Star Citizen Live: Theaters of War CitizenCon Followup

31 January 202001:07:071,845 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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this is the cameras too close to my face I'm your host Jared Huckaby there it's really just really close we set this camera up as the is my reaction shot so when you go on and on we just cut to mean be like all right is that my cue hey guys welcome to another episode of star citizen live this time the theatre is a war citizencon follow up I realized I got very loud there I apologize for your years I am your host scared how could be in joining us today this week on the show is a man who probably needs no introduction but we're going to do it anyway means every episode of somebody's first show no I understand and I joke about it all the time well yeah like the amount of times I have to really my job I feel like I'm in a job interview all the time it's like what did it what is it that you do here what is it that you
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do here let's see I feel like you're the Bob's I feel like I'm about to I'm the Bob you know yeah never seen office-based oh okay okay the Bob's I go what is that you do here listen I talked to the customers the engineers and the customers can't talk to each other yeah you never saw this this would be a good time for my camera okay yeah really should I introduce real-life yes we are like all right yeah Shawn Tracy for those that don't know me I'm the technical director of content at cloud Imperium games and recently have been getting involved with in the combat pillar so I'm also taking care of the combat pillar which is a grouping of internal team so we've got the actor team in there the weapon team in there and this I head up with rich Tyra so basically it's two sides of house we've
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got tech our tech animation tools and then on the other side a bunch of the FPS work basically and anything really to do with combat is starting to come under our umbrella now of course we're gonna be talking for the over the next hour about the years of war which was revealed at citizencon before we do that you mentioned rich Tire I just want to give a shout out to rich Tyra rich I'm a big fan all right so before we start getting to the questions from the community let's let's reiterate a little bit we haven't talked about theatres of war since citizen gun right so and that's really the only place we've talked about it so so for anybody who hasn't who maybe didn't tune in that day or didn't watch the replay on YouTube take the next hour and just redo your presentation
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for us sure all set hello everyone welcome to citizencon 2949 i'm sean tree no i won't go through the whole presentation so basically what happened was at citizencon we wanted to be able to bring a updated game mode that basically takes all the work that we've done with arena commander all the work that we've done on star marine and kind of put it together basically if you could decide on the you know best 30 minutes of a PU experience where you could jump in and it was immediate combat what would that look like and this is what we brought to citizencon so we worked on this with a small internal team and we wanted to bring it to civico make it playable nice and stable good performance and everything and get the feedback from the players see if this was even something people liked or wanted because again to kind of progress
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on star marine or arena commander it really doesn't make a ton of sense to continue to progress and just sort of isolated bits it makes a lot of sense to put it all together and again make it a lot more like what the PU experienced vision will be because this kind of combat and again if you've seen the videos and stuff like this we expect to get to this level of interaction between players and everything in the pu but when we get there it's got to be fun it can't be you know great we've got a thousand people in the server now all this combat is happening and oh my goodness you know cutlasses is over power or this weapon takes down a ship like an FPS weapon or you know if you hit a ship with the knife you know the ship goes flying off because of physics or anything so basically it's
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got to be fun when we get there and there's no reason to wait we've got to start putting that stuff together now and a big part of theatres is is it's really you're playing stuff that is already there that was that was the whole mentality of this so yes did we build a new new planet not a brand new planet we put some a new sort of compounds and and setups within a new bit of lore on to basically pre-existing assets right there was a couple new things that we added but you know I'm sure we'll get into the as we go throughout this but not a whole tub not a whole pun this wasn't like making a whole new game this was like taking all the content that we've already got putting it together in a bit of a structured scenario and and getting it fun and that was easily the most
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important part of it was bring something fun to citizen that that shows all our star citizen glory in terms of combat because last thing good to say is that every time I talk about fun it's not that the PU isn't fun it's that it can take a long time and there's no guarantee you could play for two and a half hours and not necessarily fire a shot which is great that's by design in star citizen but there's a whole part of star citizen that it that would make entire games all by itself that needs to be balanced analytically tuned and and played a lot because a warrant appears a war we hope that the deer's world will provide us a a concentrated version of that where we can iterate very quickly where we can get feedback very quickly you know it's not everybody has you know
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an entire day to dedicate to fly purposes universe or even even two hours you know some people only have 15 minutes 20 minutes 30 minutes between dinner and whatever and that's their time to plan and eating and we and we and we still want the feedback from those people yeah so theatres of war is our way to get everybody involved in this process whether you can dedicate 10 hours to us two hours to us or just 30 minutes to us yeah and if you could get that you know basically a 30 30 minute injection of star citizen what does that look like right and and my contention is that it looks like you know it looks like the uterus or it's a combined arms game-mode and I'm not even sure I mentioned that it's a combined arms game-mode we put infantry we put ground vehicles we put chips all together and we figure out their roles like and you know these ships and ground vehicles and
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everything we're designed with certain roles in mind but in a lot of cases like a great example just to go against the sort of where the the PU is that owning a ballista and the PU right now is not that fun there is a instances where it can become very useful but theaters it's a powerhouse it's incredibly important so the ballista for those that don't know is an anti-air vehicle but it is a ground vehicle and it's got to be transported around and stuff like this so having having a map basically with multiple phases that span but quite a bit of distance but we're not talking about you know solar system distances we're talking about distances on a planet so the blissed is very powerful there whereas in the PU currently it just doesn't get used that much for currently because again we've got you know about 50 players in that server with these massive massive planets you could sit in
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that ballista all day so that's it's a perfect example of the microcosm that we hope theatres of work gets us while while the PU continues to iterate we can provide scenarios that allow for the testing of our mechanics of our vehicles now yeah and I would also argue that it's a really good way to tell stories from our lore I love the lore of start students there's so much of it so much history that's been written by the by the lore team and its really great to have like a YouTube video where we go over the lore and we talk about a planet or so but it's a wholly different thing to experience something like that as if you were doing a reenactment you know as if you were doing battle reenactments or something like this I think that's a way more compelling way to tell those stories because then when you end up in
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the location the PU you know present-day sort of you're like oh I know the story behind this whole thing right it's a it can sometimes get lost given how many how many videos that we create how many you know we put out we are not a video company we're video game company is we believe in the interactive play experience and if there's a way to tell that story you know interactive play experience that's where we wanted sure sure hey sometimes it feels like but it used to feel like we were video company you've heard my jokes before we used to do more shows than yeah then Jimmy Fallon okay all right so that's all we're gonna talk about citizencon as far as the presentation that's available on youtube if you haven't watched it I highly recommend it it was great it was great it was developed almost entirely like I was so busy during mostess and it
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wasn't something we were talking about I see so I didn't know about it I knew it was a thing that you're working on but most of the stuff I saw for the first time had sitting on so I got to I got the kind of experience at the same way yeah quite honestly and that kind of goes to a little little point that I'm sure the community would get concerned about it's like how much resources really went on this right and it was a bit of a research into and not a not an R&D project necessarily but we we wanted to bring something same found that people could go really really hands-on with that you know again the P who doesn't play super well for like a just a 30 minute kind of trade show ish experience right because it's sure you need to get up you'd go purchase ship you'd get the ship up and then you're already sort of 10 minutes in and it's like okay what do I go do so it gives them it got really really really structured so it kind of the point to that is the reason you know you hadn't
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heard too much about it or or we hadn't really spread it around the company was that a lot of people wanting you know a lot of people working on it and we wanted to keep it small and you know relatively quiet to a degree just because we didn't want to distract from P you work 142 work but we wanted to benefit it somehow and and that's exactly what we did we'd started working on things that were really important for pu and squadron which which are all around combat just just the responsiveness for example of the combat and started applying them to the PU and s 42 without people really knowing how we were doing that you know again having these these these these large-scale play tests help that's actually my last citizen time related question and then we'll get into the good stuff what did you learn from the citizencon experience did you come with any story oh my goodness um like
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don't just stories but like you know a very real feedback not just to theatres of war or or the you know electronic access and arena commander and star marine but request sort of like from an org standpoint it's like what what did an orderly want to do with this there was other ones like really really good feedback and ideas that we're coming out for things that we could do with in theaters war you know a great and you know I wouldn't say it's obvious necessarily unless you've played some of these other games that were that that definitely inspire that idea is things like a capital ship against capital ship right we've got multiple phases within theaters where you've got phase one and phase two three and we can move all those around the planet you know it doesn't have to be that we start on ground and we go up to space or we could
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start in space go down to the ground this this template of theaters can apply to a lot of stuff whether phase three is a javelin or interest and and the whole maybe the whole mode is all designed about taking over that given a Juris you could do that you could do capital ship against capital ship right where you got phase one is one capital ship phase 3 is another capital ship you can do some fun stuff where you've got to push forward your capital ships and though that's a final objective you might want to take that to the frontline and maybe that's a little bit dangerous so there was a lot of ideas coming out of the community which was super good but the main piece of feedback was focusing on the fun is what everybody wants us to be doing right don't we aroung star citizen is incredibly visual and and the the fidelity of all our assets
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right I use whatever most I got a drink yeah is that are we doing the fidelity immersion drinking game basically the quality of all the assets quality of the visuals is over-the-top right it we spare no expense on that but we've really really have to be focused on the fun and it's hard when you're making it was such a large-scale sort of MMO because by nature we want you know it to be sandbox probably how you want play what you want do what you want but at the same time I think people sometimes need and and definitely if you come from the generation of gaming that I come from it we need a tiny bit of structure we need some progression we need a little bit more immediate sort of engagement in a lot of cases but that's not everybody right a lot of people want
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to go and be immersed in goal play and be be part of that universe but again focusing on the fun became a very very common thread between all my conversations at Cisco so yeah so as usual an SES we take questions from our live viewers you can if you're watching live on Twitch you can submit your question with the word question and capital letter surrounded by brackets and either the twitch chat or up on spectrum which is our bespoke communication platform on Roberts space industries comm we also submit opened a thread earlier this week and took questions from committee members who maybe couldn't be here live they also voted up which questions they wanted to see answered most and overwhelming leave the number one question and it actually combined it the number one the number seven the number 14 they were all pretty
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much the same thing Lag and hit registration issues people right now people can tank a whole magazine and star marina well theatres are worst suffer from the same lag enos and other glitches such as grenades that seem to float and land at your feet as your character chucks it away or severe desync that star Marine does this person doesn't see a point in introducing a new game mode to test combat if the up one we have now can't handle combat to begin with so and I sort of talked a tiny bit about this during the the presentation and to answer the question directly yes theaters would totally suffer from this just the same way that the PU suffers from it the same way that squadron suffers from it the same way that arena commander suffers from the same way this time rating suffers from it and to go to that point is just first before I actually go into you know what
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we've done about it is that this isn't like a special code base or anything right we're not we're not separate from the game we are the point a hundred percent right we won't we don't just develop this separately we are we are intrinsically linked to the pu squadron 42 and any other game mode within here so the nice part about that is then when we go to prioritize one of these things like hit registration or more more aptly basically just a lag between the responsiveness of a shot and then somebody dying is gonna affect everything so the nice thing about working on something like theatres is that that becomes front and center very very quickly and I would argue that in the pu it's not it's not immediately obvious sometimes yes once you get into those combat scenarios you absolutely
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feel that but just to go to my point about why we need a more analytical sort of environment that happens within the first 10 seconds of play and if that happens in the first 10 seconds of play you're gonna want to do something about it immediately so theaters will also let it with these shortened condensed game experiences it lets us recreate that experience over and over yes let's just reiterate them reproduce them is where the word I was looking for its which is the best way to track down the source of any bug of any performance issues absolutely reproduction reproduction over and over do you find the cause so again within a PU those things exist but they have they happened a bit more spread out sure so does the condenser you like it's as big of a problem we condense it it becomes a major problem we can better find the source of those things yep and are more likely to be able to and then we know if we've made a
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difference that's the other thing right um and again like sure in the PU you go get a couple QA guys together you know for QA guys together against four other QA guys and they'll meet on damar and they'll they'll have a little combat or whatnot but again it's it's the least analytical way you could kind of do this we got to be a little more scientific about this especially when you're talking about network latency and you can't just do it with a I mean either um so you know a lot of people go well just jump on a planet spawn 60 yeah and start shooting them and you'll see how unresponsive that is it's not immediately obvious when you do it that way what you really need is a full server of players and using all our assets because again the way the grenades work are a little bit different than the way of rifle works it a little bit different than the way a ship works are a little bit different the way the ground being builds work so having said all of that um we actually made some
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significant improvements oh and as I do I like to take people through the history of the problem and up into the up into the actual effects so about the 2.0 timeframe we had upwards of a 500 millisecond delay and this was injected into the system there was there were some reasons for this and and it could be argued whether those were great reasons or not great reasons but it was really about smoothing out actor movement as well as prediction for the AI ships in the verse so people that were playing in the 2.0 sort of branch let's say will remember times when heck we even how did in 3.0 one time where the AI ships were jittering a lot so again they would sort of be along a path and it sort of looked like the rubber
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banding right like they would go forward back and the forwarded back and sort of jitter through excuse me that injection of that 500 millisecond delay was what was meant to actually smooth that out but it was never meant to be a permanent sort of fix it was kind of a temporary thing but like like every bad hack it becomes permanent right when you do a quick hack you'll fix the problem and then you'll forget about the problem and you move on to something else so we had this 500 millisecond delay about the 2.0 timeframe then in 3.0 one of our gameplay programmers coupled with one of our network engineers this is Gordon and yen's reduce this down to 250 milliseconds so now we're getting a little bit better but 250 milliseconds comparatively to other games just give you an example like popular EA game battlefield
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they're usually running at 100 milliseconds so and this isn't necessarily like when you look at your ping this isn't what we're talking about so much this is your latency between you server client and then back right so there's sort of this thing called rewind time though he's kind of worked on but the first thing we did though after it because 250 milliseconds what everybody's been playing for the last little while and that just that amount of time is a lot and it's when you're talking about again the immediate sort of feedback of a shot or throwing your grenade or something like this so we were sitting at the 250 millisecond delay in at citizencon right and people did experience that but because we were a little bit anyways you know keeping it to 40 players and not a whole time chips it wasn't SuperDuper obvious but I think that it was definitely felt so
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having said that the first thing we did when we got back is that one of the the same network engineer actually went to go look at the upstream of refactor and this is actually on the roadmap and we've been working on this for a little while so what it does do is that it massively benefits a server that is running at a high frame rate now so what we've done is that he's reworked the way the upstream stuff works so that's when you're sending up to the server and when the server is running at a decent framerate thirty-plus anyways that latency is gonna be much much less so you're gonna feel really good responsiveness there however it won't really help the pu massively yet just because the server frame rates need to go higher right and as server OCS is rolling out that should be helping that the next level of this was a huge win and this is the one that we're really now playing with internally and this is what's going to make the biggest
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difference because now we've reworked that are what we call it rewind time basically so there's prediction kind of stuff and we've got it down to that hundred milliseconds but it's not just one hundred million and when we try to keep it there it's actually dynamic now so what we've done is we've exposed it so that it can actually change so we can go you know plus 120 or we could get as long as 50 in some cases depending on your connection to the server and then further to that we can actually tune it now in real time so as we're playing within the server's we can actually change this rewind time so that's what myself and rich Tyra and yen's and Gordon and everybody are actually looking at pretty much weekly right now is what's our values looking like what's you know what's the range of this where should this be but it's to get it down to you know sort of the field that everybody's used to from other games
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anyways which is generally around that you know 50 to 100 milliseconds end and that's where we're getting it to so basically when they get it when they get hands-on on this and when it rolls out all together arena commander is going to feel better star Marine is gonna feel better PU is gonna feel better everything is is going to be much more responsive and we've already got that work mmm not completely done it's not super tuned but we've already put all this stuff in so the next law the next release to actually have a bunch of this in it so when you say the next release you $3.99 yeah I want to be sure about that yeah I'm gonna say three nine but it's also sitting in a branch right now so it's not yet in the main branch when theaters goes into their hands they're gonna have it thank you it's not it's
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not saying three nine next question does it fit within the scope of theatres of war to test FPS AI in complex scenarios by creating a bot mode for players to fight against this person is drying the backdoor agent they want a bot mode yes it would make lots of sense we've already got one right in terms of the ships so we've got two technically we got pirate swarm and we've got vanduul swarm for the ship so it would stand to reason that we would get an FPS one would have benefit theaters yes but indirectly um because yes we could help on weapon balance and things but PvP is a little bit different than PV I wouldn't want to make any hard decisions based on PvE and it's set up certain vironment the PvE setup is much much more for the players now well just speaking only for myself hmm I stopped
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with PvP at battlefield 1942 and my and and that was the last time I was good yeah quake 3 in the battlefield 1942 that was last I was good I am NOT good now I generally prefer to play with friends against bots sure so just just from a enjoyment and a gameplay experience I much prefer against playing as people sure who can't you can't really kill me no I think I think I might have mentioned this anyways and we rolled out a new star marine map called the good doctor and this was the same team actually that was working on theatres war and we wanted to do exactly a PvE survival FPS on the good doctor now rai not quite where we wanted it to be yet but we already had that all the content and everything done for the good doctor so we're like okay cool we'll put it into summary let people play it you know we can get all our sort of environmental
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physics and and bugs worked out and then once we're ready for the AI spawners to go in there we'll put them in and call it a day so yeah we're not far from that at all but we're really really focusing on theaters right now and shortly thereafter it shouldn't be too far yeah next question it's the obvious one we knew it was coming where are we in development now the mode was playable at citizencon but we don't have any clear information on a specific release not three nine is what we're talking it's and it's not currently on the roadmap yeah what can you tell us so and what I said it says con it still stands true right I wanted to get it in the first half of this year I want to get in the hands of the backers for testing that's the whole thing and we're very much on track for this we're not
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behind it all because again this isn't we're not coming up with a whole ton of new stuff we're putting a lot of structure around it there's a couple of features here and there like things that are really specific to the to the game mode like again mobile spawn points and unlockable spawns and objective and destroy spawns and these things but they're two relatively isolated there aren't huge system things they're very very much game mode things so I want to get it into the backers hands and in the first half of this year because again we want the feedback because what we're doing right now is we're we're we're working off of all the feedback from citizencon already for those that don't know we actually had a whole survey that the guys did so and the response was incredible I mean like actual you know people did the survey which was great
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because we had something like I might get the number wrong but 280 some odd people play through and out of the 280 we had 220 server responses so it's like it's a pretty good response rate and you know the questions on there were all related to hey and actually my favorite response was was the game of fun it's such a simple question but you know the the vast majority and the highest percentage of responses was was was a five for fun and it was like one was no no fun and five was you know super fun and that was the highest response and that was our that was our goal so being able to just see that none was massive amount of validation I was quite happy to see that but there was like it got very granular that survey so it was like you know out of the ground vehicles that
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were on the map which one did you use the most what did you like the most which one did you hate the most you know these kind of things so there was tons of feedback that we already gotten and then on top of that just again there's great feedback on spectrum on Reddit and that comes from whether they were too hands-on with it or not and some people just had some pretty solid ideas or or bring up problems that we might not have considered so that's all the stuff that we're operating on right now and I did talk in the presentation about some of the future things that we wanted to do which includes you know friends and included as some sort of cinematics and briefing things it included is a big big chunk of work which is not you know the most exciting but it was consuming some integrations from main branch which were huge so yeah that's the stuff that we've been doing but basically we're still on
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track you know we're not behind by any stretch of the imagination but I want to get testing and I want to get some testing from the backers in the first half of this year a couple times we're going to pause real quick a JJ can they have my camera please hi everybody I have a message directly from director of community Tyler wicked oh we see your continuous comments about a favorite ship of mine in the twitch chat what do you want you to know that yes it is still on track for February the release in February which is approximately a twenty nine day period immediately following January so all right is that what you wanted Tyler you didn't
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you to message me I've not yet that's what he wanted next question let's go from the chat here destructible environments hmm that's really all it says it says a destructible environment question mark yes so first step of that is going in good doctor actually it's a perfect setup for it because most of its class so we're bringing back on our 2d destructibility so as I do I would give you the full history of what destructible is really mean for the engine and for technology anyways so yes we want our environments to be you know interactive right not just destructible but you want to be able to pick up stuff and and you know interact with the environment basically so we've got three different time type types of destructible --zz that we work with and as we get our performance really in line that's when we'll start
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dropping out all those things in because basically as we just talked about we were talking about network delays and server performance and things like this and when you're in that state you don't want to be dropping a bunch more of a destructible that need to be synchronized and pieces of it and everything so it's a couple different types that we have and already work within within the game anyways we have I call the 2d destruction basically so it's like if you have a piece of wood you have glass you have something like this that is you know Pierce a bowl and needs to leave holes and then after you've left a couple holes eventually it breaks off right so this is one of our 2d Instructables so that that's in place in a lot of a lot of spots around the verse anyways but you'll see it really really obviously within the star Marine maps like echo 11 I think definitely has one and then on top of that good doctor
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is almost entirely glass so you'll see a lot of 2d destructible with that now 2d destructible is nice because it's not like a massive network synchronization problem we don't actually synchronize every single little piece of the glass instead what we do is a sort of state driven thing where it's like once that glass is destroyed we know it's gone play that play the particle effect but it's not important that this piece and this piece is perfectly synchronized across cards the next one we have is sort of a we call it pre broken basically destructible and and what it is it's like if you had a building that it was actually sectioned off so that we know exactly how it's gonna fall apart and we've already pre authored all the pieces of it and we've just have some constraints that actually keep them together so that's another destructable that we have and then further destructible is like a little more complex of one and we'll we call it like a bully indestructible this is like
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a you would have a cutter object that can actually cut either a 3d shape or a 2d shape it's kind of combining the two where it's like the 2d destructible and the pre-broken one but you create the pre-broken pieces at Ryan or so but that one's real expensive so that one we want to avoid over the network or anything like that but you definitely see something like that in squadron though so short answer yeah we want to put destructible say okay we just talked a little bit about the feedback and stuff that you got after citizen comes the next question specifically about what changes you've made to theatres of war since a lot so again I sort of walked through that on the presentation like what we were about to do but I can tell you already can we are and have done will
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eventually have a segment on ISE that covers stuff like that so just sweet you don't want it no no she's from another one off I mean so we changed planet so the planet that we had was a v3 planet and I talked about it and it sounds like it sounds fine that would change the planet planet whatever may be a big thing to you but not that no it was really important so because V for planets came up right at the time that we were launching this but we needed to be sure that we could bring a stable build to sit on another the same V for necessary destabilized it but we knew that it was going to come about a month before we were gonna go to sit Khan so we actually locked ourselves off in a branch for about two months so that we weren't taking the main branch updates but what happened during that time were three major systems that went in and we had to consume those into the branch one
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of the major systems was planet before as I mentioned so now that we've come back into main branch anyways we put a new planet in place and it looks a lot different now to visually it's much better I'm so much happier with it in terms of the artistic look the artistic art but the actual visuals of it look better I'm very happy with that but again the mentality was make it fun and then we make it pretty later right the other woman sorry I guess physics the vid was Rebecca right yep I just want to see about how I was paying attention good yeah and I I don't know how much the community necessarily knows about I know we've we've mentioned it oh I'm not gonna go too in depth on that one um but Chris had done some work on a physical proxy refactor which was fantastic but it was a big we got to consume that too so we consumed that and
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then on top of it we also took server OCS which you know not directly I think it's a question later on it doesn't directly affect us in theatres but we had to consume that code base anyways so so those three things have already happened we're done so that's good the other thing that we did was kind of interesting it was it was a bit of feedback that we got at the same time as something that we just realized as we were doing it so when we were doing these sessions at the at citizencon of the theaters place - we had the 20 on 20 in a room and myself and rich Tyra and JJ and a couple other guys were basically lead from our QA department we're walking around the room as people were playing but what we found we started doing was like drill sergeants or something we would call out encouragement or or you know that you
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know I would I'd like to set up like a little bit of rivalry for guys but no we were calling out you know hey make sure you go unlock that spawn point make sure that's your main focus go to that location hey don't run here run here and what we sort of talks about afterwards where you know that they're not going to ship a Shawn Tracy or a rich Tyra with theatres of war so we better be sure that all these sort of call-outs are triggered into in in the map so again it's like little reminders from your commander of what you should be doing or what you shouldn't be doing or a Rhian courage meant of a thing or or trying to stop you from doing a certain thing it's really important actually and we found that once we were doing that in these theaters Maps it played a lot better especially for the first you know when you're doing your first round of it
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you're kind of still figuring out how this whole mode itself works and what you're meant to do so that was a big part of it so we've actually captured all those vo lines now and we're basically implementing them all and it's a little bit it's not difficult but it's it's time-consuming because we have to set up events for all of them it's like okay when do we actually trigger that and and how do we know that the guys running the wrong way you know and things like this so that'll be an important bit of it you're going the wrong way oh yeah that's actually a good example it's like feedback for the out of bounds you know we had a little bit of stuff that would come up on the screen but it wasn't super obvious like you had an idea you were going out of bounds but you didn't know how long you had you know there was nobody really telling you how to get back or that it was really important that you get back yeah so
00:34:37
that's an important component of it the other thing we did was completely rework the spawn screen so you were also in the same state as sort of dependent on this building blocks technology this UI system and as it was coming online it's only got so many features you know every time so we had to lock off a little bit early and it only had so many of the features that we needed for the spawn screen which is you know really really central to the mode this is giving you a top-down representation of the map where everybody is whereas the mobile spawns where's my spawn points where as an unlockable spawn where's the enemies right now you know it's a really important screen basically and it's your landing page so we've completely reworked that and it looks great so that's done - what else will be done I got a big big list anyways Oh
00:35:26
transitions between phases so this was again about player feedback one of the bits of feedback was that it wasn't immediately apparent especially in the first time you were playing that sometimes the transition between like oh well for phase 1 and phase 2 on the on the old map it was like two and a half three kilometers and a lot of times people would finish phase one they got it all captured everything's ready to go they would just beeline it they were just are walking right now okay yes the objective thing says you know this is really far away but it wasn't immediately obvious and you know as we were walking around said it's gone we could see people that were just running out of the woods type thing there was there was somebody who tried to run the damar this weekend like on foot yeah that go you know was he done yet no you know what's made it then he was uh he was
00:36:15
taken out before the finish line but he put in a good effort taken out in what way server crash or taken out taken out by the by the other people you never know awesome I won't call it names but he knows who he is good gin Holmes that sucks I'll that'd be awful like near the end I think I think he got three-quarters of the way I was only able to check in throughout the coat throughout the week throughout that doing that what Appalachian Trail he went he went for it he went he went a distance okay he went a while one sex like I wouldn't be surprised if he had something like wedged into his keyboard because he was just to keep going forward because it was a long way yeah and he probably didn't know anyways transition between phases we don't want everybody to running the day morality we don't want them running the day Marvin
00:37:01
but doing phase is there anything like this so what do we do about it um and I don't want to we did about it because it's really cool and I do want as soon as you guys get a hands on you'll see you'll see it and you'll know exactly what it is yeah how much really okay so first of all we put a couple vehicles right outside the front and these are you know they're not neurons barnable ones they're just ones again they're just buggies and things like that that are sitting right outside the phases now so you basically as you're walking you're gonna realize very quickly that you've got a long way to walk and rather than turn around going back you'll have a vehicle to sort of bring in front of you there's some real creative ones in terms of grouping up the team together to make that transition of phases and this is something that I've really always wanted I've always you know imagined that that the experience of you
00:37:50
know sort of the battle for Hoth where the defenders are really waiting right yeah and there's that moment where you know all of a sudden you see them coming over the thing and it's the whole team or even better when it you know everybody's sitting and all of a sudden a whole fleet jumps out of hyperspace together you know it's those moments that are was really going for so we put some transitional tools within that and again I just don't wanna say exactly what that one is but as soon as uh as soon as the game modes there oh sorry as soon as the community gets answer they'll they'll see exactly where it is but we make that transition much easier so again you're not gonna get stucked running there on foot and again whether that's AI helping you out whether that's you know you do something with death cams yep we did that uh well and what
00:38:40
was interesting about that was that we already had death cams we had them a long long time ago within star marina and they got disabled and there was a there was a whole reason around it there was a technical reason but again it was one of these yeah we fixed it by removing it and then kinda never went back to it but because that became a focus now hey again a death you know PvP sort of death in the PU is not it's not as obvious and not as constant as it is with in theaters war we brought back the death camps so that's already working within there yeah like I said I'm not very good so I spend a lot of time watching death cams when I play PvP game so oh yeah yeah I think it's important it's really important in theaters because again if a sniper got you from across the map or someone any person from who knows we're just not good anymore I'm only halfway
00:39:33
I'm only halfway through the list isn't this door I do want you to know that we are two-thirds of the way to the show answer five questions oh yeah so they're good answers they're good answers alright fine okay are you going on the next question do you want to going on the next question you're in charge here but I just work we're gonna do another segment we're gonna do a more in-depth segment on there's a war for ISE soon okay so what covers this that's up there question of the chat says I believe the at Susan GaN it was 20 verse 20 versus 20 when games start will they start with a full twenty verses 20 and no so and this is one that we're doing a bit of
00:40:21
feedback and this is why have to get the community hands on with this we need to get the metrics from it we need to get some telemetry to know basically how long people are working right now it's set up minimum of 8 and I'll beat the we played a lot when we're doing play tests you know with it with a four-on-four thing it's not super it's not as hectic definitely as as the 2120 and we get a little less combat going on but yeah it can play just fine at 8 players so we do a minimum right now of 8 and then as soon as it you know as soon as the 8 one joins actually the round starts the other thing and we made massive change into this and it and that's definitely coming in 3.9 which was the joint in progress stuff so this was again another sort of fix that that
00:41:10
went in to fix the problem that's no longer a problem and then it just stayed there which was this joint in progress so in the end back in the days of just our Marine we had very time dependent rounds it was whether you know was like a 15 minute round or 20 minute round or something and the issue is that when you play through star marine it actually punts you back out to the front end when you're done and and one of the issues with that is that it takes that a new load and we didn't want people joining with only like two or three minutes left in the round and what ended up happening was the logic got a little broken over time because the way that we actually tracked the amount of time and around changed so we had a bug basically that once the round had started and I think it was like only a minute or two in nobody would be able to join anymore so what that would that would that what that created was sort of this perception
00:41:58
that nobody was playing you would get you would get into a server with maybe two or three people that joined in the same let's say five minutes or something but anybody that went to go join after was actually spinning up a new server which not only is a little bit expensive in our part is pretty bad in terms of you know where the players are because we're not putting the players together they keep starting new servers so again in working on theaters this was this became so obvious right away and and because it's so important that we have as many players as possible within those rounds we had to fix this so now you can join in progress now you still don't and I think we left it so that the last there two or three minutes you can't join and this is just to avoid the fact that you've joined you've just loaded and the round ends and that's though and it just for clarity simply you say that that that features in 390
00:42:47
mean that's applying to star marine and 3 9 yeah correct sorry the joining progress stuff is all again across star marine and then when this game will comes out it'll it'll use that too so another another example of benefits from the work being on this being applied to other game modes yep okay with certain gameplay loops like medical or first responder engineering and electronic warfare it'd be first introduced to three years of war making them making iterating on them easier well they won't be first introduced to theatres war because it's not really meant you know so it's a driver for the combat but it's not a driver for new systems or features necessarily so basically as it comes on for the P you will be able to then use it because
00:43:34
again we use the exact same stuff so if it if it applies to theatres and of course medal game gameplay is but we of course want to have revives we of course want to have a well and I hope anyway some sort of body dragging or some sort of mechanic to get your your buddy out of the way of fire before you revive them and things like this but it won't first go into theaters and then later into the PU it really if anything is the other way around it'll first go into the PU and then if it makes sense for the theaters scenario or if that if that core gameplay has to has to be tuned you know it'll get tuned with theatres in mind yeah and I think that's indicative of something that can't be said enough theaters award development does not take it away from the whole the P you know yes all the same systems being developed the P you are still being developed they're still
00:44:21
being driven by the PU yes it is that the theatres of war is a additional testing method it's a it's a petri dish I think that was I think that was the disease before it's a microcosm of this thing so it doesn't start it starts here with the big thing yes like it should that's our priority and this is this ancillary thing effing we do to make the bigger just gives a good focus on just the combat and and and again the interchange of that vehicle to ground vehicle to infantry and how they all interact with each other in it in an aggressive fashion right this next question deals with physical eyes damage which we talked about for some time now with that coming in at some later date does that effectively nullify data collected now prior to its implementation not at all because the balance for the ships is still not going to be so dissimilar when physically
00:45:08
based damage comes online they'll just be more within the role that they're meant to be will it affect theaters too degree yeah but will it massively change the balance we don't want it to the gameplay though might shift because again physically based damage is not meant to be it is sort of the Optima it's not the opposite but it's different than what we have right now because it's just a big health pool on a ship right each component has a certain amount of health or whatnot so instead it's gonna be you know it's all it's all basically you're not shooting a ship until it explodes basically you're gonna be shooting a ship until it's disabled in some way and whether it explodes will be a systemic part of that right if you've damaged you know the power plant and the power plant goes critical and then the ship explodes
00:45:55
great but physically these damages are meant to or physical damage rather is meant to give a range of you know ways to disable the ship I guess rather than just blowing it up if that makes any sense and it's more like what it would be like in reality I suppose you know you're sure if you fire a you know a couple missiles that a jet it will explode but may be exposed to the wind may be explodes on the back and it's all gonna it's gonna go different rather than just the thing being vaporized within a second and then you know that's job done it's gonna it's gonna go very differently in that sense but the the I don't want to say the meta but the the main balance for that given ship should not change dramatically that's all Joe wants to know and he plans to test 100
00:46:44
plus players I can we can there's no there don't direct plans for it right now because as as we're as we're seeing if we could have a hundred players in the server we'd be doing that on the PU right now now what's your oh yes and we hope that it that all is sort of opens up will be happily testing something like this but even to test a hundred players in the server imagine we've got to get a hundred people in here ready to play so once we get it working it's not get it working once it's running really well with forty with ships with ground vehicles with everybody then yeah of course we didn't increase this well that you're saying can yeah well we're gonna and and that's the thing we're gonna have to test it we just have to test it we have to play with it and this given map and scenario
00:47:33
probably doesn't lend itself to to that many people because again the difference we find from you know doing just a four on four or five on five versus a twenty on 20 I could only imagine what a 50 on 50 looks like right now so do we want to get to those numbers if it makes sense for the game mode absolutely but yeah I want to have a different scenario something a little wider it give us give it a little bit more room but not a backdoor confirmation of any battle royal mode or anything no actually at first we called this not bought over al when we didn't have the theaters a war name yeah we literally call it not I said I just this not Battle Royale do you plan to add capital class engagements in theater who are we talking about that earlier yeah I pretty mentioned that before I'd love to do sometimes we gotta wrap up this scenario and once we wrap up this scenario but just because of all do you
00:48:22
know I don't want to say insane ideas the good ideas that come from the humidity come from other devs that's a fun one so a lot of it I've been getting messages from guys that I tend not to talk to you too much you know just with ideas which is cool and then the second half of that is of course we have to be finished with our capital class ships that would be a good idea to before we put capital ships in yeah what was the internal logic behind developing this mode as opposed to just doing data collection in the PU we covered that equation yeah we covered that a bit more I shoulda cross that off well it's just again and to reiterate right it's a it's a much more analytical you know quote-unquote scientific kind of environment that we can test the stuff in it's also there's no barrier to entry in terms of testing right you boot up the mode you get 20 people or 40 people
00:49:13
in and you're going there's there's I mean it's like two clicks and and you're playing again to do this in the PU yes we can pull analytics from all the stuff going I know we do it's just it's really hard to establish whether or not a change you've made or anything is actually making a significant difference without the focus of a given thing right anyway yes but been part of our you vacati test flight knows you know when they get in there they're often directed to test specific things for an extended period of time sure this is just another tool in that it lets us it lets us focus on combat without having to direct everybody and to do it yeah and as you mentioned the petri dish it's exactly like arena commander was before 2.0 launched or
00:50:04
before the PU was there we were testing all the ships in a very very focused method same thing with star marine and this is just the the you know I want to say obvious but the obvious evolution of those two coming together another question from the chat will work on years of war prioritize certain vehicles like the Nova tank yes it'll help push the prioritization that's the nice thing so like again it's sort of like I talked about with the ballistic really hard to keep that prioritized when again doesn't have a really obvious role within the PU not not really but in theaters it's super important and all of a sudden the Nova tank would be the exact same thing it allows us to push priorities AJ prioritization for vehicles that have
00:50:53
rules that make sense for that given game mode so yeah it helps us push that definitely I almost called the Nova Tom you should thank you I was like we're gonna we're gonna do something with that there's a great detail Austin yeah there's a great decal I saw on a tank one time that said I could have been lots of buckets is there any breach gameplay in theories of war planned like using hacking oxygen Lance or explosives what's an oxygen Lance it'd be like a cutter I guess it'd be like the multi-tool cutting but yes if the scenario makes sense for it again if there is a moment where breaching a ship makes a lot of sense within the scenario if that's part of the story that we're telling yeah absolutely but again it's got a it's gotta appear in the PU first we've got we have to rely
00:51:41
on on you know the big feature teams that are working around the PU to get their features online and if it so makes sense that we could have a very very focused moment of that happening it'll become you know really essential to the testing and stuff for that so if we've got a mode with it we've got the PU actually doing it then sure we could do that is there plans for that right this second absolutely not no I want to get this an area done that we're doing move on to another scenario but really make sure that it's fun this is number one and and there's a lot of stuff that goes into that it's not just is it fun because it goes pew pew bang yeah cool but but does it feel good right the fun comes as part of that right if it feels crappy it's it you can have the the most fun game in the world but again if it's laggy
00:52:28
if the responsiveness is bad or whatever it ruins it it just ruins that entire experience so I want to make sure that that's all worked out first and then we can do some of the cooler stuff we talked about how there's warm I prioritize some ships being worked on will you update the vehicles and theories of war as more vehicles come online just in general yeah it and they're always I think I mentioned this in the presentation we tried a lot of different ones you know it's so we'll continue to do that as as different loadouts for different ships make sense as different balance has been done with certain ships they might make more sense as the scenario changes so for example I I spoke about it I believe during that during the presentation as well but we had to remove a Valkyrie Valkyrie is
00:53:17
like purpose-built for this mode it's just real unfortunate that in terms of performance of an asset or something it is it is astronomically heavy in terms of the art the draw calls on it the poly count on it and we really didn't have time to fix that up so we're like okay you know we can we can remove that but what do we replace it with and we've said okay well we still need to dropship so let's get the hoplite in there so we put the hot plate in instead which was a little bit better performance and I think at this point we've gotten some of that Valkyrie work done which is good yeah but I'd love to bring that back you know so again this is this is the kind of stuff that we're doing with the vehicles and you know the eventualities I'd love to get sort of class-based bonds and things like this which would be really nice you just you just brought something up that I didn't quite realize another benefit of theatres of words that we were able to
00:54:06
recognize the performance hit mm-hmm in the Valkyrie and now that's gone back as you said that's being worked on right now so it's being optimized yeah so so again this is it got its performance in the PU because obvious right and again one Valkyrie in the PU not a big deal and it won't it won't it won't hit any alarm bells by any stretch but as soon as you put again forty people in a whole bunch of ground vehicles a whole bunch of other things you can see the outliers I mean you know we have we have telomere genetics you know coming out our eyeballs and and and it stands out and you know okay we got to do something about that right away and you know people will ask the obvious question why don't you just drop a whole bunch of ships in the pew and then compare them what we do but again we've got to put our priority we've got to put our focus on the ones that are being used on this
00:54:54
in areas that are actually happening and not just theoretically changing a thing for the sake of performance so other Valkyrie may not be in the first iteration there's a worse time is something we want it's specifically Valkyrie yeah oh man when we came up with the mode in the first place that was pretty much the first ship I said I wanted because again I mean what's the whole purpose of it the it's like a drop ship you've got a bunch of infantry you've got a bunch of turrets on the side I wanted to improve a being able to fire guns out the side of it I want those turrets to be able to zoom you know again it's kind of the you know it's the Black Hawk of star citizen if you want to if you want to loot it to something from present-day no it's got two turrets out suicide got a bunch of turrets on it fun Joe wants to know I through
00:55:44
you're having like sent through your feedback from citizencon what were the most popular ships or vehicles well I mean there was really only a subset of what eight so but they the best vehicles in them was the Buccaneer by far and a lot of that came down to these scatter guns that it has on it so because we put it with a loadout with scatter weapons makes it a lot easier to hit something and you do a ton of damage under the shields and right now you get a lot of points for that so as you were doing damage to those shields you were getting a lot of points so the Buccaneers kind of beat out the Hornets a little bit but I think that has to do and again this is going into the focus kind of thing we had the Super Hornets in there and Super Hornet is an awesome ship is actually my favorite well it was my secretary Buchanan's the constellation supporter but it's a it's
00:56:33
a two-man ship that's when it's the most powerful it is when there's two people in it but right now sitting in the gunner you can't be as powerful as you should be right there's some frustrations to do with the turret there's some frustrations to do with missile lock on it you know that ship should be a lot more powerful when there's two people in it and that's the stuff that we're finding out right away again a super owner with two people probably needs to win it gets a Buccaneer with one dude I'm gonna say a constellation with three people yeah well and again think about what the what the role of that consolation is in you know and I want to try to get that the actual name right but consolation can really a missile boat right I mean it's got a lot of missiles that's kind of the thing and it's long range so yeah you know does that make sense in that scenario
00:57:21
it may mean that's near exactly I I was I was trying to prompt you to talk about the Ursa from from from my anecdotal I was gonna go to the ground vehicles that were yeah yeah from anecdote I kept the IRS's seemed to it was just everywhere yeah it was the biggest surprise to me but again this is one of these things that only comes up when you're playing it and again how many IRS's did you see in the verse like you probably see a bunch you know sort of driving around Levski or or or being transported and everybody's trying to fit them into it you know caterpillars and stuff like this which is super cool but what does it tell you about the gameplay of a orsa and you can look at the numbers you can go okay well really it's only got this one super small turret on it doesn't seem that powerful but in theaters the first thing we did was make them spawn Obol so they're a mobile spawn point which is awesome makes them super powerful already just because they can
00:58:09
be a like a central point for all the infantry to come from so if you park in or sat in the right place right you can get a bunch of people's bunny in there and coming out but even though the turret isn't that powerful because the Ursa is in it practically such a stable firing platform it was shredding infantry it was super shredding infantry because not only can the driver go remote but the secondary passenger can also go into the remote turret so it's one thing to be the driver and have struts in front of you and stuff like this while you're a year are you looking around at people you can't really see behind you but being able to go into the remote area to have the view actually from the turret they're super stable if you ain't driving around too much anyways and all of a sudden you are an infantry shredder
00:58:56
so again this isn't super obvious when you if you were to play it in the BU but again in theaters it becomes very important so and these are scenarios that we fully expect are gonna happen in the view and again it's got to be fun when we get there well we are actually I'm gonna do one more question for ya we barely just started we need like some Joe Rogan level you want to go back to you that's three our change podcasting what's that you want to go back to your list of things that have changed we should actually because there's a couple other ones you know what I'm gonna gonna talk about the thing I wasn't going to talk about it a little bit so we weaponized this is super cool this was rich Tyra's idea and I'll give you a tiny bit of it anyways so we talked about phase transitions so they obvious things that we use in the in the landing zones is transit right so we thought why not Mad Max and weaponize the transit so
00:59:48
it's pretty cool we're still trying it it's you're staring like I'm like revealing like the price of the next no I don't know anything I'm just teasing but yeah so rich IRA had this great idea because we did have this tram line in there but to make it usable get some weapons on it put some my infantry in it see what happens out the side of that why not why not I tell you my earliest dreams of star citizen no no no we're sitting in a caterpillar the caterpillar opening up the side - holy you know you know and having missile platforms and the side doors whether that's guys with rail guns yeah whether that's a parts cyclone with missiles and just broadsiding the hell out of something sure then rotating and
01:00:37
do it again and then broadsiding again while the other side reloads yeah sure it's so it could be very powerful um I had thought about that when we started talking about the Nova tank I'm like oh that can fit in the car that can fit in the caterpillar and like how's that gonna go when we've got like 16 Nova tanks no protection I think so just based on the based on the yeah you know whatever the the metrics that they were reading like backed in out the door and shoot out the side if the ballistic and said can the belissa fit I never tried but basically you can do these you can do the exact same thing with a whole bunch of Nova tags and that would be before we say the Nova tank will fit some of the other stuff that we change rail gun the rail gun was really bugging or can I keep going or we have time we're going I mean JJ wants to at lunch but this group doesn't actually see me
01:01:25
do you know cause he's like he's like he's JJ did me a huge turd a night on Big Town and I'm just I'm just gonna push my way I'm season so we did some changes the railgun as well those I don't believe they'll see yet until they get hands-on with the mode which again is in the first half of this year as I said doing that change the railgun because I was super it's super disappointing to shoot I had yeah the only thing I don't like about it is the impacts are not obvious it doesn't really have a trail and I'd like to have that trail sort of this like a Gauss Rifle or or or maglev rifle or something like that that would have some sort of trail of you know you know air movement honestly struggle it's a quake railgun
01:02:15
right I want to be able to see I want to be able to see where I shot in Wyatt hit where it hit and right now the Braille contest already tell you that and the other thing that we ran into and again this is like having the focus of theaters is so awesome because we we get this stuff right into our faces immediately and we fix it so the railgun becomes very powerful very very noobtube for infantry so you could run around with a charge and it was a one shot er to infantry easily right so kind of became like the is a new tube of infantry combat you would go anti vehicle and even though the anti-vehicle guys move around a little bit slower they're a little bit heavier you know did the two guys JJ and Tom Johnson one of the producers they're like these these these these diapers with a railgun but it was like it was impossible to fight them so we made some slight
01:03:02
changes that makes it a little less easy to one-shot the infantry but it makes it much more powerful against the vehicles and that's what we wanted to do and these are the balance things that we need to do but because the railgun didn't use that much in the pu if you check the telemetry non-it there's only so many scenarios that people even used it so how do we know what it's doing without that and that proper game mode in there so we we made some adjustments there we also massively improved the layouts based on telemetry so one of the things we got our decisions con was that heat maps basically we got some heartbeats the guys we knew exactly where they are where they're stacking up what they're getting stuck so we changed the layout and not massively it's very recognizable but we made some adjustments to that layout game feeder was updated so that's again sort of the as things are happening it's you know Jared killed
01:03:51
Sean all right here we go Sean t-bags Jared you know yeah yeah that kind of stuff so game pea feed his updated I talked about the journey progress death cams mobile spawns are all fixed up so that's really good to the transitions man list goes on so I'll stop there I was so good quake three tribes to right in the battlefield 1942 that was my era hmm then I I lost it power was not within me all along like I lost get good son I'm gonna ask you one more question I'd said it's based on something that you said in your rambling my rambling what do you mean rambling you mentioned people were choosing anti vehicles that
01:04:40
are their classes oh well yes right now there's presets yeah there's pretty song yeah there's pretty sensor we're gonna keep those in there so the presets are gonna be actually I don't want to talk to you in detail but we're with it but there's roles and again that is I wouldn't see it so much as classes as instead of yeah it's a loadout that's all it is right there's no there's no obvious huge difference between how the character works anyways but you'll get you know lighter armor or heavier arm or different weapon loadouts you know if you want to be assault or or if you want to be a foot soldier right you might get a little bit of a long-range weapon versus a shotgun or something like this it just makes it so that certain roles of game played that people enjoy playing whether that's a sniper or an anti-vehicle or something are there and then additionally they fulfill really important sort of
01:05:30
balanced roles within that within the map and I want to add that one of the one of the additional ways that theatres of war is helping development for the PU is work on the upcoming group interface and friends systems yeah and we don't wanna talk about two-inches that because you're gonna hear about that on is see next week so stay tuned you check that out Sean as always thank you so much for taking time out of your day you're welcome come here and do this don't do it in it no I don't do it that much I'm leaving it at that yeah well you well we need my rambling that when I when I come you answer and I appreciate that yeah no no no I I love doing it I I especially like doing the SEO I like doing the question/answer stuff generally hate doing those hour long
01:06:18
presentation so it's like stressful it's supposed to this hour-long presentation well no this is fine because it's much more of a conversation but man doing an hour presentation that's stressful wait so if should end it here but if I drag it out longer JJ has to stay that's John I'm Jared we'll see you next week everybody take care thanks for watching you

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