a jacket mhm I'm going to bring my Star Citizen hoodie oh yes if I make

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   it I still have to see if I can make it sounds fun though and now let's turn it around no that's what need to do and now news from around the verse yes news from around the verse hey everyone welcome back to Southern California Santa Monica at Cloud Imperium games it's actually kind of rainy outside so we've got a good week update for you guys I'm Daran borick Eric Kon Davis what do we got today Eric uh we got a a lot of stuff this week actually um our lead vehicle artist elwin he is working hard on the gray box for the Reliant uh we're all really excited about that ship and getting in the gray box phase for us is just an exciting Milestone uh another one is Randy Vasquez he's working really closely with the concept artist who's uh putting together The Crucible um and as

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   we talked about before he's uh working hand inand with the Salvage mechanics so that's all coming together um he he's been providing a lot of really great design feedback to bring that ship to really uh a really great place on side of everybody else right our design director and Chris and everybody's kind of got their their heads wrapped around and Ben as well so it's coming together really well so on the arena Commander side we've got our two Engineers John pritet who's in charge of our flight engineering design and we've got Pete McKay also another one of our Engineers from the Austin office out here fine doing fine-tuning work on the ifcs flight system um this system not only uh contributes to the new flight modes uh leading up to Quantum travel but it also affects on how players Eva outside of their ship uh we're adding ifs control to the Eva HUD so we've got not only our UI team but also Engineers just working fine-tuning how basic players move outside the ship as well as trying to

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   add much more greater precise control and throttle feedback uh not just within racing but also in Arena Commander dog fighting as well um so I think that that's all we got for this week yep so once again I'm Daren I'm Eric hope you guys enjoy the ring see you have a beardy day hey guys Jake Ross here ass producer of the persistent universe and I'm here with you this week to go a little bit over uh environments uh the party system and a little bit of Animation as well so on the environment front we've finished the the top down kind of white box layout of uh the Nyx bizaar Marketplace so the little bizaar area I've been talking to you guys about past few weeks um we' finished that design it's off to Art they're going to finish that up and uh we'll have that out for you here pretty soon um so we'll have our our shops around the bizaar area and then

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   our little kind of um Marketplace area as well it's going to be a little different a little uh pretty cool though uh also we are now in a white box phase for huren uh we're looking at U moving from from our designers from uh Nick to huren so that'll be we'll we'll leave the Stanton system for a little while and then we'll come right back to it and start work on on the Hurston system huren Planet as well um on the party system side so we're we're um looking to get that in for our next release um and we are finished with the backend side of that work so we've we finished Jason elely lead server engineer here uh finished the back inside of that and has passed it on to behavior for the front end work so um that will be in for the next release so that will be something to look forward to as well uh last but

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   not least we finished on the animation side um some bouncer animations for the nightclub scene uh we're calling them nightclub scene animations even even though we don't really have a nightclub in place yet uh we have a dance Flor in the g-lock bar so that's why we use them and we'll use uh some of these animations in the million mile high club as well but uh the bouncer animations as well as the uh the patrons uh you know entering the nightclub animations we finish those up as well so uh we're going to flush out the nightclub interior uh animation uh vignettes as well as the medical unit um animations as well so uh look forward to that as well yeah um I think that's all I got for you this week thanks see you around hey y'all Mike here from Foundry 42 here in sunny whims slow uh with me today is Sean crew I'm the office

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   manager and we're here today to talk to you about the shoot down in London down in eling studios uh The Imaginarium Place uh where we basically scanned in all the guys that you're going to see in Squadron 42 um I went down uh for a few days to help Sean out because uh well you were stranded by yourself weren't you I was a bit everyone decided to go on annual leave yeah um so yes you're my hero so I was down there in um purely to um out the camera rig which was part of the map um uh part of the shoot so we took the um actors into a very um very white kind of area uh we have 52 cameras um set up around uh the around the actor uh it's very very personal we're looking at all the wrinkles um so we have to

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    make sure that people are on hand in order to make it enjoyable hence the reason Mike came down because he makes things really enjoy which is great um and uh it's just so that we can make sure that we get all the reaction and the facial features because everyone does things differently everyone's muscles work differently in the face yeah so the the 52 cameras were to get almost a 360 view of um how the person's face reacts the ears all the way to the back and the muscles here and this was in relation to the U Moab so that when a person moves we can get the reaction of their muscles as well yeah we through an awful lot of facial expression tier zero so that would be Mark Hamill and people like that they had to do um 78 79 um facial features so just like lifting their eyebrows as one

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    smiling grinning with their teeth as another surprisingly tiring I mean we both had a go didn't we so uh we know how uh grueling it can be well anyway I think that's all we've got time for today um hopefully you'll be hearing a bit more about this on next week's episode uh yeah it's been great talk to you guys I've been Mike I've been Sean and we'll see you all around the verse bye hey guys Brian Chambers again from Frankford office uh this week fortunate enough to have one of our senior software Engineers Chris bolty with us hello thought I bring him in uh he can explain what he does here um in Frankfurt and what he's been working on recently okay uh since introduced me I think I should B I'm an engineer working in the engine

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    myself that's funny H my main focus is the more low level system so I work on multi sading lowle multi sading I work on the lowle streaming system how to get the data from disk to memory um I work on General game optimizations I work on CPU side vendoring it's more less what I generally do uh my main focus at Cloud Imperium so far was working and developing the sound system is our own St structure which is heavily tied in that we want to have large groups of moving objects together like the ships Y which we'll see with 2.0 hopefully soon um and in the more recent time I was focusing on optimizations mostly rewriting our multi

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    sweating back end to be really PC Centric because on consoles you always work with a fixed Hardware where you have um stuff like you have fixed number of Hardware RS and you can really design your code for it PC is a little bit different Beast because you have so many configurations yeah it fluctuates exactly fluctuates and on P you have you don't know what is running on the PC on the console you know the has a fixed number of Cycles it needs PC you could run five instances of the game at the same time it still has to work sort of makes it more interesting but I think we are going into the same direction most of you saw already that the the utilization overall went up which means we distribute our work better and it's still a bit to do because

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    especially some other noticed about CPU s weet taking 100% this is just implies that we are CPU bound because CPU 3 number three is our main sweat where we do all the world updates and yeah we haven't paralyzed enough yet or we do too much work on the threat which means you just block sort of critical F fast to the PO and yeah that's what what else you been covering recently that's mostly the threading and then sometimes spend with sculling issues which means now now I say that like oh what else have you been doing I know that's a large task and an important one right yeah it is large but small on like said back fixing General optimizations profiling the game telling

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    other people where we could improve our code on the optimization side there's always two kinds of optimizations you can either do the really high level optimizations which tend really to be longer because they need to be an architecture reite of the engine yeah but afterwards there are sometimes really low hanging Foods so you think oh this this isn't really good how we wrote it it takes 5 minutes to fix exactly makes a game exactly cool thanks for uh taking the time to come in chat with us chat with the community uh um hopefully I can get him back here again and maybe some of the other Engineers as well but um besides that thanks for watching and we'll see you next time as always a big thank you to our Studios

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    from around the world now let's check in with Jared who chatted with our QA tester Tyler Witkin in this week's ATV interview thanks guys today we're sitting down with q tester extraordinaire and host of witch glitch Mr Tyler Witkin Tyler how you doing man I'm doing well thanks for having me so you've been out here at the Santa Monica Studio all week yes what are you doing here um we came to LA to uh help transition the new QA lead in La Vincent or Vinnie Sinatra Vinnie Sinatra Vin Sinatra he tells us that's his real name we're going to find out in another

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    interview yeah but uh so you've been working QA for Star Citizen for how long now I have been here for a year a year so where was the game when you came on what was like the first thing you remember working on oh I came on about a month before the 1.0 push in December um so at that point we had that one patch that came on with all the Mustangs uh a bunch of new ships and um yeah fun you're just drifting up into memory yeah no I forgot it's okay uh so what did you do before you came to Star Citizen uh before I came to Star Citizen I was at Blizzard Entertainment um I was a game master for almost five years so yeah you did that as well too I was on the GM team when w launched so we we we

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    we weren't there at the same time I I I left just before burning Crusade came okay I was there until right before Warlords of dror Goa so uh you worked out of the Irvine campus uh no actually I was in Austin Texas Austin Texas yeah they they opened up a a big Center there and moved a bunch of people out there and uh worked there for a long time good memories and Good Times yeah we have quite a few of our staff members that have that have done some time in the blizzard trenches yeah actually like a half the QA team in Austin all came from blizzard gotcha so a lot of people think QA is just playing video games we hear that a lot oh how awesome would it be to just play video games all day yes tell tell us obviously playing video games is some aspect of that but but absolutely give us a typical day in the life of QA

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    uh so A Day in the Life um I mean of course you do play the game just because uh you know you want to make sure that you understand it to its full potential um but day in the life it's it's a lot more structured than that uh we'll spend the beginning of our days grabbing new builds they'll kick off new builds overnight that will have all the developer changes from the previous day um so we'll grab those builds and sometimes we'll have special tasks or special projects we have to focus on a developer request like you know hey we have this the the whole new flight change uh online and so if you guys could really just hit that and so we we create checklists um sometimes we just ad hoc test it which is just dive in and see what we can find um generally when we get a new feature um the new functionality it's we call it a target-rich environment uh there's a lot of bugs and so we don't always have to follow a checklist you know to make sure we cover everything because generally

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    just diving in um we have we have plenty of of stuff that we can write up and uh investigate um but yeah on a day-to-day on a day day basis we'll get we'll get our morning build and we'll hit on that all day and uh we constantly have developers coming in to hey you know I'm I'm I'm implementing a new feature and I don't know how it's going to affect this other feature you know can you test you know I just made a change to Collision can you see what happens if you collide with you know a ship in a ship a buggy in a ship and a player in a ship and so we'll just yeah you know do all kinds of stuff and uh now there are different kinds of builds there's release builds there's profile builds is there another one I'm forgetting uh there there's profile builds there's release builds and then there's working in the editor okay uh those are the three main environments um at cig so the difference is for a profile build that's the build

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    that the developers um use to debug their their content what they're working on so the profile build um has a ton of commands console commands that you can use um debug text so for performance testing it has all kinds of statistics and and all that jazz um a release build on the other hand everything is compressed it has uh it has pack files it is that is the build that is the end user experience so um the release build is what we basically it's the final package right before it goes out to The Players so all of those uh debug and console commands don't work in in a release build and then of course there's the editor which is where they actually um are developing the new content so there are many times where something will be fixed in the profile build and then when it gets converted into a

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    release build all hell breaks loose oh yeah that's actually uh one of the things that uh we had the opportunity to do uh since QA is in La this week um was sit down with all the various departments and basically go over you know hey here's here's exactly what qaa's workflow is for accessing a release build and a profile build because we want uh development and QA to be in sync so that way we can uh reproduce replicate issues the exact same way to make sure we're on the same end because as you said there are issues that will happen on a profile build and not happen on a release build these spooky issues and so whenever we write up a bug we have to we have to write you know this is happening in a release only build or this is happening in a profile build or it's happening in the editor gotcha what build were we in the other day when I walked by and we used the computer terminal and crusader and the

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    monitor popped off the stand yeah that was good I don't just in case anybody doesn't know that story uh Lando was walking through the studio giving a tour to somebody and he walked by my desk and he was like what are you working on and I was like oh this is actually AC 2.0 this Crusader there's these computers and you can go up to them and you can call a ship and it summons it to a one of the platforms outside and uh and and the guy was like Ah that's really cool and so I go up and I press F to use it and the screen on the computer just smacks into me and falls on the ground and I was just like that wasn't supposed to happen so we tried for like half an hour to get it to happen again because that's again one of the first things you do in QA how many times can you reproduce it um and it just never happened again it it's not happening again we still this day you can't get it to happen again um and with those type of bugs it's always as soon as we

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    release it to live all the monitors are going to be flying off the computers luck of the draw and yesterday we were we were trying to put together a different segment and we were loading into the hanger and when I loaded into my hanger the buggy was up on its side from Spawn and it didn't make any sense and as I approached it it started moving towards me yeah it was chasing and then I would take a step back and the buggy would start f following me and it basically the buggy was following me around the hanger yeah that's another one that I went upstairs like right after I was down here couldn't get it to happen again it's like hopefully it was a one-off issue because sometimes there are those those really one-off issues it could be a corrupt build or a corrupt file whatever um and hopefully we'll never see it again but if you're in your bug if you're in your hanger and your buggy upside down trying to kill you and

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    you see in the in your peripheral that it's maybe chasing you yeah yeah I wish we had footage of it we weren't recording at the time that was that was pretty fun now differences between the profile build and and the release build are why some some things like the new hanger lighting changes might not look as as look correct in the release in the profile AB yeah that's actually a perfect example um right now we're experiencing a bug where on profile builds which you know the community the backers they'll never see a profile build because that's the debug um build um right now there's an issue where the profile build is working perfectly with the time of day settings in the cry engine the release build however keeps defaulting the time of day settings in cry engine um to its defaults and so emra Switzer one of the most talented lighting artists I've ever met one of

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    the most talented guys I've ever met um relit the hangers recently and the community is like man the hangers look absolutely amazing and they do they look cool they look really cool but they're still not even what they're supposed to be um because of that time of day issue and that's something that is only a release bug and so that's something that they're working out so hopefully in the next patch the hangers will actually look even better well our viewers just got a look at the how the hangers are supposed to look while you were talking cuz we overlaid that footage while talking yes and uh when we're done here you have to go upstairs and get that footage so we can overlay it gotcha deal deal right we're going to wrap it up here Tyler uh but thanks for stopping by uh it's my pleasure we'll see you in Austin in two weeks yes looking forward to it bar citizen on November 8th yeah bar citizen November 8th at Reds porch

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    uh 7 7:00 p.m. November 8th Reds porch in Austin we'll be there hanging out with anybody who wants to join us so we'll see you then uh that's Tyler Witkin I'm Jared hucke back to you guys I wasn't ready to leave yet I saw that see all we might have to do some investigating when we get there all right I'm here what up what oh my God oh my get the holy sh holy I really like Tyler yeah he seems

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    nice yeah cool guy he approached me with a Hawaiian shirt and he said hey I'm Tyler you're just a sucker for guys with wi shirts well you're not wearing yours today I know but nine times out of 10 I am ah that is true thanks guys the new Hangar lighting is looking awesome it is indeed I uh this just say Ben seitter which is in itself a good Ben seitter are you supposed to say something about the lighting uh light's good hoay light hoay I'm in all seriousness um the last version of the lighting you guys saw the the current version in the game is bugged uh if you think it looks good now it's going to be even better next up we thought folks would get a kick out of a very brief walkthrough of our upcoming Santa Monica office here it is hey everybody so if you've been

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    following the news Cloud Imperium games lately you might have heard that the Santa Monica office is getting ready to move into a newer larger more robust facility uh today we wanted to take you on a quick tour of that facility it's obviously uh still under conr instruction and there's a lot of saws and a lot of noise in the background but we're going to see how this comes out and give you a sneak peek of how things look before we get all the desks and all the technology and most importantly all the people into the office now this is uh we're coming in now from the one of the the back door so this this this is uh what you're looking at right now is actually what's going to become the new community area so uh if you if you on the uh on the left here these are offices for our legal and Community

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    teams uh Sandy Gardner will have her office here Ben Lesnik will have her office his office here uh toast will have their office um and then folks who are coming over from our West Hollywood office and joining us here in this studio will have their offices here uh to the right here or I guess it's to your left uh there will be desks here and this is where the community will live uh I think my desk is about right here if I'm not mistaken at so I can look directly into Ben's office and yell at him when we need things um before we go further let's take a quick detour into here this is what's going to become our new studio area now this is where we'll be filming around the verse uh reverse the verse um our upcoming Dev versus Dev

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    show and uh it's also going to serve as our motion capture studio uh it'll we'll have a green screen at some point we'll do a lot of Photography here basically this is our allpurpose production area of the new office and here this will be like our green room where our guests come when we're doing motion capture with with uh such dignitaries like Mark Hamill or Gary Oldman or whatnot this is where they'll rest here uh this area here will be clear for the most part but then but when we set up the motion capture studio uh this will be the control area for the motion capture stuff uh over these boards here in this area this is where Thomas Hennessy our our wonderful camera person at this time Thomas Hennessy and Justin Chambers will

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    be here this is where we'll be putting together all the video content and you can see it's very echoey here at the moment so we'll come on back this way here the one thing construction Crews love is to have people coming through and filming things now as we come back out here down this hallway is more offices again for our legal and for accounting HR stuff like this uh this if I understand it correctly is to be ort one's office as you can see artwin lives good in the center of the office we have our main foyer so this is basically there'll be tables and chairs where

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    we'll eat lunch this is where we'll congregate in our office time we have a kitchen that's being put in over there uh there aren't a lot of food choices in this neighborhood where we're going to so we'll get to be able to prepare our own food and eat lunch dinner whatever meal comes after dinner second dinner I suppose uh over here this is our main entrance foyer now this is where the front door will be uh you'll notice that at this moment the front door is actually not in uh but the front door go there and our uh our facilities manager will sit here and then we'll have our big conference room here uh when we do our aniversary live stream I think we're going to be in this room when we do that so we'll see we'll see how if I'm right or wrong about that I'm going to get

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    this stuff out of this guy's way I didn't realize so follow me here bathrooms you know you got to have bathrooms and on the final third of the building this is where our Des design and art teams are going to be so this entire Corner area here is primarily for our design teams uh your your Matt Sherman's your KX Rena's they're all going to be here Mark aent if I if I remember the uh latest season chart I think Mark aon's desk is like right here so this is where we'll be filming bug Smashers going forward um room for another conference room uh somebody's office I don't quite remember might be Paul rendell's we'll find out coming through this

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    way one of these will be Chris Roberts's office and the other one will be a a conference room for everywhere at this end so when you so when you we get back to attend for the chairman and whatnot we should be filming it in one of these offices because he does like to film in his office I can't blame him he has a very nice office directly across we've got offices for the writers so your Dave hadock and your will Weiss bomb over here for some of your producers and art director and Mr Steve Bender uh if you watched the Germany tour recently you saw Steve Bender standing in front of his desk and shouting into a headset we don't even give him a chair anymore over here this is where the art team goes so your gmach your Omar they all they'll all sit here uh one of these

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    offices I think is for Forest so yeah this is where the art team the art team here design team over there all together but still close enough to you know meet when they need to and yeah let's check out it you Dennis is one of our favorite people in the office and around here this could probably get get pretty dark I don't know if you'll be able to see me or not but here's where Dennis's office should be and then want to peek in here this is the start of our it closet here obviously nothing's been moved over yet but they just finished up the cable runs a couple days ago and in industrial strength hea air conditioner on the up above so yeah then we come back down this

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    hallway and we're back in the kitchen I see we got some pretty indust some nice Industrial Equipment there I look forward to uh preparing my lunch every day anyway that's about it there's not much to show at this point but we wanted to kind of get some footage in here before we get get the tables and all the equipment and all the people in there to show the progress so uh thanks for watching and uh if we're moving either this week or next week or the week after we're moving real soon and uh we look forward to showing you the finished product so back to you guys have a question you guys this is the uh before look you're going to be seeing all the work that has happened after this once we move in so it doesn't really look like this right now is what he's saying yes have walls and everything this was before yes

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    before and you haven't seen anything yet Sandy talks about what will be great at the new office benett color okay what what was that the new offices are going to be very cool cuz first of all we'll actually have some space and so what we're doing this weekend or is it hey what this weekend or next weekend it's next weekend we're building some sets so we'll have these rolling sets for ATV RTV meet the devs de versus Dev all of that good stuff we have a little uh map stage so we can do our map there um I actually have my own office although I think I'm sharing with Ben yay roomies yay and uh one day I'll have my own office a yeah lost I I do I like sharing a room with you uh what else

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    what else uh well we have a much bigger stage area so there's going to be room to do map in the future if we need to do it here you did say that and I um we we have there will be uh plenty of room for new folks who are coming from Austin as we expand out the persistent Universe development here in Santa Monica um it's it's a big upgrade where we're all really excited about having you know our own space we are very excited about having our own space so we won't have to cram into tight spaces that didn't work we're just two weeks away from the Star Citizen anniversary live stream on November 19th our actual anniversary is November 26th however that is Thanksgiving so we're doing it on the 19th 11:00 a.m. till 2:00 p.m. PST and I just cut Ben off what were you going to

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    say I was going to say something about Thanksgiving and how we're thankful for all the support we've gotten from our backers it was a bad Segway but it was it was bad quality uh but the live stream's going to be great we have all sorts of new content uh we've been putting together for this one um you'll see the latest on pretty much everything we're working on and of course we're kicking off the uh anniversary sale you'll see some new ships some old ships um plenty of ships and now it's time for this week's MVP then the envelope please here's the envelope okay and the winner is life on Lars who created the wonderful retro style Star Citizen wallpapers check it out these are just absolutely fantastic if you're familiar with like old 1950s sci-fi films stuff like fibon planet um

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    it starts it asn't B in that style they make great wallpapers and finally here's your art sneak peek be sure to tune in to reverse the verse

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    tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. Pacific on Twitch we'll be answering your questions about that art and uh everything else and of course thank you to all of our subscribers for making this show possible we will see you next week in Austin on around the verse around the verse a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a

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    a a WI a a thanks Adam oh thanks Jerry