Inside Star Citizen: Council Calls | Spring 2020

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:05

   So, imagine if you will, I'm coming into New Babbage spaceport. I've checked my hunger meter, I'm a bit low. I know I need to go and get something to eat. So, I'm I head down to the fruit market and I uh buy a piece of apple with the streamlined new interface we got and it comes up into my inspect pose. It's all looking great. And just as it does, I notice all around me players are appearing with an apple in their hand. That's good. That's the money shot. Well done. We have a wonderful QA team all over the world, but there are some issues that we can detect faster at scale with a lot of players playing the game and that's

2. 00:00:54

   where the issue council comes in. The issue council is a tool on spectrum where players can report new bugs. They can contribute to existing bugs and they can priority vote bugs they feel are most egregious. We use that contribution system, if it gets to a certain level, to pull those bugs into our system, to pull our those bugs into our own Jira and we use the priority voting to figure out which ones are the worst. I think the issue issue council is one of the really big benefits we have with a live product. Also, the fact that they can provide repro steps. How did they get there? What did they do? Sometimes you do something unexpected and that's what's creating the bug and it's hard for us to reproduce without knowing that's what you did. We determine an issue is valid by the number of contributions it has. Once it

3. 00:01:42

   hits a certain threshold, in the case of the live issue council, that's 10 contributions, then we it gets confirmed and we realize it's a valid issue. So, when I first saw this particular bug, players were reporting that food was randomly appearing in their hands, which is obviously a little bit strange. I went to the game and and checked it out, and sure enough, you could be riding the train, you could be flying your ship, whatever, and just hamburger would just appear in your hand. Um I thought it was convenient. I kind of wish it happened in real life. Obviously, really, really funny bug. Uh you know, for me, it's kind of almost almost a feature. At the time, obviously, didn't realize that it was taking money money out of your account. You were paying for that freebie food.

4. 00:02:29

   So, it wasn't that much freebie anymore. Discussed it quite a lot with Keien. We kind of went through the code kind of a bit backwards to to see where exactly is this extra piece of food appearing from. Um and then over time, we kind of traced it back to this purchase logic that was executing on on all the machines and and sent it over to Spencer and his team. The bug made its way down to me because I was responsible for implementing this new feature of picking up food when you buy it from the store. And so, this was not just that we're spawning food in your hand and charging you UEC, but you could see ridiculous scenarios where you'd reach out to grab this item and slide across universe to get it because the way the carryable system works

5. 00:03:17

   trying to get that in your hands. So, initially, my thought was, "Okay, this bug might have to do with how the item is getting picked up and how we network that." Because uh I used the functionality we already have called post spawn action on our carryable items. So, when you have that set, the instant this item is spawned, it says, "Oh, somebody's trying to carry me. I need to be picked up. Let me request that." Thought there was something wrong with the networking there. And this was a total dead end and was not at all what the problem was. So, later down the road, I was uh investigating our new quick buy feature, which is uh you'll see in shops instead of just saying like oh buy or try on, there's also now a quick buy option that you can get. And what that does is it circumvents the need to like oh buy, open movie glass, uh do I want to buy this, buy, okay, buy, all right, we got it. As with a lot of things, adding a

6. 00:04:06

   new feature suddenly breaks things because this was totally the problem. And the reason is because we circumvent that movie glass step. Uh when you interact with something in the game, it's all server authoritative. And so like oh if I'm going to try to pick up this item right now and I reach and grab it, the server knows that you did that, it tells everybody else that you did that. And so here's where the problem is. Normally when you interact with a shop item and you say okay, there's the thing, I'm going to interact with it, I'm going to open my movie glass so I have a chance to buy it. Opening the movie glass is something that only happens on your client. Right? So when everybody else gets told about this interaction, they say hey Spencer just opened up his movie glass, but like it's not your movie glass, so don't worry about opening it, you know. Back it there's nothing, there's not a real movie glass there for me on your

7. 00:04:53

   computer. But when we circumvent the movie glass and we say hey this person tried to buy this thing, essentially everybody would get this interaction call back and just say I want to buy this item. Everybody else doesn't have that step of oh I don't have a movie glass for that character. It went right to the buy. Just spend their own real money because somebody else tried to make a purchase. So in the end the fix was actually pretty straightforward and pretty easy to implement. It was only a few lines of code really, but as with a lot of bugs in our game, the the hardest part is tracking down why the issue is happening in the first place, going down several dead ends and saying okay, this is really where the issue is. Let's just put a couple lines of code in, let's prevent this scenario from happening and now we're good. And it's really great that for issues like this we have the issue council to bring up like hey this this bug is happening when we have a lot of players and they're in the same location and stuff. Uh things that are

8. 00:05:41

   harder for me as a single developer to try to reproduce on my own machine and that you know is easy to go unnoticed with just one person. It's a super important and it's a it's a really great thing and it it's the one of the things about this project that that adds to the whole um life cycle, you know, that it's all live. So, all day you're always playing almost what we're doing um as we're doing it. So, it's a direct connection between us and uh the players. Way back when games like Wing Commander pioneered the use of in-situation comms calls, where NPCs would call into a screen in the player's cockpit and provide exposition or react to current happenings in gameplay. For the upcoming Squadron 42, this feature is being brought into the 21st century by the comms call strike team, who are working to develop a systemic solution that can

9. 00:06:30

   stand up to scrutiny from all angles, while providing experience that is both diagetic within the game universe and relatable to players who, today, have video calls as a regular part of their daily lives. So, comms calls are a communication system from ship to ship. And with Squadron 42 involving the player taking the role as a pilot, it's their primary use of communication. Nice. Brilliant. Brilliant. What we're currently doing with Squadron 42 is you can even see the person who's communicating to you. You know they're right there next to you and then you can

10. 00:07:18

    even fly over to them and see them animating and talking to you. So, we have four types of comms calls. We have cockpit, we have terminals, we have mobiGlas, and we even have FPS weapons. We are currently shifting our focus to the cockpit comms calls towards gold standard. Gold standard is a term used in the industry for when a feature team or any kind of development team focuses on one aspect or one feature of development and we take full focus all the way to the end delivery of it. This includes making sure that helmets for pilots are lit in the correct way to deliver a good performance on the face. We have cameras set up per ship. So, maybe some manufacturers will have a different camera set up to others. We also look at the skeleton and animation of the pilot

11. 00:08:07

    themselves, making sure that each character brings their own personality to their flight pose as well as their delivery of their lines. The IMC's going to kill you and all your mug friends. Due to the current state of the PU, the comms calls are pre-recorded and delivered based on context. Ultimately, uh it'll be working the same situation as Squadron 42, where all dialogue lines will played in real time, as it adds that next level of immersion. For instance, maybe your wingman is calling you that needs to get pirates off his back and he's getting shot at left, right, and center by their energy weapons and a dynamically lit in the cockpit. Last thing you want to see is all these blaster fire on the cockpit and then just have a pre-recorded animation of a unlit cockpit. It can really break the immersion. So, the team

12. 00:08:55

    is really coming together to bring a terrific cockpit experience for the player of Squadron 42. We have over 100 characters with hundreds of dialogue that's delivered all through different ships, different circumstances. I'm sure it'll be an experience to remember. So, what did we learn this week? Well, we learned that even the most seemingly innocuous bugs can have a potentially devastating effect on the in-game wallets of players everywhere. That with tools like the issue council, players can take an active role in the development of Star Citizen. And that successful immersion for a storytelling experience like Squadron 42 can often come down to the little things like simply knowing the responses of our opponents are accurately reflected in the mayhem around them. For Inside Star Citizen, I'm Jared Huckaby. We'll see you next week.