CitizenCon 2952: Star Citizen & Squadron 42 | Partnered Development

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   foreign so that was a look at Outlaw lifestyle a glimpse at how the outposts and the space stations have evolved since we saw them at last year's citizengon 2951 uh now if you've been following our program today you might think this is it we're near the end but we've got one more special surprise in store joining us on the show today are two people who probably need no introduction but we're gonna do it anyway founder and CEO Mr Chris Roberts hello everyone how you doing how you doing I'm doing good welcome to the spaceship welcome back to the spaceship you you opened the show today and uh Squadron 42 game director uh Mr Richard Tyra hello how's it going good this is your first time on the spaceship it is it's what you think I think it's very nice

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   I'm just gonna ask everybody how it thinks all day um so yeah so Chris Rich you're here are we are we going to talk a little bit about Squadron 42 is that what we're doing right now uh well yes and no so uh but it's me and Rich uh I've been uh heads down working really hard on uh Squadron as as well as helping out on the pier and uh one thing that we've thought um that would maybe better to reiterate is there's a huge amount of work that we're doing on Squadron that is going to make a massive difference to Star Citizen the Pu and we wanted maybe to talk about some of the things that we're doing because I know a lot of people say well everyone's working on Squadron no one's working on the Pu and

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   that's not really true because a huge amount of the core gameplay that we're working on on Squadron is specifically being built not just for squadron but to benefit the Pu and we're just doing it in sort of The Test Kitchen of Squadron to allow us to really you know polish and make sure the features work well without having to be caught up in the sort of quarterly release cycle that you have on the Pu because we were finding it was it was hard for us to really finish the features out you know we'd get a tier zero out and then it would just sort of sit around for a while because everyone was rushing on to the next set of features they're wanting to do and and for squadron obviously we're you know it's shipping as a final polished AAA title so everything needs to be really put together working really well and playing great and so we're trying in the

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   setup that we're doing now to do that for the features that we've identified that we need to make sure it works really well for squadron but also we'll play across into the Pu and so we thought it'd be really useful to come by and tell you all about some of the subtle things and the gameplay aspects that we're working on that maybe you haven't heard from Todd or Tony or everyone else that like and you know today and uh you know during the iscs because we sort of try to keep the Squadron stuff close to our chest to really sort of surprise and impress people when we do it and so yeah we thought why don't we just come by and maybe just talk about little things maybe show you a sneak peek of something here and there and not everything because you know we we're trying to keep it close to our chest until it's really ready to let the baby out of the

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   carriage and it's you know beautifully dressed and all the rest of it but um yeah hopefully uh it'll give you guys some insight to what's happening and also understand that a huge amount of the development resources even if you think they're working on Squadron are ultimately working on stuff that will be in the persistent universe so let's talk a little bit more about that before we jump into the actual features this this co-development has been part of the process since the since the project was first introduced uh 10 years ago congratulations on 10 years by the way um uh Rich talk to me a little bit about this code development you you started with the Pu and then you've now gone over to the Squadron 42. so you've worked in both you've worked in both environments you know the the struggle of t0 uh features and the quarterly releases for the Pu and now you're

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   getting to kind of your experience is different on Squadron talk to me about how that's changed and how it still work for one still benefits the other or will ultimately well when I worked on the Pu it wasn't really the pus Squadron it was always we were working on features that pushed for both projects so the focus when we were on the Pu or when we were more pu focused was that we would make sure that we were getting features up and running you know developed to the specifications that we needed them to work in a multiplayer environment and then getting them out into the audience's hands you know on quarterly releases but the biggest issue I think you know if you've been you know if you've seen me doing talks on SC live over the years or even in some of our retrospectives is that we'd get features and the way that our you know crg's set up is we have feature teams and we have

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   content teams so what would happen is we'd develop a feature and then we'd push it to the live audience to get feedback around that feature but there would almost be a lag with the importance of that feature and turning that from a singular thing into an experience a gameplay experience that you'd go and enjoy and play as a part of a fun game so we always have this lag where content teams were then trying to get on top and then use the feature and we were trying to change the feature so I think this kind of pulled it back a bit allowed us to really focus on both the content and the feature at the same time because it allowed us to bring it as under one umbrella which is Squadron 42. so we were able to get that feature in the in the game not as a t0 but as a fully whole capable gameplay experience that you know myself careers we can play and enjoy and go is this right do we

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   need to make it better how does it feel and also prove that out with the content that we want so once we then developed that and honed it in in almost cast it in that iron in the in The Crucible kind of thing we can then move it into the Pu and ultimately it's not that they're going to get features later because they would have had them probably earlier but just not not ready or you know you can I can pick a few features right now you think well there's not really a huge purpose for the mounted guns as a good example it's not really a huge purpose for them in the Pu right now but we're making sure that any feature that we work on has that purpose so when it does go into the Pu you know into the game people can use it and experience it how we wanted it to be designed and how we wanted it to be you know because we struggle a few times say for example active status is a good example we have this vision of how it it

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   sits across this broad spectrum of the game but we're having to piecemeal it in and that never really gives you the true intentions of where we want to go and I think this allows us to do that in Squadron really hone it down and then give it to the PE audience and I think they'll be you know fundamentally it's better for the development of the features and it's better for the gameplay experience that both players will experience in both products yeah and I think I mean I think that's a really good point is that the you know it's before we were developing the sort of features in isolation and then they sort of went in to try to get used in Squadron and try to get used in the Pu but they weren't really developed iteratively with content and so that's the reason why we sort of pulled back some of the stuff and are working on the Squadron is because then we can iterate it with actual gameplay content which is what rich is talking about to make sure

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    it feels well and right with the time to to bake it in without having to feel like oh okay we've got a quarterly resale and because you know there's a lot that goes on with the quarterly release in terms of not it's not just that one feature there's all these other things that go into it and there's a whole process of publishing and splitting off the streams and so there's a huge amount of effort and work every time you do one of these releases it sort of eats into your development time in terms of doing the the feature and so pulling it out out of that sort of Loop and saying okay we're going to work with it in the Squadron to really make it polished so it's yeah like not a t0 version we've really got it done it feels good we like playing it this is fun this is challenging it it feels it feels good uh is is the benefit I think that's happening with us on Squadron and

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    we're seeing it on our side I know it can be a bit frustrating for everyone on the other side because I saw telling you oh yeah it's gonna be much better uh you've got it right now but we are very aware of a lot of say usability issues um uh you know user experience issues that we are addressing right now in squadrons specifically for both Squadron and the Pu that's gonna and we'll show you a couple little things that will help with that today but essentially if you think of core gameplay in terms of you know we have some core areas where we call the you know the sort of the actor system which is would be the FPS the uh you know players moving around on foot uh you know interacting with things uh the vehicle stuff which you know like John crew heads up but the you know the whole Vehicle Systems and and you know

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    you've already seen some presentation stations today on things that are very specific to vehicles uh you know like the sort of Need for multiple speeds and also the Resource Network which is going to first roll out in vehicles but it's going to be Universal um you know all those are sort of core gameplay systems that we have and so what's happening now is that we're taking some of these systems and really just making them work well four Squadron and then bam they're going to come across into the Pu you know another good example which hasn't been taught today very much by the the on the you know the vehicle side of the Need for Speed but you probably saw you know in the different modes there needs to be more stuff on the hood and you know

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    we've got a whole redesign that's happening on the herd and the mfds that's going to be very different than what you have now first of all it's using Universal building blocks instead of you know what some of the Legacy stuff has in Flash but it's going to be much more uh minimalist depending on what your context is uh it's going to be you know depending on what equipment you have you may be able to cast some stuff to your visor maybe not and we're building this system to work well in all the ships used in in Squadron and then it will get rolled out to the Pu which has obviously much wider range ships but as we're designing it we're building it with both Squadron and the Pu in mind and so these there's a lot of things you know people have talked about the star map forever or uh you know so that has definitely been a major I mean there's right now I think

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    three Engineers you know uh a couple of visualists on it that we're really sort of working to make you know the new star map which people haven't had it's been in in film yeah we're not quite ready to show you today but um that is going to be a much improved experience but all of it so navigation uh traversal you know combat the whole feel of it all things that we're really focusing on here to bring across into the Pu after um you know we've got it working really well in in Squadron and so I think uh ultimately it's going to be good for the the Pu and a lot of things are going to sort of come together over the next couple of years uh and um yeah we're pretty excited so we wanted to yeah visit you and talk a little bit about I think there is two common themes that I think you'll see

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    throughout the entirety of this talk as well one is the fact that it's how we develop the features that everybody looks at individual features they've got the microscope of that specific feature but it's how they all interact together to create the game so it's it's about bringing them all together to create that gameplay experience and number two is that none of these are like oh we're going to get to this in however time and you know we're going to work on that all of the stuff that we'll talk about today is stuff that we're actively working on and not in the Inception but you know we have in our hands we can play it we can see it we're feedbacking on it so it's something that you know we're fairly Advanced along and so you know hopefully we'll be able to pull back the curtain a little bit Yeah of the things we're going to talk about and I think we're about ready to get start getting into it here uh some of the things we'll have aspects to show

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    some things won't have aspects to show uh like the star map like Chris just said and whatnot uh some of the things uh will be presented in test Maps because we don't want to give away any Squadron 42 specific locations and stuff like that that said I think we can maybe show some stuff in osteado because people we only showed that at one location so yeah so uh so yeah you guys ready to listen to Preamble let's go let's start with uh Rich here that you're you were you were the AFT guy now you're the whole Squadron game guy but let's start with something uh that affects everybody this is a first person Universe after all uh let's talk about the FPS radar and uh the player interaction system stuff what can you what can you tell us about how this is evolved so it's interesting because we we obviously I think I've given a talk

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    on FPS radio and scanning in the past and I think the biggest thing that when we look at what what starterton is now what's the first thing that you do you know you're in your bed how do you interact with the game how do you interact with the environment that's around you doors getting into your ship how do you interact with kiosks and and a lot of the things that we realized is that you know and it's not something new it's just something we've always wanted to get to is how does the player interface with the game how do they how do they translate their controls and what they want them to do you know ultimately on in the in the universe that they're playing and how does that then translate in the computer game so that it does what you expect it to do and I think one of the biggest things was the player interaction experience where we kind of use this terminology to understand like that's like interact mode personal in a thought you know the

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    player interaction system all of these umbrella systems that kind of sit underneath this main kind of like Saga shall we say and I think that's one of the things that we really want to improve and make better because I think it's lacking right now if you go and walk around the universe you know generally having to go into interact mode having to use the cursor having to select things you know we've spent a lot of time trying to make the world physical and feel right and immersed that you're immersed in it well you can you can interact with things like the props are interactively you can do things you can push things around you can move them I mean the whole goal is to make it a sort of physically living universe exactly that you can interact with to a level than in most FPS games you don't right because most FPS games you run around you shoot things maybe you pick up a gun that gets dropped but you generally most everything's static

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    and so our goal for definitely for the Pu is one of the reasons why we're doing the persistent you know the whole idea of persistent streaming and and later on the server matching is to have this fully persistent universe that yeah you can push the chairs around or that that cup I could take off your desk and take it to my my spaceship instead of your spaceship Jared and it would it will be there and it'll persist so so obviously interacting with things is a huge deal um in Squadron we have a huge amount of physical puzzles interactions um in a level that you I haven't seen in a lot of FPS games so it's it's almost like a sort of Story game and a puzzle game and a traversal game and a combat game and a stealth game or in a flight game all rolled into one

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    um and so so we need systems that are easy to use and you know currently what we have ideas were good but it's pretty clunky so we've been really focusing on it because also we want you to be able yeah okay keyboard mouse what if you're interested what if you have a Gamepad we need to make sure all that stuff works well so we don't want to have 400 key presses you have to remember to do stuff and we don't want to take forever to interact and do stuff and so we've really been thinking about it those are and those are by the way have been number of bit large complaints on the Pu just getting in a new person getting into the game like how do I get out of bed how do I do some basic stuff how do I understand you know right now it's sort of trial by fire I mean I think you know there's a lot of people it's almost like you know I don't know whether it's a frog software thing where it's like oh I managed to beat the challenge of Star Citizen and I actually got to my ship

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    but uh yeah we need to make that better and so that is actually one of one of the big things we've been focusing on and the the player interaction system and by the way these have been plans they've been around for quite a while and uh you know Rich back when he was in charge of sort of the core gameplay Group which was the AFT and the weapon um teams and the actor Tech Team and stuff um that was on the list of things to do it just you know because of what we talked about the release Cadence and and Star Citizen um on the alpha it just you know didn't get to it yet well we're getting to it now and and uh you know we're working on it so I I mean I mean part of it is basically removing the barrier yeah so removing the clunkiness as Chris said to how to you'd interact with the in you know with the environment so what we've kind of gone to we've gone to kind of this weighted system so is if you're

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    walking over to a trolley you know you shouldn't have to like look exactly at the handle to be able to go I want to use the trolley you just want to be able to go over there and the game you go I want to interact with the trolley just press F and the game should know yeah they want to interrupt the trolley so if I'm looking at your desk for example you've got quite a lot of things that I could pick up and take and taking this do whatever I want but you want to be able to just walk over there and not have to go into a mouse cursor mode to be able to then select it and you should be able to go I want to look at the green ship I'm going to pick up the green ship I want to look at you know your little mini ship over there or the book or your coffee cup or whatever and it's you just want to be able to go and look at those things press F and you you need confidence that when you're looking at something and you know we have the the user interface to tell you

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    that yes this is the thing that you're going to pick up and you don't want to have to go into this separate mode to be able to do that so I think that's one of the fundamental things on the play interaction experience and that that's such a pervasive system across the entirety because it's the same when you're in a cockpit in a cockpit or you're walking around are you an Eva or you're crouched or you're prone or all the different environments that you're in you need to be able to just effortlessly interact with the game world and you want it to just feel natural and immersed because you want to get involved in what you're doing in the gameplay not have to fight the controls and then on the other side of things which is FPS radon scanning it's actually kind of being split into kind of a two-fold the first area is kind of what we're calling uh kind of like a quick scan this is something that again if you think of these Star Citizen Universe

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    it's very detailed you know that's one of our strengths that we would detail at scale and so you want to be able to go in and understand all the individual pieces that you can go and go I want to move that thing or I want to go and get in a giant ship but sometimes it's quite difficult to realize okay what is what is environment or what is interactive or which bits are relevant to me you know for example if you look at Uncharted they have you know painted areas to show you where you need to go and where you need to navigate but you know that's not Star Citizen star systems built on realism and the reality of the world so what we want to do is have kind of like the radon scanning system where you can do this kind of like quick ping or quick scan wave single button and that is kind of just for your local environment and everything will then be tagged as you look at it so kind of think you know I look at the camera it'll come out and

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    it'll have a little box info box and it'll say okay this is the model of the camera this is the information and it's almost like you've done a little mini mini scan on the camera but it's happening for everything around you and you can just quickly look around and be like oh there's a cottonable surface there because I want to be able to use my mod tool cutter oh there's a vent there that I can get access to oh there's a terminal there that I can hack and I'm getting that information it's almost like that blade runner-esque of like I go into a space and I can go okay what are the ingredients that I have to play with as a player for me to be able to progress to the next area and then we've got the other side of things which is red and scanning which is what we're calling like a charge scan wave where it's the same system you're holding down the scan button and that's pinging out across wider areas and that's where you're looking at you know individuals you're getting you know you're getting okay there's two guys over there what's their details oh there's you know

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    there's an NPC over there okay I can see an objective that I need to complete and that's a bit more because that's so that's more gameplay pervasive that's something that's going to be more of a risk reward so that's like okay I'm giving my location away but they're also so they may or may not you know know that they've been scanned if it's a player they absolutely will be and that's all underpinned off the signature system that we do for radio and scanning of the ships as FBS so it's all systemic it's not we have to go in and they go oh it's this custom setup so we have this kind of usability aspect for radar and scanning for people to be able to go in and understand you know I think there's been plenty Reddit posts over the years and people go oh we're just scanning you know red on scan would do this and show me little info boxes and yeah we have that up and running so there's the add that aspect of it to which kind of ties in with the player

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    interaction experience of how you play the game and how do you understand what you need to do and then there's the other side of things which is then it's a more of a proactive tool of you looking through the environment and finding what you want we have a couple of videos should we show Absolutely some videos of those so I understand we have we have two videos uh what's this first one we're gonna look at so the first one is more kind of um showing what I described with radio and scanning that first aspect so you're going into a space you're doing a quick scan wave and then it's quickly showing you up the little bits that you can interact with right let's uh let's take a look at FPS radar and pi 1. so you can see here this is in asiado which we've already showcased but this is obviously going in and utilizing some of our new building box UI for the doors and then here's a scan wave you can see

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    that I'm looking at that data pad and then you can move around and it's giving me that information so right now it's just giving you the basic high level information in terms of the names and things but you will also have more detailed information depending on you know contextually what the item is and what you're seeing here is part of the player interaction system so you can just even though that's kind of a complex area there's lots of little things that you can interact with but you're getting confidence of oh cool I can I can grab that or I can use the data pad and you're not having to go into interact mode you're not having to be driven by the cursor you can go in and just press F or interact with it and you know you've probably seen this in plenty of AAA games but they don't have the detail and at scale that we do so we wanted to make sure that that system is really robust but hopefully it gives you kind of an idea of and I'd also say that like part

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    of the idea is that you know there's the you know there's the default action which in this case is what you see when you're on it when it says grab or or you know I think there's a few other ones that you can be using default action but the icon the the yeah just had a single disk with uh with that wasn't broken then that would be there's only one thing you can do with it in a lot of those cases There Was You Could See there was a broken disc in four pieces which was basically saying that's a multi-action so as you look at it if for instance in that case if you hit F does a default option if you held f it would bring up the modular wheel that would show you the other action so you could maybe equip it versus grab it or whatever you would do and so the idea is just like you can doing like uh you know Rich was talking about a lot of other uh

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    sort of AAA even console games you walk around you look around oh look I can extra do something with it right uh so there's a bit of that that's happening here so you can just look around and I can interact and direct without having to hold f move your mouse around and all the rest of stuff I mean we'll still have the overall interact mode that you can go into if you want but the idea is I just play around if I'm used to playing games a certain way so there is a certain um language of I think FPS or even third person games that exist right now and we don't want to like do something totally different to it because you know people are used to playing games a certain way it's like why in fps game you run around with wasd and use the mouse because so many people are used to it and so we're leaning a little bit onto that but trying to make it much more usable and work with inside a much more powerful system than you typically get in games

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    and so even there you saw there's a lot of interactables you look at them you can move them around do all these different things with it and hopefully it'll be much more intuitive for players in Squadron or or Star City and that default item actually is a good it's a good point because that's also something we've gone to and we're changing in the fact that we want everything to have a default action that essentially you go over you press it always does that default action but let's say you're harvesting harvestables and you want you know the default action is that it picks it up and puts into your hand but you want it to be always be to store into your backpack you'll actually be able to go in there you know right click on the item you know when you're in interact might bring up the wheel or like Chris says hold F industry it'll bring up the wheel and that will replace that list that we have currently right now and you'll actually be able to remap that in

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    the game like three clicks and you go I don't want it to be pick up into my hand I want it to go straight into my backpack because that's what you're doing right there so then you can go and have it you know it allows us to give the interaction system how we want it to be by default but then it puts the onus on the play if they wanted to get you know they want a weapon to always go to their backpack because they're happy with the weapons they've already got and they're going looting they just want it all to be store they can do that out of the gate so it doesn't always go into the hands and they were you know they have that customizability to be able to you know interact with the environment and the objects that they're looking at before we move on we have a second video yes I haven't seen this one uh you want to set it up or you want to just go into playing it so I mean I mean the second one essentially what we're about to see is kind of what I talked about

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    this the second half of radon scanning so this is where they're still getting the environmental information like with eagle event or a terminal or a hacking area and but you're also now getting information about the enemies and the AI and what's out there so it's a wider and broader yeah I mean this is where you basically it's almost like whether it's x-ray vision or you can hear it through the wall but you could track someone on the other side of a war but you're doing the charge scan which is yeah much more risky because it's noisy and if people go up someone's scanning maybe there's someone over there and they can track you down but it'd be useful in this like when you're stealthing around it's like you're going to go around a corner you don't know if there's some enemies around the corner and you want to find out you you know you use this uh it's very useful yeah having played lots of levels

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    definitely because you know in Squadron you know we're we're trying to have a certain amount of realism so you're not just gonna go and gun down 400 people so we want you when you're in situations you're outnumbered and you have to you know it's it's more of a stealth game in the FPS than it is a straight out run and gun shooter and bring it to the point of realism then bring it back to the point of fun as you so you know there's a lot of fun stuff all right so I want to see this clip I haven't seen yet let's roll FPS too so what you're seeing here is that he's going to do a scan wave in a moment essentially what you'll see is that it's now penetrating through the walls and now you can start to see the slavers that are in this environment now these flavors don't necessarily have a radon

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    scanner so they're not able to pick you up so what will happen is when you do a scan wave or a charge scan wave your signatures will basically Skyrocket so that's what will give you away to other people so in the PVP environment you're only getting you know it's a big risk if you want to do it but you're giving away your location so if you know if you're willing to do that then so be it but in a more of a PVE environment what we're going to do is we're going to have tailored some some enemies will have radon scanning and some won't so if they do then they'll be like hey I've just been pinged and they'll get your location and then they'll go and investigate so what you're seeing here you know what on that video is kind of a more a wider broader area and seeing through the walls whereas the first one is kind of a more limited scope and you can you know it's up to the player to choose which one they want to do first one is really more about just you know we want to encourage the player to

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    go into an environment and go okay cool I'm in this room what what things do I have to interact with and then the second one is more of a wide Escape like uh Chris said you know when we're playing our stealth levels you know you need to have kind of a good understanding of where they are and it's only temporary and you will have a cool down on that on that charge scan wave so you're not just being able to spam it there forever it's like you'll get a temporary picture and you go cool I've got a good snapshot now I'm gonna and you know make my move and go forward so while we're still here on the first person experience the player experience let's let's stick to a couple more topics that are related just to the the player before we move into ships and bigger stuff um Ledges and ladders uh you know everybody knows the the struggles of uh elevators in the persisting universe but that's not the only way to you know

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    Traverse the universe to get around and stuff I understand that you guys have made a number of improvements to mantling over Ledges and how to use ladders I mean Legend and ladders is kind of uh yeah exactly absolutely it's kind of a two features that we're focusing on but I mean as Chris said in terms of Squadron development we're looking at improving the entirety of the traversal experience how does the Player move and you know just from General Locomotion and how that feels and then in terms of you know the traversal moves of vaulting manteling ladders and so on and so forth so one of the two areas that we've identified that we wanted to push for was a for Legends which is we wanted you to be able to I've just I've slightly misjudged my jump because I'm in first person you know I can't see my feet and it's you know it's kind of

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    frustrating you're like oh it's just right there if this was real life I I just put my hands out and grab it right so that's the first part that we can actually grab onto Ledges now that you're falling past so that you can actually then pull yourself up which adds just it it's to be honest it's huge like we've built traversal levels now and it's it's the difference is night and day because when you're in a first person it's very difficult to judge like right on the edge so we can add a bit more challenge to the traversal so that you're actually moving around with Ledges and grabbing and pulling yourself up and then the other side of things which doesn't necessarily sound that interesting in terms of How It's improved ladders but again is if you play the star system right now you get onto a ladder you're looking bolt straight forward at the wall you're locked you can't look around you have no spatial awareness it's just that's it you're locked in you can't get off

39. 00:30:19

    halfway you can't jump off it's you're kind of very locked so what we've done about halfway no no exactly so what we did is we kind of leveraged how we did body dragging and that you know even though you're attached to this thing you want to be able to look around so you can attach to the ladder you can jump onto a ladder directly you can attack you can run and jump onto a ladder you can look around full 360 Degrees you can look around 90 degrees as you're going up you know and it's just a lot more fluid and a lot more you know it doesn't feel like oh I've just now I'm locked in it just feels like you're more of a human being on the ladder and you can look around and then obviously if you can look behind you on a ladder that opens up environment you know opens up scope to jumping from that onto something else so yeah because you can jump off the ladder halfway up it or whatever exactly so there's a there's a huge amount of I mean with in Squadron

40. 00:31:07

    we're putting a lot of traversal gameplay in uh which will make its way into the Pu when all these sort of systems settle and I think you'll see a lot more I mean you already see a little bit where you know you could use a track to go and to put a crate over or push something to get up and look at stuff in derelicts right now for instance in the Pu but imagine a whole level above that which is kind of what's in Squadron I mean even even that in the derelicts was really inspired by some of the early work we were doing in Squadron but there's a lot of uh like physical and traversal gameplay and puzzles in Squadron and we're building the systems to also work well with that and then again with the systemic world like we have in Star Citizen where you can move things around and they can persist there should be multiple ways to solve the

41. 00:31:55

    problem you're trying to deal with which is how we've approached the Squadron design is like in most of the area is that you go through there's more than one way to get to the end to solve the problem to you know do you you know stealth around you just take it on head on and start shooting or is a way that you can you know do it without seeing anyone because you've just you know taken this difficult traversal path so those are all things that are important and and so it's little little things like this and and I would say I mean we've got a video to show but we're still you know like some of the Finesse of the the animation detail is still to come so this a lot of it is yeah this is the block out but yeah we you know we we have this beautiful motion capture stage here that we will show you guys at some

42. 00:32:44

    point when um the Manchester goodyards and this stage are fully finished and then Jared will do a wonderful we'll do a a updated version of the 2013 tour that I did with Aaron but it will be in a much bigger environment um anyway uh so uh but I I would say definitely that um I mean we could show up at the the we got details to come like for instance if you jump and you just make it you know you're going to you know catch your balance and do that sort of so that's not in here but that's sort of the details the finesse that we're adding to really have that sense of you in first person feeling your body and your inertia when you're going up and and and and down on it I mean if you cut out to the third person when you see

43. 00:33:31

    some of the stuff you sort of see some of it even in the blocker animations but there'll be much more in the the final version but we probably should yeah let's run the video if we can all right uh ladders so obviously this as you can see this is final art absolutely this is taken directly from Squad and put it to know it's obviously test map but you can see here that as Chris said it the the you know the level of inertia is is still block out phase but you can see that we're actually starting to get that you can grab on you can go straight into a mantle or a vault you can go straight into the pull-ups and the thing is that what you're seeing here is you know while this is just an intest map a lot of these are providing design ethos to then feed into the Pu so if we've got derelicts and we've got environments that we want the player to do missions in we don't just necessarily just have

44. 00:34:19

    to rely on you've only got jump or you only can do Volta mantle and right there we did a we did a jump onto halfway onto a ladder and here we're looking around to the left to the right and you can jump off the ladder at any point you can slide down it you can do all sorts of things a little bit yeah so we're gonna fight an elevator the ball the true boss and we jump across to get on the ladder there and again these are all the blocker animations and uh oh I wonder what that is someone accidentally put that in there yeah anyway but the other thing as well spaceship yeah I mean the other thing to say about about the traversal is while we're

45. 00:35:06

    highlighting uh ladders and the ledge grabs and things here the other thing is that we're also you know we've taken Deep dive on things like the control input so for example we've got action queuing coming up so you know for example if you're sprinting and you were you were shooting just before you're sprinting you might be holding down shift and left Mouse button and then now what happens now if you then release shift you've stopped shooting but sometimes you want to you want it to continue shooting because I'm still holding the the input that I want to do and what we're kind of terminology in terms of this action queuing and that's something that we've we've got a whole Matrix of all the different controls all the different methods from chrome to pouch the transitions you know weapon swapping and so that just you again using the controls is a lot more fluid a lot more intuitive so it's something

46. 00:35:55

    that we're really really putting a really magnifying glass on to making sure that you're not fighting the controls the controls are working for you it's doing what you want it to do so if you are Using a Gamepad or you are using a joystick or you are using Master keyboard it's it's easy to use and easy to interact the world so that you can immerse yourself in the environments and the missions and the gameplay so it's something that we're really really pushing forward in all aspects right because you know prone is one of the things that were um yeah set to be working on here right the you know the crouching the various transitions between all the stuff so some of the stuff right now in the pu's clunkier than it should be and so we've really taken a deep dive on all of it yeah and uh to make everything a lot more fluid though you know looking around on the ladder is a good example

47. 00:36:43

    um but also you know like on a bigger level right we've done a complete rework on um like you know Eva what we call sort of push and pull uh there's you know physical interaction I mean we should probably talk a little bit about that we have a video to show of that but it's a complete redo of the current Eva system and it has a lot more of the what you would expect when you're in in space in vacuum pushing yourself off you don't for instance you have momentum now so if you push off in a direction you will just keep moving in a direction the use of it's far more easy yeah handling weapons and looking around and some of the tech that we've developed for the push pull is the same stuff that will be that we're going to be using for prone and a bunch of other stuff and really

48. 00:37:31

    the looking around on the ladders is kind of based on something yeah I mean to be honest a lot of those systems are and Wednesday Chris says push pulley means zero g Push Pull not trolley Push Pull um but we'll talk about that too yes we will but when we talk about uh ev82 and 0g the biggest thing again again it's just be an Eva right now in the star system and just look left it you don't have a stability of you know if you're a human being you look left your horizon doesn't change because you move your head and it's the same our camera light tilts and moves and then you get into a scenario where you're like you can't really understand the perspective of where you're in it's like oh I'm now upside down so Eva T2 which again you'll be able to see a clip of it working it's it's night and day it is a fun day we basically

49. 00:38:19

    threw the old one away and this is a fundamental change in terms of how we work in Eva first off you're not upright you're in more what we call the Iron Man pose so you're leaning forward we still retain the upright pose for certain circumstances but it means that you've got a better sense of your actual volume when you're traversing forward so you're not got these legs that you know are beneath you but you can totally look around 360 Degrees your camera is stable as you can you get a good orientation when you look back you know you see your body it's fully decoupled so you're not just pushing forward and you're flying like a spaceship you push forward and that gives you an initial inertia in that direction and you will keep going in that direction until you change but then when you want to change you just need to look at another direction and you push that way and the way we've

50. 00:39:06

    implemented it it's almost like your suits can similar to the ifcs on the ships that kind of like counters the forces and then it allows you to go in that way we actually originally tried it where you would drift and you know actually do the curve but it just made traversing more intricate spaces which is what we want to do and you know eventually we want to be able to turn gravity off in ships and that you can take those down and it's definitely I mean that's part of the plan I mean we absolutely you know in the Resource Network um uh so segment that's one of the things so all of those tight intricate areas that we've built over the last seven eight well ten years now I suppose um you know that you can go into those tighter areas you need it to be stable you need it to be in a position where you can turn on a dime that you can look upside down that you you get a good sense of what you know your orientation and I think that's something that we've

51. 00:39:53

    really pushed ahead on Eva T2 and to be honest the engineering team have done a really fantastic job I I find it a lot of fun flying around in Eva and then and then I'd also say the other thing that we should point out in the longer term for the Pu not so much in Squadron because you're you're in a sort of pilot that has Eva as part of its setup is you're not every not every spaceshoot is Eva cable so we're going to separate it where you have to have like basically an Eva pack a a rocket pack for you to sort of propel around if you don't have one then you know it's the physical Push Pull so you can move along surfaces you can push off against them you come close to something you can grab it if you're in close things and those hand holds you can grab them and move them around so we have this physicalized interaction that

52. 00:40:42

    happens and you don't actually need to have your you know Eva pack a jet pack and then the Eva jet pack is if you're in open space that's how obviously you can stop or change your direction and do the rest and that will be more limited on fuel so I think long term in the Pu there's going to be some pretty interesting gameplay um so if you you know if you do I don't know a boarding action or something maybe you need a you know a spacesuit that has a Eva pack or you're doing repairs out of space in your space level you did that yes you will not be able to repair the ship in that outfit right now sure um but but I I think it gives a it gives a really good um it's just going to give more options more context because like longer term what we want to do in the in the Pu is what you wear is important right so

53. 00:41:32

    right now everybody just runs around in a big suit of armor a big space it does and we haven't really turned on some of the features we've actually put in there that says you know for instance you shouldn't be able to sit in a in in a seat of a space fighter in heavy armor you just you shouldn't be there with your gun on the back you should have to have a flight suit on or uh you know you come into a city you shouldn't be wandering around in heavy armor because that's anti-social maybe they don't let you go in there so we want people to have reasons to wear different things have storage that's the whole point of the physical uh inventory system and as we're starting to roll out more of it's coming in and Squadron and then in the Pu that's definitely coming online and you know things that we're doing like

54. 00:42:20

    that with the you know the physicalized cargo and everything else and if you look at all the new ships there's always locker and storage there's there's you know we have a whole system for um outfits now that we was first going to be in Squadron but then coming to the Pu it's designed so there'll be a nice sort of lock almost like a wardrobe system that you can go in and and hang up your outfit and switch quickly into another outfit or switch into this close armor everything yeah so we want we want it to you know be your virtual second life and and we want to make it as easy as possible for you to manage all these different things that you can wear for different roles uh and you know Eva is one of the Mainer parts of that where like I said you you either have an Eva suit with the pack or not but you still will be able to move around and we should probably run the video so good

55. 00:43:07

    job bring it back around to Eva at the end like that let's take a look at the DVD video uh see what we're looking at here well and as Chris says in terms of know here we go the Eva this is what you're seeing here is that you'll probably see some of it in the third person the thrusters are not firing because yeah the old VFX but it's also the lvfx code so we haven't part of the proper this is a current pu suit versus what we'll have is a new one with the proper like pack that has the thrusters in the right position and when you go forward the thrust is going from the back so what you're actually seeing here is you've actually connected to this surface so now it's almost like you're in a prone situation but this is going to be what more our new prone will be again you've got full 360 Degrees you can just move your mouse and you look all the way behind you or all the way in front and right now we're moving along

56. 00:43:55

    here not because we're thrusting because we're using our hands exactly to move ourselves alone and we're looking around as we're doing that we went out to the third person here you would sort of see us moving our hands around I think we'll see it a little later on there we go here we go so we're just sort of pulling ourselves along and if we wanted to at this point we could stop and we could push off against it and then we would just go floating out into space so that's the sort of idea of what we call push push um and so what you're seeing here yeah he just pushed himself off so what you're seeing here that's actually um kind of you're just floating alongside the actual um this fin of this Asiata station and this is actually keeping you in this orbit and then if you did and that's just you just push forward and go where you can actually

57. 00:44:43

    jump off into space but then this becomes one of the if you look at physical traversal where you've got jumping and mantling and vaulting this is where we have zero g Push Pull we have the tractor beam that kind of pulls you around in Eva and then we have your Eva pack which is limited by your resource of Eva fuel so this allows you to kind of manipulate and go in Eva and allows us as developers to build Eva traversal spaces both wide ranging and both small scale so yeah here's here's I mean we were before on first person looking around but here's us cutting out the third person to actually show you what your your character and body is doing and so there's a lot of I mean and these are still blocker animations actually but so there'll be a lot more like Nuance or Fidelity to it but yeah you have you have a lot more um control uh you know directional sense

58. 00:45:35

    uh ability to look around ability to stop yourself so I think you know in this one we're going to come up close to the glass above it yes and you're actually going to see us like if you fly into something you sort of arrest just again block out animation but you're gonna as we get down close to it I think we're going to come down you'll see uh as uh uh our character comes down here a player comes down here yep uh put our hands out to brace ourselves to stop ourselves on the glass here so all of that's like systemic it's that's not that's not marked up or anything it's all raycasting seeing if things you brace yourself when you come up against hold on a rest your thing you can push off against things so we've spent a fair amount of time in engineering on all this but it's not just for squadron it's going to be you know it's obviously

59. 00:46:23

    useful in some of the environment Squadron this is one of them obviously the acid Anna space and you're getting to look down on the slavers that you saw in the earlier scan uh but you know the use of this in this you know the Pu is going to be massive and also the big thing that Chris said there is it's systemic there's no markup if you want to go and climb all over a ship you can do if you want to climb over a space station you can do if you want to climb over anything that's in Eva it has a surface you can and you can put your hands on it it's got a big enough space to put your hands on it it will work so there's not there's no there's no like oh it only works in this scenario or it only works in this scenario it's it is what you see here and then as what we've not been able to show today which is we've had do you have working or partially working is that when you go into very tight environments if there are handholds you

60. 00:47:12

    will be able to grab onto that hand holder whether it's a terminal or whether it's you know a hatch to get into a ship you'll grab onto the handhold and then you know instead of putting your hands out and Landing you'll grab on and then you go cool I can use the terminal or I can look around and again you're not locked in you can look all 360 Degrees you'll switch hands as you look around and you can get a sense of okay where do I want to go next I want to go over there cool or I want to go through this door and it works in tight environments wide scale environments and fundamentally it's a lot a lot nicer to play than our current version which is just it's no I mean it's it's massive for the game so I'm you know I think there'll be a lot more sort of Eva external action yeah uh the combat's better it's much more stable

61. 00:47:58

    I think you know we'll see a lot of puzzles and traversal in the Pu that can be built from that because we don't really we have a lot of stuff down on planets but it would also be nice to have more like exploring a you know mod that is sort of derelict asteroid bases kind of things and Eva I think you know we all love science fiction obviously you're making these kind of games um that you know there's that's sort of a lot of classic Sci-fi that you see so we we spent you know that's that that is a that's an example of us being able to spend the time to really think about how we want the system to work how best it's going to work and better in and Squadron and then it'll be something because we did two or three iterations we did uh you know we did two or three iterations how we wanted to do did we want to have this Iron Man post we want to have the upright did it blend between them and we

62. 00:48:46

    were playing it and playing it and it's like oh it doesn't feel right and now you can just you know it when you get it right because you can just go and you're like oh this feels really nice and you just end up flying around the level and connecting things and so yeah it this unlocks content for them oh absolutely I mean I I purposely didn't watch the videos I wanted to be able to react as honestly whatever accordingly as possible and I know you said those were blockout animations but as somebody who's been with Steve Bender on a Friday night at the Outhouse like that looks just like [Laughter] but no it looks great and I think everybody who saw that now is going to see the potential that the absolute gameplay potential for all kinds of zero zero g gameplay possibilities that's great I mean this is this this

63. 00:49:35

    mother I mean there's some smaller things like we have one other thing here we have a video for which is you know it's not as big as a system as like say the UVA replacement but like the hover trolley that we've got I know that I saw it I really like the hovertra yeah I saw the Reddit thread said why didn't someone do a hover trolley well actually that was something we've been working on for quite a while uh but the thing I will we can we can show you here in a few minutes but the thing that's really good about this because you know obviously the physical trolleys the wheels get caught I mean just like in the real world right uh and you've got problems of going upstairs and all the rest of stuff just like you would in the real world uh is that it sort of opens up the potential and this really plays into the Pew we use it in Squadron for certain things like you'll you'll see in

64. 00:50:23

    what we show here but for the Pu it's actually much more interesting because you know now you have the ability we always had this design for our like bigger um cargo containers right ones you can just pick up yourself we originally had this design where there was sort of a gravel Ed system where yeah you stuck in this thing and the gravel of it would come up and then you know now you can push around you know a huge container and we're moving for physicalized cargo it's going to be in 318. um I think Tony's trying to squeeze a few things and we'll see if he manages to get everything in but this isn't necessarily going to be in 318 but it will come in probably you know not too far in the in the near future but this allows you to not you know just have your little

65. 00:51:10

    tractor payment pick up something and move it around but you know okay let's have a bigger container and what happens if you okay turn it on use it up it goes and then you just push it into your cargo hold turn it off Locks into the cargo grid and now that cargo container imagine a bigger one well you know what happens you know like right now in the inventory system you can put things in your you know local inventory of your ship or um you know other various inventories well imagine your containers say one of these bigger like maybe a 16 SCU one or whatever that's sitting there and now I can place I don't know large vehicle um items in it I can place all sorts of stuff in it so I could load up this container I could push it into my ship then I could fly it off to some remote planet and put it next to you know where I'm camping out or longer term where you say maybe a player base or some group of

66. 00:51:59

    players with persistent decide to take over it derelict or something and I can like basically load up a bunch of supplies in a in a container like bigger supplies or weapons or amateurs or whatever and put it in there just by doing this so it I think you know the underlying sort of hover tech for the trolley stuff is really good because it it will really play into the the cargo and the logistics that are going to come with that because longer term with Persistence of what we're doing I think there's going to be a whole bunch of gameplay there will be around revolved around the logistics of of living right like how do I how do I have my food how do I have my drinks how do I have my raw materials how do I have my weapons uh you know if two orgs are fighting a war over a patch of land someone's got to show up with extra you know ammo and missiles and you know all that kind of

67. 00:52:47

    stuff and or weapon replacement especially as we get repairing and the salvaging and stuff you know okay well rather than have to fly it to a place that can do your repair maybe there's an on field repair that's happening right there and someone's changing out a broken weapon for another weapon because you've loaded up and stored in in your container so there's the possibility abilities and the Pu is huge and this is an example of just like little bits of tech that we're putting into Squadron that we're planning on bringing it across into the Pu but in the Pu they just have a lot more potential like like the Evas yeah I mean the biggest thing about trolleys is when we approach trolleys with the physical trolleys with that we wanted them to serve two purposes one we wanted them to serve a purpose that is more traditional games which is you know I can move things around and that allows me to create you

68. 00:53:36

    know traversal opportunities to meet if I'm blocked I can move a box over here and now I can get up higher now which is kind of what the more physical trolleys are kind of better suited for and this is another example where we kind of put trolleys into the Pu but there wasn't really a a use case or best use case so that at the moment they're just used as enemies so I've seen people fly them as missiles out of ships and but they're not really utilized for what we want them to use and then you've got the other side of trolleys which is we want to be used for cargo loading now again we've got a lot of ships we've got a lot of different ramps the scales of those ramps is larger and with hover trolleys what you know when you see the video you can push them downstairs if you push them up any ramp you know the the weight that you're having to physically push a physical trolley which is taking into account hover trolleys

69. 00:54:25

    you don't have to worry about that because you know let's play the video see the video there and we've hyped this up now have a try those are the most amazing thing in the world here we go so you can see here this is actually a um a slaver pod so it closes down it's on the floor we're going to activate it whatever takes up now grab legs off you get hold of it bam and by the way our new the new interaction system's not working in this demo here this is a separate build but where you know as you can see it's getting pushed over bulkheads bulkheads but this is essentially a really big Improvement for us because we want you know we want physical cargo and we want physical cargo to be a really a big deal in the for you that you don't have to move that car you're having to make decisions on how long is it going to

70. 00:55:11

    take to load it up not just buy it from a kiosk and appear in your ship so this gives us the ability to do that and like Chris says move much larger things than what you'd normally be able to push as a human being yeah I mean this happens to be just a slave apart but you know obviously you'd be pushing that you know as long as it's gravel ever equipped and has the sort of hover device then uh you you know like I said you could have large uh shipping containers and stuff like that and this is all underpinned by our graph like technology so the same you know if it has a dragonfly or eventually you'll be hopeful to be able to move much larger ships if you need to rearrange them all you know when you're moving things around uh on your homestead or whatever we do eventually and I've actually we've actually had

71. 00:55:58

    this working on a planet so you can just push this over Planet terrain you don't let go you stay stable because it doesn't actually undulate uh unless there's unless there's something actually physically touching it so it allows it to be much more stable and what we want to do for your cargo loading is that we'll use a system similar to the cargo grid that you'll be able to snap things on top of it so when if you have a flat platform you'll be able to snap cargo boxes onto it so they won't fall off then you're able to you know reliably move them without frustration and again you can see some of our design ethos coming through is that we're trying to remove the barrier to entry we're trying to remove the the control mechanism the things that frustrate you as you play the game and kind of make that a lot simpler I see this and all I can think about is a Spock in the photon torpedo too that's true very cool so yeah so we've talked

72. 00:56:48

    about a number of things now that are related to the player to the first person and stuff like this and we got a couple more we're going to come back to later but let's move up into spaceships yeah because spaceships are are a big part of the experience we just had a uh earlier in the day we had our flight experience a segment where they talked about master modes and Quantum boosts and stuff like this um but at a higher level and stuff let's talk about how the flight experience is changing a bit through the work in Squadron 42 and anything you want to share with us on that I think the biggest thing for me and I think it's what we've Chris and I've talked about is the difficulty of developing a game over a period of time when it's a live product is that you're developing things in isolation and you're putting them out so you're going okay this is our t0 you know this is mfds and okay and now we

73. 00:57:37

    want to do the flight HUD and we put the flight HUD and now we want to do this section and what happens is maybe it's a different designer over the years or maybe it's someone else or maybe they've learned from what's happened or gone out previously and lots of things come together but they don't necessarily feel right because they've not been approached to where you've gone we're going to do it all at once because you can never do it all at once if you've got to hit quarterly releases so with Squadron development what's it allowed us to do is allowed us to look at the HUD and the mfds and everything together and go well actually we don't need all that information on the HUD if we've got it on mfds or we don't need all the information here if we've got physical switches and it's allowed us to approach the design of the cockpit experience holistically so that we can go okay let's pull all this noise away that

74. 00:58:25

    because we've tried to fit everything onto the Hub we've tried to put everything on there you know you need to know your g-forces and you're heading Direction and and you know I need to know my ammo and and you know Master mode is a good way of going down that road it's kind of going okay we want to have traversal and we want to have combat so if you guys the end combat if you're in qcm you're in Quantum mode so that's traversing the flight and then we've taken that approaching on okay well do you always need an altimeter well no maybe not if you're if you're in space maybe you're only not Cinema so when you go down to to Atmosphere you know your mfds if you're in SCM what do you really care about what you care about your health your weapons targets Health how they're doing but as a default experience we're only giving you the information that is needed to you at that point in time and what we

75. 00:59:14

    actually saw is that you're flying around we've got gorgeous space environments I want to be able to look at them I don't want to talk yeah the fighting you want to see the environment you're flying around yeah I I mean I mean one of the big things that were the big initiative on the the vehicle side for squadron is the sort of complete redo of uh the HUD and the MFD systems and basically the display where we're first of all we we have to refactor it to move away from some of the old flash that's been around forever which is what the MFD displays um and uh on the HUD we sort of took a look at where we were going and felt like like rich said it's just too much stuff's there all the time well what we want to we want to be more contextual so yeah and we're doing this in a overall

76. 01:00:02

    holistic way that would be probably almost impossible if you were trying to fit it into quarterly releases in in the Pu so you know most of the vehicle team is working on this as as a sort of group uh you know you're in the need for multiple speeds that we saw earlier you sort of saw some aspects of it which is the the different modes you can be in depending on what you're trying to do but uh you know a lot of that's also reflected on the HUD and the information of what you're targeting and whether you can you know whether you want to be able to cast up say your target status or your ship status to your advisor then that won't be the case for everything uh every suit like for instance if you have a more combat oriented ship or suit that you would wear you know like a you know

77. 01:00:49

    I don't know a Gladius or a Horner and you've got the appropriate equipment then you should be able to cast if you're just flying a an old rust bucket like an aurora what was the Drake ship we saw the other day when we'll be looking at saying all the HUD was on there we're like well it kind of the equivalent of a lorry oh yeah yeah you know it's a caterpillar yeah yeah so yeah you wouldn't have the caterpillar you know you wouldn't cast it up to your visor like you would as a fighter pilot it would be sitting down on the on the mfds but in the cases that you have the ability to cast it and do stuff in all the ships are also building in the ability like there's a not just a game config screen in your ship you go in you have your like settings screen and the settings will be remembered on a per ship basis and you can set up one you know okay I want this display to be there so this display this I want this

78. 01:01:36

    to cast here and so um so it's all been built about building blocks and being um in a very sort of top-down system clean approach uh so we're pretty excited about that we're not ready to show it uh yeah because we're still in the the sort of you know foundational stage yeah with this a little further before it's all fully polished already so but it's going to be I think a pretty sea change in terms of how it feels as you're flying around besides the different modes of of you know combat and traversal and all the rest of stuff it's it's how you get the information and and how it's related to you is is going to be much more contextual much better and it's huge in combat it's huge in combat because in combat right now you're either you know

79. 01:02:24

    we're obviously trying to bring the combat closer which obviously what the yogi and the guys and Dave talked about in their talk um but you don't want to be you don't want to have a little clutter on there and you want to have that spatial awareness of okay who's my Target and the other aspect is that on that level of you know again a holistic approach is your player information is only on there if it's relevant and also the targeting we've talked about redoing in terms of right now if you go into the Pu or when you play Squadron with 100 players yeah you're just getting 100 player billions of markers and it's like it's just massive information overload you know and sometimes there is definitely a problem in Squadron yeah absolutely quite a few areas of the game where there's massive amounts of ships yeah and you know some players can deal with it but you know it's just so much information it's just it's it's

80. 01:03:12

    unnecessary so what we've done is that we've again we want to strip back the targeting so that again you're only targeting the things that are important to you so you know we're relying Less on all these markers and we want to put more of a focus on your your radar in the cockpit because you have a radar in the cockpit you know fighter pilots in real life have a radar they don't have in-world AR markers they are 20 guys coming over there you know we want to make sure that you've got the information that you need but also we want to be basically make sure that you're using the tools that we provide because what's what's happening right now is that everybody's just reliant on the Huddle because the HUD has everything on there but you've got nfds you've got a cockpit radar you know we want to they're there for a reason so what's happened over the years is that we've tried to put we've redone them at separate times and you know the mfds are still in Flash and they've done the

81. 01:04:00

    building blocks so we've kind of gotten to this cycle of trying to oh no this is it this is where the player should be and what we want to do is we'll go go back to kind of what Chris's original Vision in terms of well there's an in cockpit radar you should use that there's in cockpit mfds you should use those okay now I'm in this specific combat mode okay they're they're cast so I can see that information but the radar doesn't become redundant that should be the that should be what the noise is on that's where all the information should be okay I should be able to go in there and select targets get that information should be clean and delivered to me but out in the world I want to look what's there I want to look at my target I want to look what I'm saying oh there's a space station oh there's another guy coming in so we want to have less Reliance on just AR markers for everything and only Reliance on marking the things that are important to

82. 01:04:48

    you or you've directly marked yourself yeah and I think when you when you fight combat experiences where you're fighting 15 20 ships it's just a lot it's a lot more fun because you're not having to deal with all the extra noise you can just focus on being the best pilot it can be I think it's it's really important and I would say that definitely you know we're we're putting a bunch of work in to the radar which is really radar so star map so like what you've never had in the Pu to the original design was that the that radar that you would see would also scale up or you know scale out basically to be a nav your your star map right your nav map and what happened when we were getting the first iteration of the Pu out the baby pu we're like we didn't get that working yet so we just said well we'll use your Mobi glass version and

83. 01:05:36

    we're still using the Moby glass version all these years later and it's still mostly the the code that was done all those years ago and that's when I mentioned at the top of uh talk that you know the star map well the star Maps really star map and radar because you can zoom in and zoom out and you can zoom all the way to the radar level or Zoom all the way out to the star map and we've put a huge amount of work into making that much more fluid much more usable much visually better and also having the information there and the interact ability so like you can be zoomed in and you can be looking at your radar and you can Mouse over contacts and you get the information from it you can click them and then that will now select it as your Target and do a lot of things that um you know haven't really been there so so I think think a lot of players because we haven't delivered and this is

84. 01:06:23

    sort of at the top of the the talk that rich was talking about was because we haven't delivered all the things we've just delivered some of the things sometimes people just are focusing on certain things and if they could do things like select their targets easily from the radar they may not be wanting to see 400 Market AR markers when they're flying around and so those are all that's that's example on the the vehicle side where we're sort of really trying to bring that all in as well as you know there's other things that we're doing that will come across the Pu in terms of physical buttons like when you activate something you're you're you know we've just that's in process right now but yeah you'll click a button and you'll see your character you know click you know here's for the landing gear or here's to turn the lights on or here's to activate my

85. 01:07:12

    Quantum Drive just to make it sort of feel physical but we're going to give you modes and ease of use so that information's presenting to you well and you can yeah have fun being lost in the world which is the most important thing and a certain level of customization as we're talking about because you know some ships have better mfds and more usable places than others and stuff like that so well the other aspect as well in terms of just the radar scanning which is it's a really good example of a feature that we've Pat onto the Pu in Star Citizen that isn't hit the what we envisaged it to be because right now you're kind of limited to 20 kilometers now really you know I think you've seen Quantum boost in some of the earlier videos and the premise that we want you to be is you know we've got this vast universe so we want radon scanning we

86. 01:08:01

    actually you know we have this smaller radio and scanning of on the FPS you have the smaller one that's giving you information in the room and then the larger charged one that's giving information about maybe the floor that you're on and it's the same principles in the ship side is that we want a smaller one that is fairly instantaneous and that's kind of giving you information about the people you're fighting or you know your local environment and when I say small answer I can say sub 100 kilometers you know that's just giving me information around this area but then we've got the charge scan wave and that should be giving me information about things that are 10 15 20 000 kilometers away and then that's why where qboost comes in and the fact that you're Q boosting to these locations you're not having to go okay there's a Quantum travel marker there that's a million kilometers away that's like okay I'm making a conscious decision to go there but for Q boost it's like okay I am there I want to

87. 01:08:50

    boost around the environment but I want to have things spread around so that you know we're not just cramped in because radar and scanning is fundamentally it has two purposes one purpose is to give you information about the things of your environment and the second purpose is to help you explore it's to help you find things that are not necessarily apparent because space is a big dark place so we need that we want to be able to take advantage of that so when you have this ability to detect things that are much further away all of a sudden you start to feel like yeah you've got to fly to them to yeah to investigate them and so I mean I think that's like that's a good example of something on Squadron that you know we were also looking at like how do we solve the problem of your you know patrolling an area right and it's not very much fun if you Patrol an area

88. 01:09:38

    and then it's like I you know space is big I go to this area and then I look around and I I radar covers 10 kilometers in front of me and that's it that doesn't feel like I was patrolling you know a large area of space and so we we sort of were thinking about well how you know really if we think about it there's like short range which is you know what you would call the standard control mode like a slower exploration I come up to a you know a derelict or there's a cluster of asteroids that I'm going to fly around to see what's happening and then there's the medium range which hasn't really existed in both the Pu and it's something that we really wanted to have in Squadron and we really should be in the Pu which is well you know what's that over there that's 10 000 kilometers away the equivalent of

89. 01:10:26

    being on a planet and going there's a mountain over there I can see it I don't know what's on it but I'm gonna drive over there I'll walk over to that mountain and so the idea with sort of the the scanning is like the wave goes out and yeah you'll pick up things 10 20 30 000 kilometers away so you definitely won't be able to understand what's there but you'll say there's something point of Interest okay there's a point of interest and so you'll be able to map things and then we need to get there but you know the quantum travel spooling up spooling down or and we and so this is the whole Quantum the idea of quantum boost is your sort of uh mid-level traversal speed where it allows you it's probably about 10th the speed of the full Quantum travel uh sort of you know not using all the quantum juice if you want to think of it that way but it allows you to sort of get there pretty

90. 01:11:14

    quickly and you know also appreciate the environment you're going through uh and you know go over there oh I go up to the mountain okay no I can see what's up oh there's trees here oh that's really cool that opens up a whole bunch of gameplay I mean definitely helps out in in Squadron but in the Pu it's massive because in the Pu when this rolls into the Pu now you can have exploration gameplay in space so for instance you've never had yeah we've never had so you you could be in you know a big nebula gas cloud and you scan oh I gotta contact 20K away okay I'm going to boost over to see we're like oh I come up oh look it's a you know it's a derelict or there's there's a abandoned mining station this group of rocks over here or I go over here and and we can even in the Pu be in a case where you can sort of almost sort

91. 01:12:02

    of round you know procedurally generate some points of interest when you start to scan that you can go in and visit so I think you know the whole idea of sort of these three these three sort of levels of traversal one is you sort of you know regular you know non-quantum one where you're just using your regular thrusters which is much more sort of limited and you know works for you know combat and stuff like that then there's a the quantum boost which is sort of to you know fast fast run over to a place and then there's the the quantum travel which is the really long okay I'm gonna go to this planet that's 500 000 kilometers away and I'm gonna be in Quantum for five minutes to get there uh and I think that's going to open up a huge amount in the Pu uh I mean it definitely it makes a big difference to

92. 01:12:49

    the gameplay I mean it makes the exploring it in Squadron in space feel much bigger yeah because that was the thing we were trying to follow and I think it's a problem in the Pu right now is when you're in space it's sort of you know most of it is point to point it's empty for you right it's like you spend your time around the space stations or uh you know some asteroids here around the planet but we want to open it up a bit more and have that idea of oh I can I can detect something I want to investigate it so the whole sort of exploration um investigative gameplay that can happen in space now because of these different modes of travel and the scanning is going to be a a huge huge deal so I know we have a clip for this uh for folks who maybe joined the program late and didn't see the flight experience segment earlier or if you're

93. 01:13:37

    watching this separately on YouTube and you don't know what this looks like uh let's take a look at the quantum loose clip that we have uh so we can see it one more time here so just to call out that's going to be the old HUD yeah there's the altar that's too busy that's the next old time yeah earlier we were showing the old old so we've done a scan here those are that's also the old point of interest because the point of interest will be just points yeah but basically we've done a scan we've got some points of interest that are uh you know multiple 10ks away and you can see the distance there it says 13 000 kilometers on the right hand side so this is obviously just placeholder UI for the quantum boost and we again you can just boost over there and it obviously has this interactive gameplay which obviously went into uh yeah and this by the way is that that sort of programmer work in progress from Yogi uh um uh the quantum

94. 01:14:27

    boost um because you're just gonna have to stay in the zone to keep and boost otherwise you'll fall out of boost but we've gone over to the the planet here so what it's allowing you to do is sort of have that mid-level traversal and investigate things uh without having to uh you know spend forever 1200 meters per second or when I'm traveling over and it's over too quickly so just to clarify again for folks if you watch the flight experience segment earlier in the day that's the old old UI which is probably closer to what you're familiar with in the Pu today what we just showed now is the new old UI the one that was intermediate now but we're now moving away from and basically it's the same as it's the styled uh Squadron UI that was from the UI you have in the

95. 01:15:16

    Pew right so what you have in the Pu is the these generic version that Zane did this was the one that we had the style that we did for the aegeo style but it was still based on the idea of all this information being present and we've decided that we wanted to really scale that back to be more contextual to switch between modes so that's one of the reasons why we're not really showing all the herd and the MFD stuff now is because we're in the process of the change so it's you know a lot of programmer art and you know even you even saw it in the the need speed segment whereas a lot of that like the mode stuff and everything they've just sort of hacked in the modes to the current um uh HUD stuff but when the new one comes online it should be much cleaner and easier to go and I I don't know if it was too clear on the video that we were seeing but on the video we say we

96. 01:16:03

    weren't originally an SEMO standard control mode and then um we switched to Quantum mode so the spooler wasn't really the spool up for the quantum boost the spool look was just there's a spool up as you go into Quantum mode your Shield's power down so you so you you know there is some risk when you're in the fast traversal mode and the Quantum Drive Powers up but once you're once it's spooled up and you look at a place you can boost towards it and it's just you press shift and it's instant yeah and and so so for people that want to you know go oh what's that over there you know people have been wanting to I just want to like free Quantum right you know there's people who want to do that for quite a while you know second start of the right and straight on till morning so yeah so we're we've been talking about these these flight experience stuff the ship related stuff the new UI

97. 01:16:52

    stuff the contextual changes and everything uh we'll obviously show those as we get closer to being ready to show those have you talked a little bit about the the star map um again not quite ready to show uh today stuff uh as far as those mapping things and getting around stuff uh there's also the mini map there's also the mini map which has always been this promise of being able to find your way through either a really large ship or a space station or stuff like that uh what can you tell us about the work on the mini map so radar as as we call it is essentially it encapsulates the star map it encapsulates what's in your cockpit and it also encapsulates when you're in fps you have an FPS radar and scanner and the mini map is essentially a way for you to be able to and you can access it both from your Mobi or it'll be on your

98. 01:17:40

    HUD a way for you to get the spatial awareness in you know when you're in a 3D environment in fps so I think the work we have in terms of the mini map it gives you that 3D isometric view that you can move around and all the information in there is underpinned by the FPS radon scanner so the information that you you're you're scanning in the environment is the information that you'll see on the minimap so if you go into say a known location so let's say you go to Microtech you know that Landing Zone essentially that that will be pushed to your MOBA glass so you'll be able to then load up the minimap and go okay how do I how do I get out I mean I've seen so many different new players play Star Citizen they're like where do I go so you know it'd be nice for us to

99. 01:18:28

    be able to go here's here's the Spaceport here's where you go and buy food and drink here's where you go and buy weapons and you can just go cool I open up my map and it's like oh that's where I am oh that's where I can go and it it gives you a map at your fingertips but then when you're at an environment that is not so let's say you go to a derelict Outpost you'll be mapping that environment as you go or you may be able to find a terminal that has the map on there that you can download and then you have it to you so it really allows us again Star Citizen one of its strengths is that it's scale but that's a challenge for us as developers to be able to give it to players and for them to be able to understand and navigate where they need to go because the first thing is how do I play the game where do I need to go what do I need to do so you know how do

100. 01:19:15

     you play the game is about making the barrier to entry the controls smooth and intuitive what you understand you know and then it's like where do I need to go okay well this allows you we have a mini map here that this allows you to go oh cool there's a Spaceport there's the shuttle or there's the train or this is how I get to this area and we can provide you know missions that allow people to then navigate to those places so that then they understand okay this is how I get to a certain place because everybody you know if somebody says to me tomorrow I you know come around to my house or go here just give them a postcode and you put it into it yes everybody's so we're in Google Maps exactly you know you need that you need the the street level uh version of it yeah and you know so we've long wanted this I mean it's very critical for uh Squadron but it's also you know I think important for the Pu and you know the

101. 01:20:04

     concept is that some of the maps are sort of readily available you just walk into a a city and you know the terminal Auto connects to your your Moby or what ever and you get the map downloaded and some of them you may have to explore something and then as you explore it you map it just like a sort of more traditional mapping technique and there'll be some cases like you know we have some stuff in Squadron which I think would play Perfect well in the Pu where like you don't have the map initially but if you hack in or you can download it into a system like asiado is an example of we've been showing it because we showed it a while back as a location it's just one of the very you know it's a bada location in terms of Squadron but you know since we showed it we thought okay that's a good it's just a good backdrop rather than just you know gray boxes

102. 01:20:54

     um but you know that would be an example is you don't load the layout of that place but you would have to go and hook into their system download the map and then now you would have it in your minimap so what we have is we have some footage here which is showing how the visuals the mini map in terms of sort of an isometric render in engine in the engine in the UI that will essentially become your minimap but you'll have a more sort of you know reduced version with you in the middle as you're moving around but if we run it uh you'll you'll you'll see kind of what the the tech is so first this is in the editor um but it's essentially what it does is it's taking our existing um layouts levels ships so we don't have to build this custom but it's a way of

103. 01:21:42

     applying certain shaders and marking up certain objects to be displayed like before gets displayed but the walls don't so we can just take the existing geometry you already have streamed in that you're walking around already and then use it to be rendered for our minimap so this is this is essentially in the engine using the Idris ship itself and the various parts of its interior to create the minimap without any special this you know this doesn't have any specific custom like uir for it other than some of the like level things that say you know uh you know ground level or whatever it's one of the advantages of having high detailed ships yeah because the environment's already you know already in a good state to show Straight Out The Gate and so the idea of this being systemic

104. 01:22:30

     is that you know when it's the feature and the is ready to go right for prime time I think it we can just apply it to space station yeah because a lot of traditional gain development you have to make custom mini Maps yeah so you look at environment and you go we have to make a custom environment minimap so if we want to support Lots tens hundreds and thousands of locations especially for the Pu and absolutely for the Pu it's just it's just not viable so we wanted to come up with a solution that we can use you know with minimal effort on the side of content creation but gives us all of the information that we want and this mini-map it's not just uh oh that's where I am it can show your objectives it can show you other people it can show you information about those things and again it's all underpinned by the radon scanner so when we call it the just this is just a a kind of how you

105. 01:23:20

     view your radar information in fps and your radon scanner gives you so much more information than just oh that's the name of the door it tells you what's the state does it have power can I hack it you know if it's a person what is what's the right to status are they injured so if you're coming into here and going I'm trying to do a medical Mission I've got a marker I've got a call I can get a scan of the local live the area go right this person's injured oh his body's injured too oh he's got a tier one injury I'm going to go and help him before he bleeds out because I can see his health and you'll be able to see that via this information yeah it allows you to detect uh saboteurs or Intruders but then you're using like the relay networking where the saboteurs and Intruders can start pulling fuses and start hiding themselves from yeah this

106. 01:24:07

     will also underpin Resource Network yeah so exactly that the the same visuals and Tech is planned to drop into the so the resources so if you're looking at like your schematic for the ship to where your relays are going to be or security reasons bulkheads which doors are open or closed um basically it will pull up your you know your holographic view of your ship like that using the same Tech so that the idea is those two things um you know work well together all right so we've been talking about uh the FPS step the step that affects the play player specifically we're going to touch a few more of those things uh before we leave today we've moved up into space and talked about our flight experience and the scanning and the mini map and um now from ourselves and our ships let's talk about our enemies our

107. 01:24:56

     opponents the the the entities we're going to encounter and talk some uh talk about some of the AI improvements that have been coming because of work on Squadron what can you tell us so the AI systems that we have we basically threw them away so we we found out we wanted to we wanted to understand where we wanted to go what we wanted to achieve and you know over the years as I've worked in games I think probably Chris with a tester as well is that the best AI are kind of some of the simpler AI that you have a really good solid foundation then you build on top of it and I think our AI over the period of time that has been there I think it's kind of had lots of different iterations and it kind of lost its way a little bit and then yeah yeah it's kind of lost so what we've we've done and well also no one's the the AI That's in the Pu has never really had

108. 01:25:47

     tuning time no exactly the focus and you know it it it was a basic implementation at the beginning and then it's been rolled out and there's so many other things going on that they really haven't had time to focus on it because you know you're playing and with the servers running at six frames a second there's a whole bunch of problems that come with this that doesn't help the AI out at all uh so this is one this is actually a really good example of where Squadron really helps because we're saying okay don't worry about that I mean yeah I'm sorry that the ai's kind of brain dead a lot of the times in the the Pu combination of the you know it's older logic of behaviors haven't been well developed but also it's because of pro performance of the servers and what's going to happen with server mashing is

109. 01:26:36

     going to make a big difference for that and there's other things that are happening in the background that will will also make it better but the advantage of taking it in onto the Squadron side is that we can really just focus on the AI the behaviors iterating on it adding sort of interest and complexity and making them feel like real humans uh fighting you or in the case of Vandal real aliens fighting you not okay or creatures yeah yeah well hey let's be quiet about that um but not get tied up in some other problems that come with multiplayer come with online servers and make that work really good as a single player having fun feeling challenged feeling like it's it you know I'm not just shooting

110. 01:27:25

     dummies that jump up and I can easily blast and when that all works then comes across into the Pu especially when some of the latest stuff's going to trigger in the Pu I think it'll be a whole different experience and and it's I won't argue it's been like a long hard slog on the AI side uh it's partly because we wanted to become really systemic and we have a massive especially in the Pew a massive world that can have all these different situations so it's not you know like if you're doing a standard FPS game a Call of Duty um like the narrative parts of it you know exactly where everyone's going to be and you can sort of script actions for the AI to make them seem intelligent but really they're kind of following scripts whereas with us you know all the different planets all the

111. 01:28:13

     different you know locations on the planets or up in a spaceship or all these different situations the AI could be in there's no way you could script it all so you need to make it systemic it needs to understand the environment it needs to to have perception of what's happening around it and be able to communicate with the other AI it's fighting alongside to seem like they're working as a team and so that takes time to work uh you know the AI team is uh been working on it for a long time led by a friend Jessica riccucci he's been doing a great job and I you know we absolutely have turned the corner yeah this year because I you know you know both me and Rich actually we we were playing it when some of the blast systems came in and you know it was

112. 01:29:03

     challenging to say the least yes uh and and challenging in a good way in like the fact that we were like okay we want to we want to clear everyone out like we were running asiato as a test level okay let's see if we can just run and Gun and take all the slavers out and uh I mean rich is a much better fps player than me I think I'm kind of okay but which is much better but no we weren't all I managed to get it but I was like I was like I'm going home I downloaded the build and um home I'm like damn it I'm gonna finish this level I'm like I almost managed to do it I mean it it was you know it was getting it was like Eldon ring from software like I want to do it one more time and it was and it wasn't just that you were getting like a headshot or anything where it was like okay the AI is just Supernatural and they can instantly shoot you it's like they were moving around they were

113. 01:29:50

     anticipating where you were trying to flank your areas and they were behaving intelligently and those are all uh behaviors and systems that we've been working on in terms of like realistic perception like they can you know hear a sound around the corner but if you were three four doors away or whatever maybe they wouldn't hear you if you drop something and you know see where you were and see you in the peripheral vision or they'd have different uh ways of approaching searching for you or fighting you you know whether they're more aggressive and they're pushing up towards you or they're defensive and they're staying behind cover or they're trying to flank you uh so there's there's a whole bunch of work that's done and so on the AI side I'm I'm actually feeling like yeah it's really some pretty great stuff uh and so that is going to be stuff that

114. 01:30:39

     will ultimately be coming to the Pu and it'll be really cool but I don't know if you know rich wants to add a bit to it well I I I need I need to ask something because I've spent more than a single day on the internet before when you say we've thrown everything well actually I was about to come back to that so because that's going to be the title of the kataku article it's interesting because what we what we talked about is we identified everything that was there so when I came on I wanted to understand where you know we're talking years now so okay what what is there how do we want to change it and how do we want to manipulate it so we're not throwing away the the more technical underpinnings of the of the AI consumption's still there or like how the um you know how they they navigate and find around the world it's more about the bits that you go and you tune and the you tweak and we

115. 01:31:26

     we call them behaviors like AI behaviors so what we did is we pulled all the AI back and stripped it back to essentially three base behaviors essentially Defender so I want to stay back and cover and defend a location a strafer who kind of wants to get you know seizure and wants to go behind you and then pushes that kind of want to put pressure onto so we wanted to create these three core behaviors that the AI can choose to go and you know they can choose yeah combat behaviors this is so once you've engaged in combat they can then select one of these behaviors to engage you so that you get a a mixture of combat when you're fighting them and obviously you might get three Defenders or you might get one straight from two pushers and we've got a video to show some of the uh some of the behaviors but then what we have is we have a trait system that sits on top of that and that's where designers can go in and go okay I want

116. 01:32:13

     this Defender to be to always defend he should never re-roll as another uh Behavior or I want him to be um like a turret so he never moves from cover to cover or I want pushers to be you know I want always be a pusher I want them to you know be aggressive I want to be Reckless I want them to have friendly fire so we can go in and essentially we've got three base behaviors that just by themselves play well you can play that and go okay do these three is that a fun experience then you can start adding in all the other things on top you go okay I want this this train this trade so you're crafting combat experiences so in a pu Mission if you've got a ship coming in bringing AI reinforcements we can say okay we can weight the behavior so you're not getting the same thing every time but you can go okay you get these guys who push they're quite aggressive

117. 01:33:01

     because that's their faction whether it's nine tails or these guys are quite defensive they're you know they're more military and what we have is these traits that multiply the behavior so now we've got multiple different things and then you add different um weapons in there so you've got sniper rifles so the different engagement ranges and all of a sudden you have this Matrix of individual behaviors that it's multiplied into the hundreds that allows us to have a really strong combat experience that is not the same it's not you know Star Citizen game that you're going to be playing for hundred thousands of hours um you know you don't want to just be having the same combat experience over and over again Western Squadron we want you to be able to ramp up the combat we want to have factions played differently we want you to have different experiences you play throughout the game and when we looked at the AI combat Behavior that's something we identified

118. 01:33:47

     but then we also looked at perception and basically um tweaked that and read that in a way that allows us that you know you're coming around the corner it's not just instant headshot because to be honest AI it's very easy to make AI that are amazing because they're just computer they know where you are they know exactly what they don't have to Mao same it's just instant headshot it's very easy to make them too hard what what it what it's not human no exactly what we want to do is we want to make it challenging but fair and that is well you know when when we were Chris was talking about playing through asiado even though it was very challenging when we died it was because ah we made a mistake it was like okay I didn't check my left when I came out here and I'm like oh I got taken out and we've also looked at accuracy so we've looked at

119. 01:34:35

     accuracy is that you know even a human you know even a soldier they don't immediately have a bead on a Target and they pull the trigger they take a time to adjust to it so you know as soon as you pop out of cover they're like oh someone's there it's not instantly on you they've got a bit of time and then what we wanted to do is that we don't want AI to be 100 accurate you know but we want you to still feel pressure so we have a silhouette-based accuracy model now so that if they do miss can you get in that Center like you know it's kind of going past your head and you're like okay I'm under pressure and we want the AI to pressure you but pressure you in a way that you feel like oh what how did he shot me through a box like oh you know oh he's pushing that way and you're hearing him you're like okay I need oh they're coming this way and I'm being pincered and I think that's where we want to we've put our real focus on terms of how they perceive you in the

120. 01:35:23

     environment when they're socially active how how do they perceive you in in combat and then we we have pretty much ninety percent of what I've talked about there is in the game we've had balance passes we've played it it's a lot of fun and then what we have on top of that is future things that we're going to be adding even more so you know we've got versions of them going doing medic behavior and Reviving our lives and ammo management and all the other Advanced combat behaviors that we can pull on top which we're already working on but they they're underpinned by an absolute solid foundation so if you strip all of it back just to those three base behaviors the defender pushes straight for is it fun because if it's not fun there you can't just keep relying on putting stuff on top and going oh it's going to get fun when we do this it's going to

121. 01:36:09

     get fun when we do this so we we pulled it back so that a you have a challenge that you feel like you're being pushed that you feel like you're under pressure because especially in Squadron you know you're not a Commando you're a fighter pilot you know fighter pilots don't go in and you know they're not John Rambo and again in the Pu you could be a you could be a haulage trucker or you could be you you might want to do something else you might want to be doing just a homestead so you want to do trading and so when you get into FPS we need to have the the um the AI reflect the level of difficulty that we want to push in it into the persistent Universe yeah and I mean I would say I mean yeah thrown away is was you know yeah disingenuous but basically that but it's but you know game developer is iteration right so you have V1 then you have V2

122. 01:36:59

     and then yeah through and you know V1 was the very first basic combat behavior and it was it wasn't you know it's it was the beginning and there's a lot more systems now yeah underpin it that's why we threw the base one away because we have more ones that are underpinned by you know a lot more of the things we talked about like perception the accuracy and all this other stuff that happens and within the context you were speaking specifically of the FPS combat behaviors correct like the seven segments I did about the bartenders those are all still accurate No it's social so I mean social Ai and combat behaviors there's there is yet again uh socialized yeah the vessel will never end right but we'll also be using some of these um tenants and Ethos to push into the

123. 01:37:48

     flight AI so the flight AI which I think you know was talked about and in the earlier talk in terms of the jousting and how we want to have more close combat things like accuracy and the behaviors and how they can roll different um traits and how that that's something that we'll have holistically across AI across Star Citizen as a whole you know we're showing it as the FPS but it's very similar so it's something that I mean we've got we can show the characters waiting to do their race so let's let's certainly look at some videos yeah so what I'd suggest I think would probably show the investigation first outside of you just talked about combat yeah there's a whole bunch of other behavior in terms of because you know like I said stealth game plays a lot yes so

124. 01:38:37

     you know Squadron is the test bed for that so investigation so like someone Hears A noise what's that let's go check it out they radio their you know back to base or their body hey I heard something here or they're getting a gunfight they could actually call back hey I need reinforcements and they'll come in that's all behaviors that's in working right now in Squadron yeah and then on top of that you know you're making the joke about the the bartender and all the rest of stuff but really uh the main uh cooking bed for what we call social ai non-combat ai is Squadron there's a lot more stuff happening in in Squadron that will come into the Pu so it's not just the bartender or you know even people eating at the chow line it's you know it's you know Engineers going about their daily business or a janitor you know cleaning up messes that people

125. 01:39:25

     leave systemically or for instance flight attendants or hanger Personnel yeah the hanger that you know are basically operating on the hangar and then when they're not fixing something and they're having a conversation side for instance the whole dynamic conversation system that Francesco's been working on that allows the Rai say aboard the Stanton which is the address that you're based in and it's huge conversation when you're playing through a level and you can hear them talking to each other and reacting to what's happening it all of a sudden brings that space to life so yeah but the dynamic conversation system allows it so we have some that are sort of more story scripted conversations like if you leave eavesdrop on some people patrolling and it we've got some stuff we want to let you hear so you know where to go and stuff like that but also there's Dynamic

126. 01:40:13

     conversation so people can just sort of you know whether it's in a mess or they sit down and they just start up a conversation talking about the most recent vid show they saw or uh you know talking about what they think the best ship Thruster is uh and there's a system in for that and we're creating a recording but that's also a system that's going to come into the Pu that's going to create a huge amount of life so when you go into a bar in the Pu or you're wandering around the you know the big point of interest to cities people will be having conversations gossiping talking about oh well I heard there was something went on the nine tails attacked so on our eyes and another and but it will be systemic and dynamic which is really cool it just adds so much it just adds so much so let's look at some of this in action uh we don't have the conversation system stuff to show today but the let's

127. 01:41:03

     look at some of the investigation stuff and then we'll look at some of the combat stuff you're talking about afterwards so we've actually got it as two videos so this is the investigation in the test map and what you're seeing here in some respects you might think that this is scripted that this is something that we just put on a track this is purely systemic so if we we captured this 20 different times it would be 20 it would play out 20 different ways so the one those individual there is gonna is going away to hide behind that RNG boxy whatever we want to call that color so that's the place this is essentially a standard for the player the other two AI are searching for him at the moment uh the white spheres you see are basically hiding a cover spots and so as AI this is a sort of debug mode as the AI goes around and they search the Spheres go

128. 01:41:51

     away indicating that okay they check that place so no one's actually there hiding out uncover so and they they're both kind of working together so their their logic is they need to clear these rooms first and then once the rooms are cleared they can sort of go on so they share this information so as they're clearing the cover points and the cover points are basically all the nooks and crannies in the room they're clearing the cover points and they're sharing together so you'd see here that they're going okay this guy's coming out and go okay there's an open vent again this is systemic he's just coming to investigate this event but he's not cleared this entire room yet so he's not going to progress and he's just going to go and check the rest of the room alongside his body and once and then cleared it they'll then progress but again here would be you know you'd hear them talking to each other I've not found them yet where is he and again if that we've got vents in here just checking

129. 01:42:39

     another vent there yeah so we don't we also have other usables so it might be you know something you can hide in or he they're going through systemically checking the usables checking the cover points you can see there's only a few balls left now the ones at the bottom right and then the ones at the back that he's clearing and then one of these enemies will then go okay we've checked everything in here I'm now going to progress to the next space because that's where you know they're not in here I think you're going to go this way so come by there's only one set of ones left I'm just gonna check it can come through here cleared those so now he's going around here uh uh and what you're seeing here with the bar which starts off it's something that we've added for the perception so they

130. 01:43:26

     start off in green and then it goes to Yellow then Amber then red so once it goes to Red that's into full combat but the previous states are kind of levels um they go up based on levels of different perceptions so a green mic they just might have seen you that's the equivalent of going huh you know did I say something no by the way in the game you don't see that that's right no no that's our debug that's just indicating uh the level and the level in the game but we'll have audio and visual representation for those levels so the the initial green one would just be like like a head turn maybe a verbal cue then you're getting into the yellow and Amber that's where like they're turning to face the noise and going I think I'm gonna go check it out and then you know maybe they'll walk over there to investigate or if there's two of them one of them would go hey you go check it out and then he goes and checks it out and then we have obviously the

131. 01:44:13

     red where it's like there's a definite threat here and once they've been threatened like in most games what happens is if you wait a long enough time they will then de-escalate to the green and it's like their minds have been you know it's like mrb the flash through memory it's gone in our game what they do is they go to a threatened State and in that threatened State they'll still do their social activities and their functions but they're more they're more perceptive so as soon as they see for like he's there again they'll get into it so it makes in a difference that if you've gone loud at the start and then tried to hide you can't just go oh no they'll forget about me it it has memory and that will be the case in the Pu as it is in Squadron so and so that was on a test map yeah we do have a an example of it working yep take a look at the the real deal so here is inaciado in the

132. 01:45:05

     decommissioned area you can see the two AI in the in the distance catch you and then this is kind of just a representation of it doing the same thing in a real environment but obviously we wanted to show you the kind of the the thing behind the curtain what are they actually doing they're checking cover points they're checking the usables that are there and then you know in some a lot of the cases when we actually captured this video uh if we actually failed because they pincered the player and they actually found you before we were able to show you you know what was happening so it's uh it it's really good to see how this transition from social into combat so that you can actually play through the game so here he's checking a usable which we've set up we just kind of like

133. 01:45:52

     looking and checking okay is there anything there nothing there and again he's sharing that information with his body so if you've got two three four AI that are searching then obviously they're sharing and talking to each other and letting them know that nobody's found you thank you you may not be able to see them but you're going to know they're out there looking for you and if you stay in the same place for too long they will find you yeah so you can see the the one in the background is actually looking over one of the vents one of the railings should I say and then I think the uh Ross who did all captured all these videos I think he takes a bit of Revenge and again not scripted that it's systemic they understand all the hiding places this is their station they

134. 01:46:40

     understand the hiding places they understand where to look and they just go through some yeah so you can drop these enemies in any environment and it will they will play out like this but obviously what they the choices that they make at runtime will be different and this is where you know we have to make sure that the AI that we're working are even though we're working on it in Squadron it has to work for the entirety of Star Citizen in all the different environments and all the different scenarios that you're put in so it's uh it's a it's a major Improvement so that's hiding from the AI but let's look at some of the combat tactics now so let's do combat tactics one so again what you're seeing here is in a test map we wanted to kind of show you a bird's eye view so we've just turned god mode on so you can see it and you can

135. 01:47:27

     see the labels here so we've got the Defenders that kind of push the cover points then we've got the The Pusher who's kind of pushing towards you and then we've got the strafe for who is kind of like taking more of a wider Angle now there are some similarities between all the behaviors but it depends on what happens so whether they go to cover you know a pusher for example can still go from cover to cover a Defender can still go to cover to cover so it's not like you've got these binary choices it's about awaiting the different choices throughout the behavior so that the AI provides something different but also applies pressure to you as a player so that you're having to react to the AI you know right now our current AI you basically get the jump on them and you can just take them all out but in reality what we want is we want you to react to the egg as they're pushing you and challenging you and we want you know

136. 01:48:15

     we want that challenge to be fair so that you feel like you've made the mistake when you eventually or if you do I get taken out I want to get some of that God mode and then we have one more video showing the tactics situation let's take a look at that so this is just a short version where we but again it's the same uh AI that have been dropped in and and the roll the dice for if they don't always become Defenders or always become pushers or strafers it can be random every time so the combat experience is different so you and you might all be pushers or they might all be Defenders but the way it works is if one of them rolls a Defender then the weight for them to roll another Defender is lower so essentially here you can see here that he's getting tagged a lot just because we want to show you the

137. 01:49:02

     behaviors themselves rather than you know get taken out so he's being a bit more aggressive than you probably would be able to that's going to make uh the eventual eventual speed runs a lot harder because they're not just Goombas they do the same thing every time you can't memorize the patterns and the other thing you might have noticed as well is that we're starting to add traversal opportunities for the AI so they're not always the star on the basement over you know you in fact I'm not sure Crouch mantle crime ladders they can jump over railings and and push you or they can climb up onto things and shoot down on you they can use ladders they can do all sorts of um so we're putting a fair amount of work into AI traversals so they they sort of understand the environment and how to Traverse over it other than just flat ground

138. 01:49:52

     and of course you know on some of that I think you saw some of it he didn't get hit right away some of the early shots missed and then they hit him that's kind of what Rich was talking about earlier um because you know it I rich says it's very easy to make you know AI aim perfectly all the time because they know exactly where you are yeah they've got all the numbers um but that's not any fun so the fun is making him feel real like that's you're playing against another Real Player or a human all right well we are just about out of town I think we got two more talking points we want to cover before we let you go let's start with one that might be surprising to some it must be maybe not they won't know about it we haven't done a lot of talking about in the past skills there there's uh what can you tell us about skills in in

139. 01:50:39

     Squadron 42 so skills it's not just looking forward to it will be Star Citizen as well so we've split them up into kind of two um areas one is physical attributes so we have four physical attributes such as strength agility endurance and fitness and then we have techniques which is kind of like whether it's takedowns or traversal so if you look at the physical attributes what we have essentially we're going to have a skill system that you can go and the way that you play the game will dictate how you level up these particular skills so if you're constantly carrying boxes you know you may get stronger so you can actually lift stronger things but getting stronger doesn't just allow you to lift up your boxes but it also means that your equip load that you can carry in your inventory is is higher that that

140. 01:51:27

     weight doesn't affect you as much so you're not you're you can you can Sprint further because it's not affecting your stamina as much you know your Force reactions you're more resistant to that because you're stronger in yourself agility in terms of like weapon swapping or um going to ads we have endurance so that's for example like how resistant you are to the environment if you look at say Navy SEAL training or SES training in in Britain essentially you know they have cold weather training uh they have you know you you can survive in harshering climates you can go longer without uh sustenance uh and then that's what essentially endurance gives you and also for example like GeForce and red out so that you you know Pilots train for that so they can actually modulate their breathing so they're actually able

141. 01:52:15

     to sustain higher G's than a normal person would be and then you have Fitness so Fitness for example you can have a higher stamina so when we have swimming you can swim longer you can you can hold your breath longer you can Sprint longer so we have these physical attributes and we have multiple different ways for how you improve them and those physical attributes will will denote how effective you are at certain things in the game so and that will come to obviously for flying as well as um in fps but we're not going to be removing any of the skill elements so there's nothing and we're going in there going oh you've got 10 more damage or you know we're going to make you fly the plane better it's like no that that's always relying on your skill this is the things that you you can't necessarily improve so you know like I said how far how fast you can Sprint or how far you

142. 01:53:01

     can Sprint all of those different things that are tied into physical attributes well it's like real life right absolutely you've got to spend some time if you want to increase the strength you I mean yes you could naturally be born strong but if you go to the gym and you start lifting weights yeah you know okay I can do whatever I can like bench press 100 pounds now I can do 120 now I can do 140. now I can do 160. now I can do 180 right well you couldn't do 180 right from the beginning you had to you had to work the same if you're like running you know you work your way up to a marathon and so that's kind of the idea is there are things that you do during the game play that uh you know your gameplay can add you but if you want to take some time and go to the gym and do some squats you you know you you can get some strength up and I I again

143. 01:53:49

     that's part of like making that that the the the Living World so if you want to invest in your character that way in a sort of more realistic way the way the world was because Irish says we still want all the skill in terms of being able to you know aim and shoot and do all the rest of this stuff um then you can do that if that's something that makes sense for what your character is going to be I mean in you know squadron's one thing but in the Pu you know yeah I'm a I'm a cargo hauler I probably don't really need to be or buff and everything because I'm sitting there in the camera my caterpillar hauling a bunch of cargo but if I want to be a bounty hunter maybe I want to invest some time so if I'm in a foot race trying to put take someone down I can outrun him you know yeah because if you're wearing the same art if you're

144. 01:54:36

     wearing heavy armor and they're wearing heavy armor and you've put effort into you know Skilling up your character because you're saying you know you that's the dedicated area of focus that you want you know you can run further than them you can carry a carry things you know that are heavier than than they can you can equip things onto you and it doesn't affect you as much so all of those different physical attributes it allows you to progress your character in those ways and then we have the technique side of things so we're going to have multiple different techniques for lots of different skills across the star system but a good one to a good one to have to explain it it's almost like the 10 000 hours you know if you do ten thousand hours kind of thing you're better at something so takedowns is a good example so the first time you do a takedown you know that's going to be quite sloppy it's going to take quite a long time you know you might struggle

145. 01:55:24

     and okay eventually you you take them down and it's like oh okay the guy over there heard me it's not very good and after a certain amount of time that you you know you practice at them yeah more takedowns you do the better you'll get better so then they'll change different animations so now you'll unlock a different animator where it's it's smooth yeah very looking forward to hearing all the versions of take down from sloppy to Super Killer Pro yeah and at the end once it'd be like you know straight in straight out you lower him down onto the floor it takes you know it's much faster but you've put in the effort to level that skill to a level that you want to achieve and I think that's what skills is about it's about giving players goals that they want to do we'll have the same for like uh you know melee like fish fire combat yeah

146. 01:56:12

     knife fighting um longer term we want to sort of this is more pu not Squadron but introduce say more moves you could do in fights say martial arts or whatever you have to go somewhere or traversal as well and learn them from someone and then do it a bit more and then you would get better so these are all things you could gain and that's kind of the like you said the you know the idea of sort of you know the skills and techniques that we want to introduce because uh again it's you know this is going to be a really huge deep world and it's sort of up to you how you want to I mean it's actually build your character if you look at fighter pilots nowadays or Formula One card races you know they're absolutely extreme athletes they're not just they don't just go get in the car and like the car does everything it's not the 70s no exactly you know you don't know yeah they go to you know try to race a

147. 01:57:03

     Formula One or they play a football match absolutely so that's that's what it gives you it gives us that ability for you to specialize your character in areas that if you really enjoy FPS then you can push it that if you or if all you care about is flying ships because you want to be a fighter pilot then you'll be like okay I want to level up agility or I want to level up endurance because endurance allows me to hold more G's so you know if that guy was gonna black out I'm not gonna black out because I'm going to be able to do it and it's those slight one percent differences that allow you to put some effort into do and that you should be you will be able to level them as you just play the game organically so you're not going to have to go out and level them um you know you know like Christmas squats if you if you do squats like that's the equivalent of us going from Crouch to stand essentially it's like we will allow you to do things like that if

148. 01:57:50

     you want to go and kind of like level them yourself but you'll also just be able to level them by naturally playing what you like in the game that Pilates area and Microtech well yeah we were all the the old thing info and then the other thing that we're going to do which will tie into the last thing you're going to talk about is you know the way that you'll sort of track this is the same way as you know I've got an Apple Watch on here and I can have my health app that will tell me kind of you know how unfit I am right or how fit I am unfortunately at the moment it's mostly unfit uh but uh you know that will be essentially one of the apps in the movie glass and then one of the last uh you know things that we're going to talk about as far as some of the stuff we're doing Squadron uh is you know there's a complete redo of the Mobi glass uh and the first iteration is in

149. 01:58:40

     Squadron there's a sort of cut down set of apps in Squadron because it's the military movie glass and you you know don't need all the cargo trading and all that kind of stuff that you would want in the Pu but it's a framework that we're building almost like a you know our own automobile system yeah uh and it's all in building blocks so all the all flash stuff's gone away it's been built to be extensible um there's been some attack and thought into how it looks and rendered which is much nicer and transitions much better before between the modes and uh you know in Squadron it's where you'll sort of be able to see oh you know this is who I am that's how I'm doing in terms of like my health and stats but also like okay

150. 01:59:28

     here's my personal uh log of what's been going on in the light in my life which is basically sort of what I've been playing the game you know here's my mission assignments uh you know here's the the ship chat channel uh what's that yeah the ship WhatsApp basically uh and um yeah obviously the the your nav map start map and all that will be in galactopedia the galactopedia so you can look up and then in the Pu it's going to just get expanded and maybe uh potentially have a slight uh UI difference to be not the military version but be the civilian version but it's it will all go in the same framework using the same base work so one of the things we've been really trying you know not just on on the movie but on the Huds and the mfds is they're all using like a common building block

151. 02:00:17

     framework and we're trying to share the same base code stuff so it's easier to support and maintain because one of the problems right now in the Pu is because there's a Hajj patch of the old system which is the old sort of flash scale form system and the new building blocks it's really hard to extend stuff right now and so one of the big obstacles to doing features is actually the UI and so squadrons one of the ways that we're really going to sort of just you know clean the house and make it easier so then in the Pu extending things will be easier and and simpler so yeah I don't know if you want to say anything more on the mobile well I'd roll the clip that we have and we can throw the motor glasses take a look so the first page that you'll see that's

152. 02:01:06

     coming up right now is kind of like the overview so you know it's the overview of your player it's the overview of your ship and then it's like your primary objective so and all of these uh widgets that we call them are kind of shortcuts to the kind of the main focus areas alerts as you go to the other yeah page so you can see here we've got your messages so this is kind of like the email client and then on the right we've got kind of like the ship chat that's coming in with you know General chit chat from the AI which again is kind of just making it believe that you're in this you know believable environment or a real life environment rather than just you alone so responsive compared to the old one yeah and it's just a lot it's a lot cleaner and you know the information it's something that we've tried to be consistent across the HUD and the mobiz that we want to make sure that we're

153. 02:01:52

     giving you clean information you can see like the alerts so the alerts are now cleared from the messaging app because we've read the messages so it's gone but there was an alert down on our mission side here but now we've gone and looked at it it's cleared so that's the system it's a framework so like inside the you know you'll get you know notifications oh look I got a new message over here I'll click over to it now we're back and the biggest thing as well is when you it's like in everyday life you everybody pretty much interfacing with computers they're interfacing with emails and you know Google Chrome or you know search engines and everybody does it every day so when we come to things like the MOBA glass you know we have to have a level of familiarity that people understand it's like okay this is intuitive to use and

154. 02:02:40

     it comes back to really the original message that we started this talk with we want to make sure that the game that you're playing we're removing the barrier to the entry removing the complexity so that you can enjoy the stuff that you want to do enjoy that you want to go and do you want to go and do missions you want to go and you know get equipment or find rare loot or join up with your friends and I think a lot of the things when we look at this where you go from playing interaction experience to improve traversal to improve hard star map Moby is a combination of that with where we want to provide all this different information but we want to provide it in a way that you're familiar with that you can go and go we don't need to reinvent how you read emails you know we don't need to reinvent how you understand a mission or you know and you want to have the information at your on your Mobi like okay tell me what am I

155. 02:03:30

     about to it's my environment outside is it breathable do I need a helmet is it hot is it cold you know you need you know you you look at an Apple Watch or my wife has an Apple Watch so she's got a Fitbit and it's like okay this is your heart rate and this is your oxygen you know you need to have that information at your fingertips so you can go okay I can now plan for what I'm about to do and coming back to what Chris said earlier in terms of you know you're not just going to be all wearing heavy armor going into the ships and you might not have an Eva pack and you've gotta you know you've got to decide what you need to take out with your own specific missions it comes back to bringing all these things together as a unified experience playing the game and then you start to understand like why we've got an eating and drinking system or active status or injuries or red outs and you know inventory and are the trolleys and

156. 02:04:21

     the physicalized nature of the world and when you put it or stop putting it all together which is kind of we're seeing that Glimpse in Squadron 42 because we're able to focus on that experience not just individual features you know we're starting to not just see it we're playing it and I think that's what's really exciting to to look at to show you the progress that we're showing here today is that nothing we've talked about is like oh we're going to start this in six months oh we're going to do this in two years so we're going to do that it's a lot of it we've already done and we're just we're in the position where we can go in there and play it and understand it and go okay let's tweak this let's tweak this and let's start building on top of it of systems that were really you know confident in technically and from a design point of view so that we can build on top and we've got a very

157. 02:05:09

     clear idea how they can scale in Star Citizen because we've got a mini environment of Squadron like the test bed of proving it out and I think it's it's going to be a real benefit to the Pu for when we push these features over because also for the developers who are just specifically pu content they've got an example of how to use these systems and they understand how how you know they've other developers have already gone through the mix of putting it into the game and now they go cool there's documentation I know how to go to it yeah I mean I think that's a big thing because you know as a building the feature with the content means that okay you're doing the you know some of the traversal stuff we talked about well here's where you're using it in Squadron and here's how we use these different physical elements to make an interesting uh game experience and that means that the Pu team that's

158. 02:05:58

     now going oh we want to do 10 of those or 100 of those has good examples of how to use it rather than here's a feature you figured out because again that was a lot of things that went in with that you know it's like trolleys as we use for example or just features that didn't really have uh gameplay or use associated with them so uh you know I mean there's a lot more going on in Squadron than just this but we thought yeah this is just a snapshot it would be very good to talk about some of the core gameplay things that we're working on because we know that people are saying hey we'd like these to be better or this would be easier to use or smoother or more responsive and and that's absolutely we know and we're working on and and the plan is it's uh it's definitely going to be in the Pu as

159. 02:06:48

     well in Squadron Squadron is working on the pu2 everybody all right so that was our version of a short conversation about Squadron 42 and the benefits to the persistent Universe uh before we let you go and get on to wrapping up our full day of activities uh Chris any final words you want to share with the Star Citizen Community about Squadron 42 it's the co-development of two projects how it'll affect our citizen what do you got uh well I mean I'd I'd say that uh it's incredibly challenging trying to have uh develop two games side by side also while you're building the tech as well it's also incredibly rewarding I have to say that

160. 02:07:36

     the feedback especially on the Pu side that we see all the time really helps inform as developers what we're doing all the time and so and it involves informs what we do on the Squadron 42 side two in terms of some of the base mechanics some of the areas that we go okay well you know we want to work on this thing and prove it it's all the stuff we've really talked about uh this time but you know for me it's an incredible privilege to be building something of the level of ambition that we're doing um both Squadron but also Star Citizen because you know ultimately I think that Star Citizen itself in terms of an experience in terms of how you can seamlessly go from sitting inside your ship

161. 02:08:23

     your interior here look at this constellation Phoenix and walking outside uh onto a planet and looking at the foliage and the trees and seeing them out in a distance and walking over and being able to actually go there rather than it just be a background that you can never reach the the you know the scope and scale the sense of being able to go anywhere do anything uh that is something that most game engines and games generally just can't do and and don't do you know they're limited to more limited spaces and you know we utilize we're utilizing in Squadron to give you a sort of single player experience that sort of feels like you're you know in a huge play environment and system that you Traverse around I mean we talked about you know

162. 02:09:11

     the various types of quantum travel you're using and all the different you know down to the detail mechanics of picking up something off a desk and moving it over it and and and being able to build a system that can do that for the detail and Fidelity that we're telling a really rich story in Squadron but also a huge universe that you can exist in as a Sandbox for everyone on the player is a complete I mean from a developer's standpoint uh it's a dream I mean it's a dream I've had you know my whole life uh being able to do it because we're supported by the community out there is a you know something I'm always internally grateful for and you know it's the best job in the world so as much as it can be difficult

163. 02:09:59

     sometimes as much as it can be frustrating when you see everyone bitching about something or something's not working or you know what kind of idiot did this or which you know doesn't this person know how to run a project and all the rest of the stuff it's still the best job in the world so you've read the feedback well of course we all read the feedback or everyone every developer reads everything but you know you need a you need a thick skin I mean at the end of the day you have a vision in your in your mind and we're lucky enough to be able to really fulfill that I mean it you know it's a bit of a Pandora's Box that got open when we realized we had the level of support to really go all the way because it's a completely different scope of game now than 10 years ago when I got on stage and I was pitching a much more limited you know sort of privateer freelancer online

164. 02:10:48

     and uh you know next Generation Wing Commander uh what we're building now is a completely different experience in terms of a lot more um just Fidelity and scope and possibility and the idea that you can do and be anything in it and if you can think it or imagine it or see it you can you can go there do it do all those things that is you know like I said I think there's almost nobody out there in the industry that has got the opportunity to do that we're getting to do that here at CAG it's thanks to everyone that's supporting the project uh you know and um so like I said it's hard work you know there's you know no no one no one slacks off we're working really hard we all wish we were doing stuff quicker and faster than we end up doing it but it's

165. 02:11:38

     it's not because we're just sitting here you know eating obviously we are working really hard and it's exciting I mean for me I you know I look at things we have in development and how far we've come uh you know how far the game itself even Star Citizen you know this year there's more people playing it there's more uh you know spending more time in the game than there was last year than the year before I mean we're accelerating I think that's partly a testimony to the game itself over the last few years has become more stable it's become more performant there's been more features and content added so even though we still have a lot of things to go and we talked about a lot of things we want to improve um it's more of a you know yes it's rough around the edges but there is something there that keeps people coming back uh despite the frustrations right

166. 02:12:28

     and I think it's that sense of you being able to go and do anything and do anything in in the universe and we're really committed to making that finishing that off and making that a really great experience that's that's frictionless so you know while it is challenging doing these two games together um it's also a hell of a lot of fun and I'm you know looking forward uh you know over the next few years because we got a whole bunch of really cool stuff coming down the the pike uh beyond what we already have here that you know it's it's a good time to be making games it is it is a lot of fun it's it's I think I think video games strangely people video games get this reputation of because it's hard work

167. 02:13:17

     because it's so difficult it's it's like it's a job and it's like pain or whatever but but no video games are are fun they're creative they're they're expansive they they're collaborative uh they're definitely iterative um uh it's and there's nothing else like it no no other industry in the world would would have a weekly behind the scenes a documentary series that I now get to do from a spaceship landed on one of Pyro's planets uh Rich you want to try to follow that so the only one thing I would say is that even though we are focused on Squadron 42 we still read all of the feedback in you know in Spectrum online the comments or Reddit so a lot of that feedback that's been come to the game over the years you know we've we've taken that on board and it's we're starting to execute on that feedback

168. 02:14:05

     with some of the systems that are not as Forefront in people's minds such as like the interaction system and how you interface with the game human controls and the action queuing and traversal and I think the biggest takeaway for me when I when we start to look at all these features is that it's don't think of it as Feature Feature it's we're making the game the biggest thing is that we're starting to put that game together and we can sit down and play it and whilst our citizen you know there already is a game there this is about you know making what's there even better and making sure that all the things that new players and existing players have had frustrations with that we're smoothing those smoothing them over and removing the friction and so and then about injecting that new features on top that's going to just enhance it even further so I think

169. 02:14:53

     it's you know in the next few years it's going to be a really exciting time so as Chris said there's lots of things in the pipe and I think some of the things that come online will be real game changers to not necessarily what you do because that's going to be delivered by the content and the features and ships but how you do it and how you interface with the game and I think that's going to be a huge Improvement and I think that will you know I think if you're a developer it's something that's really important because you've got to make sure that your game is if they're not talking about that aspect of the game then you've done it right and I think that's where we are we're getting close on at least on Squadron 42 so that we can then map that over to them and then of course the only thing I want to add is that everything you've seen here today is work in progress we've removed some of the locations and aspects where you've seen them to

170. 02:15:42

     protect for spoilers and and story elements of the game but all this stuff is coming to the processing Universe at one point uh the stuff we've been able to show you the stuff we haven't been able to show you uh today and if you were surprised by the skills part in particular like we just kind of snuck that in there before the Moby glass rest assured we will be following up on the skills conversation with visuals and a more in-depth discussion of how that'll work and how you'll interact with that and stuff as we get closer to being able to do so so uh if you've already gone to Spectrum or Reddit or your YouTube thumbnail and added little red laser eyes to Richard Tyler that last part's okay but everything else we just ask that you hang tight and give us the benefit of the doubt it's a it'll be fine so yeah so thank you Chris thank you Rich for taking the time to

171. 02:16:30

     talk a little bit of Squadron 42 with us and how it'll affect the Pu uh we are just about to wrap up our entire citizen gun day here uh but before we do I want to throw it back to a video that we opened Today's Show with uh there's a bunch of our developers and staff at our five studios around the world uh talking about their favorite things of the Star Citizen Community so we'd like to play that for you one more time and when we come back we'll uh put this whole baby to bed so take a look