Around the Verse: Episode 1.04 (2014.07.03)

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:02

   [Music] hey everybody and welcome to episode four of around the verse I am Sandy Gardner and I'm Ben Lesnik it's a very good to be back it is and what did you do this week then I was best man at an old friend's wedding up in Seattle he's actually the guy I started the win Commander website with so if if you go out there you can probably find some uh drunken dancing B photos e more exciting than me all I've been doing is watching the World Cup soccer other we we do have to thank James for doing a fantastic job standing in uh and feedback was

2. 00:00:50

   excellent there was one thing out there that I think that has terrified the entire development team and that is this image of James with anime eyes I saw that that that's burned on all of our retinas I saw that and I also saw that we're still kind of awkward and oh I don't know what they mean by that we are normal human friends see I think people would actually like that better all right it is that time again Ben what time is it time for the monthly report uh this Tuesday saw the releas of the June report so if you're wondering what was happening at any particular cig office check it out there's a lot of detail in there and some cool pictures be sure to pick out your Gamescom ticket if you haven't already I think they're almost sold out right yep it's going to be a heck of a party it is going to be a heck of a party and we're also looking for somewhere we can shoot around the

3. 00:01:36

   verse so if you know or have a beer garden in Cologne really a beer garden or a beer house or just a small beer room as long as Beer's involved call us trying to finagle a Gamescom booth on the show floor we'll see how I go with that I wonder what we're going to be showing redacted and now news from around the [Applause] verse let's do this one module at a time starting with Arena Commander I mean the big news is we're continuing to improve Arena Commander uh and that means just that means including bug fixes updates to the server we're also adding features uh the UK team is developing something

4. 00:02:25

   called New Horizons it's another game mode it's going to pit people against each other in a new way and everything else about that one is redacted H we are balancing and fixing bugs on capture the core and Squadron battle and we are reducing Friendly Fire Hits we have noticed that your wingmen are about as dangerous as the vanuel on occasion so uh we're reducing that and we are also fixing the error in which their uh their guns tend to blow themselves up audio improvements to whisby and shield hit effects whoosh whoosh design is focusing on expanding the ship component system obviously we launched with a couple of basic ships and they have some components and now we're we're going to start to give you options different engines different uh guns different shield generators it's going to be pretty cool and there have been many service side fixes to improve stability and accuracy we are at 30,000 players

5. 00:03:14

   now and with a new patch hopefully dropping this week uh we should just keep going higher onward to Squadron 42 our single player game team of Foundry 42 is hard at work uh currently focusing on a vertical slice of Mission 4 also making plans for localization for our non-english-speaking backers that's right uh if you're French German or speak some other language we are going to make sure you understands sadron 42 as well isn't that eigs yep yeah and they are they're also working on multic Cru seat functionality which is going to be important uh in the near term for things like the constellation and in the long term for things like the javelin Destroyer Behavior the team at behavior is working on the design of the Avatar system and our internal system building tools yep uh basically they're doing the things that are going to let us build start our citizens so first we sit down

6. 00:04:01

   we we build a tool for our designers that will let them create a star system quickly then create a character quickly and uh we just kind of grow exponentially from there heavy UI work also continues on the firing range and Mobi glass first thing you're going to be seeing from them though is the asteroid hanger which is so close to done and uh once the asteroid hanger hits you'll also be seeing improvements to the existing hangers as they transition over to the room system that's going to allow us to expand them in all sorts of cool directions so if you want like a living room or a bathroom added to your house hanger you will uh have that option they've also finished the implementation of the next Hangar flare item which is a real fun one except to you have to wait and listen to hear it later this month it's going to be a cool one all right now the one you guys all really want to hear about ship development I just heard about that this morning it was great

7. 00:04:49

   ship pipeline concept work on the 890 jump was completed at Behavior that's our uh space yacht and it looks beautiful it is beautiful they've updated the Avenger uh it's basically been remod retextured and you're going to be seeing that in the near future cutless variants are also now in progress of course we can't give you any detail on those yet no we can't they're going to be good uh the internals of the interest are getting work uh with focus on uh rooms that are going to be important for squadron 42 like the engine room Captain's Quarters uh reactor room missile room I'm looking at my list here but there a lot of rooms Armory airlock it'll be good constellation variants are ongoing Focus using now on damaged States and the integration of some of the multiplayer capable rooms including the generator cargo room cockpit and beds we've also

8. 00:05:37

   got the vandel bomber coming up that's also looking great uh concept is finished and it's moving on to production concept for several other expected ships and a few that you don't know about also kicked off last week so expect to see more on the Orion or the Carrick in the near future persistant Universe Tony zeric and the persistent Universe team have been doing what Ben they have been uh basically getting the design up for the persistent universe and building the tools we need to uh build it out further they've started with the first five systems we're putting those together now that those are the first ones you'll play in the beta work is being done on the large World 64-bit conversion which will let us make much larger environments we create worlds even bigger worlds now uh and finally the uh character customization pipeline is

9. 00:06:25

   kicking off basically we saw how much you guys like the brown Coast during the freelancer sale and we decided that you needed more customization options sooner so they're they're working on Avatar design they're working on outfits uh possibly integrating some of the tech from warhorse it's it's uh it's maybe not as sexy as ships but it's a really interesting design process I think it's sexy right well there you go yep you see she should know sexy yeah hey everybody I'm Le moderator will here to bring you this week's MVP this week I'm actually joined by valanor Aerospace hello this week's MVP goes to lwh Hawk for his Star Citizen music video using original music check out this clip

10. 00:10:08

    that was awesome thank you very much lwh Hawk your this week's MVP yeah oh

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    yeah what we have here is the size of a cubic

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    meter of space pants as compared to Freddy Mercury let's go over to Chelsea and Alley for a customer service update how's it going in CS we got a lot of tickets hi I'm KX Forno Tech designer at Cloud Imperium games and since PS I've mostly spent my time ruining all these beautiful ships and uh I will not stop ruining the ships most recently I've begun ruining the uh cutless uh and one of the one of the good things about having packs behind us is that we we learned a lot about how to

13. 00:13:24

    build our ships out uh how to form the function of these ships so we we are now able to build them out in white box form whereas before we sort of built out all the art first and then we would go through and meticulously build the function into it uh what I'm doing now is I am taking the cutless and turning it into all these beautiful boxes and these boxes are the hierarchy of how the ship gets built stitched together and then ultimately torn apart um so with with this we're able to get right into the full game play of having ships having the thrusters power output uh destruction States and all the ways

14. 00:14:15

    that these systems interact all of those done before we even get the art for those completed what this means is that we can work more in parallel than we were able to before or was a lot of the time we would spend some we'd have to to be playing catchup on this system or that in order to get them all meshed together well now I can make it all work from here with my little flow graph and box system here I am inside the cutless and it works it's still using some of the other HUD elements but there I am in my cutless and I can even start blowing the wing off the back bits and tail and

15. 00:15:08

    everything currently functions the way that I want it to ultimately and now that we have this we can focus on making it pretty again so that's what I've been doing since packs aside from watching all the twitch streams which I maybe spend a little too much time on I've been doing this too Ben who won the MS paint contest uh well as you know last week we offered a RSI mouse pad to signed by the entire team to whoever could draw us the best Ms paint version of the freelancer we received a lot of very uh interesting entries a couple of which we'd like to share here uh our third runner up who will get uh 10,000 UE is Dragon 64 with the Robert sandwich Industries version okay the uh second runner up who

16. 00:15:59

    will get uh 15,000 U is cran with the fish Lancer and the winner of this fantastic mouse pad is angry peas with the speed freelancer yes go speed freelancer go yes congratulations angry peas and this week Sandy sits down with our Bug Smasher star Mark aent morning Mark how are you morning pretty good had some coffee so I'm about you know waking up now yeah I've been hearing some bug Smashers in the background yeah I guess they're uh fix fixing up the building finding some bugs or something jackhammering it away jackhammering sawing drilling yeah you name it they're doing it we even had some people goinging up the stairs so you might he you know hear godzill in the background a few times exactly well we're here early cuz

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    you get in here early so that helps yeah I get here at like 5:30 every day just to beat LA traffic all right well I have some fans who would like to know some answers questions no blemish would like to know what has been the most frustrating or most memorable bug you've come across so far as a programmer there's a lot of them but if I narrow it down to Star Citizen on this project to actually have a fun little bug that's happening right now that me and a couple other of the studios UK and Austin are looking into where a multiplayer if the player spawn soon as he spawns in he can be like standing like this and if you move around the ik just has his hand so he's just like it's so funny but it it only

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    happens on like the initial spawn and if you're lagging the worst part is uh myself and a few other people can't even replicate it and QA gets it all the time so we're just trying to chase down this bug that we ourselves can't replicate but other people get it no problem and it's just so irritating cuz it's like what's causing this and that's one thing that we're chasing down now probably the most annoying bug so far I guess that has nothing to do with location or computer specs or anything like that funny part is we were wondering if it was like you know maybe his location so we added some like fake lag and network latency still couldn't get it and we're

19. 00:18:23

    like all right maybe your computers are too fast so I actually asked our RT guide Dennis if I could buy borrow a slow slow hard drive cuz we have ssds so after like spending a couple hours copying all the game over to it still didn't get the bug how slow are we talking oh really slow was like just getting into the game took a couple minutes compared to SSD where it only took maybe a few seconds to get in all right and even with the lag it went from like you know 2 minutes get the game to 10 minutes cuz simulating dropping pack and lag and was just like server was like I sent you this information get ready how come you don't know them and the client's like cuz I forgot it all right Scully would like to know

20. 00:19:15

    how many years have you been programming what languages have you used and what types of programs have you worked on prior to Star Citizen so I actually started programming in 1998 actually had no idea what I was doing at the time because I was only like 12 but I started originally modding uh this game called halflife they came out with SDK and I just wanted to know why it worked how it worked and pretty much ever since then i' just been you know programming all kinds of things I've for that particular project it was C++ and through there I was able to join another mod group called black maesa source which is still in development for today and from that I moved on to um my

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    first retail project called Insurgency which is actually available now on Steam and then I wanted to go on something bigger and better so I applied here and I got in and all three of those projects use C++ but I have done some scripting stuff using python on and pearl uh for all three of those projects including this one to generate you know scripts or things that I need to run real quick but the primary language has been C++ Jack T Colton would like to know as a game play programmer my understanding is that your focus is more on the game strategy and how to implement the mechanics to create the feel of the game Chris Roberts has been clear on his

22. 00:20:55

    vision for Star Citizen today which part of this vision Vision has been the hardest to get the feel right for the game I would say the hardest part is getting the ships to work in multiplayer cuz we have well Chris's Envision wants like these very complicated interactions with ships which is really easy to do in single player but in multiplayer you have to deal with sending stuff across the network making sure it sinks up and you just get all these fun bugs like uh the first question where the player sits up which doesn't happen in single player so we that's probably the hardest thing it's just making sure everything works but um some of the things I touched as a

23. 00:21:44

    gameplay programmer is not just you know code it's design you know I work with the designers with they Envision how something's supposed to work and go all right you want it to work this way here's what how we could do it and how it you know it's going to work in single player and multiplayer maybe it'll be a little bit different maybe it'll be the same and then how it's going to be set up in the scripts how the artists are going to work it so it's not just programming this thing it's figuring out how it's going to work everywhere and how everyone's going to touch it so does that mean you have to write two separate pieces of code for single player multiplayer it's entirely possible I mean there's some instances right now where um with cry engine we have have this thing called the editor where we could hop in as a designer and you know

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    create a level and move our ships around hop in the game hit Escape hop in the game and in there your environment is completely different from joining like a multiplayer match so you have to handle respawning and all sorts of things differently than what you would do with normal clients and stuff so you know like in the editor your ship could explode you hit Escape you want the ship to be go back and remain intact but in multiplayer if your ship explodes you either leave it there or you create a new one so you have to handle things a little bit differently depending upon your environment sounds complicated oh yeah right but it's all fun last question all right KO would like to know dfm AC has been running very well and it led me to wonder how

25. 00:23:23

    many processed threads are used to calculate and simulate the physics related articles of the dfm AC I.E each Thruster in use Delta ref player and NPCs counter inertia from Rapid firing of weapons and crashing are each of these separated on their own process or are they grouped so we actually have two threads for physics and we call them job threads and anytime some kind of physics interaction Collision or something like that or you know has to process movement it'll use one of those threads to do it and then we have our main thread which is where all the game logic for weapons and ships lie so our thrusters actually have to be on the both physics and the main so there's been a lot of fun

26. 00:24:12

    crashes where the physics thread will try to access something that the main thread has closed and it's just been like a lot of back and forward to protect between you know the two threads cuz I'm not sure how many of our fans know these threads will run at the same time or not it's depends when they get called and a lot of underlining stuff but um specifically for the thrusters we have the item attachment stuff which is all handled on the main thread or the game thread and that's how the thrusters get attached detached so if you shoot them they could come apart or if you you know use them too much and you have too much heat they might get damaged and again get detached meanwhile physics might be calculating

27. 00:25:01

    all our physics calculations for that Thruster and if we don't tell the physics thread to who wait I'm about to detach this it's going to just crash so I was actually working with uh physics programmer John pritet on trying to prevent such crashes cuz his Thruster code is one complicated beast but it works so well wow yeah it's a lot of protection to make sure that they could work in sync right well thank you for your interview we look forward to seeing you on the next bug smashes or today's bug Smashers and um I think it'll be around for a while so thank you for having me cheers guys I wonder what food tastes like

28. 00:26:06

    seeing as our around the verse logo competition was so successful we thought that we would do that for 10 for the chairman yeah we were blown away by the entri we got for around the verse and uh we kind of feel that The Temper of the chairman logo is getting a little long in the tooth needs a new look and who better to give it than the uh stares and backers who created the show in the first place how did they do that then well we created a threat at the ARs forms you can go and submit your ideas for a logo the winner will get an origin 350r racer ship and the honor of knowing that they have their logo at the top of every episode of Chris Roberts show coming up on Friday you'll all go inside the asteroid hanger with the team from behavior in an allnew inside cig it's looking pretty cool and you you got A Sneak get it earlier didn't you I did in Montreal it was very cool so I'm looking forward to seeing the final product

29. 00:26:53

    speaking of things they don't celebrate in Montreal a happy 4th of July to all of our American backers and non-americans who celebrate uh especially those in the UK who are probably happy to be rid of us well that's it for today thank all you guys for watching keep the feedback coming we read all of the Forum comments and I have to Pat you on the back see I read all the Forum comments well thank you to whoever told her to Pat me on the back I know what about mine know we're supposed to exchange oh okay whatever it's okay there we go right so be sure to join us next week we'll be sitting down with uh Dan Tracy trying to get a little bit more inside his head and uh I guess that's it for around the verse this week that is not quite it for this week's around the verse as we have a little sneak peek at some concept art oh well uh after that then we'll see you around the verse we will see you around the verse

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    Point your face at things and pull the trigger