10 for the Chairman: Episode 55 (2015.03.02)

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of 10 for the chairman. This is where I take 10 questions from our subscribers and answer them to the best of our ability. Our subscribers are the subset of our community that contribute extra money every month to allow us to do enhanced community content. So this the show um that I'm doing where I answer the 10 questions around the verse. um meet the devs, uh sort of some of the inside CIG pieces we do, um and also uh Jumpoint, which is a monthly magazine that has 50 to 70 pages of sort of in-depth behind the scenes, uh material. So, uh, you know, thank you very much to subscribers to allow us to sort of do all the enhanced community content we do because I think that's one

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   of the things that really sets us apart and, uh, your guys contribution pays for the people behind the camera and the people to, uh, you know, write posts and do all that kind of stuff or collate and get together all the images and data which actually takes quite a lot of time to organize and do and extract from the various busy members of the development team. Um, so thank you for enabling that. Um, so just before I start with the 10 questions, uh, I was just, um, signing some more cards for folks, but, uh, we got this in which was really very cool. It's from Sun Systems United Navy. And, uh, they, uh, basically created, uh, look at that. That's awesome. A Systems United Navy consolidated operations codeex, which is like an operations manual for, um, you know, various things inside the world of Star Citizen. Uh, it's beautifully printed. And then it's kind of hard for me to

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   potentially show you guys, but I don't know if you can sort of see from here. Uh probably we'll do like a close insert, but I mean the level of detail that's been put in here, star system maps, looking at the different ships, cutouts, stats, uh it's brilliant. I mean, this is fantastic. In fact, you know, having this inside a game would be amazing or just getting as a book. So, uh it's it's beautiful. So I I am constantly amazed at the uh you know level of enthusiasm, the skill, the talent uh you know how many how much people are sort of really invested themselves in the world we're building together. Um and um yeah I'm you know I'm flabbergasted. I mean, I think, you know, you guys saw last week we had the wonderful world of Star Citizen, which was sort of our new debut uh sort of community focus show looking

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   at stuff that the community's generated and you know, there's some incredible um machima in there where you know, like Fish Feather does some amazing stuff, Years 100 and a bunch of other folks and um you guys, it's it's amazing. It's just so wonderful to see this world and universe sort of take root in everybody's imagination and what everyone can contribute and uh you know on the team side it, you know, completely inspires us as well. So sometimes we see stuff you guys go and go, "Yeah, that would be yeah, we can definitely do that in the game. We can do this." And so anyway, it's it's fun. So you guys are um are doing great stuff. So So anyway, that's uh that's it. So I'm super impressed with that. Awesome work. And let's get to the 10 questions. Um, okay. So, the first question comes from Harper, who asks, "Will player organizations be able to recruit NPCs

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   into their ranks? If not, what other mechanics might be put in place to allow organizations without 24-hour activity to protect organization focused content like capturable space stations and capital ships?" Well, so, okay. So, the the the concept that we're going to have with NPCs is you absolutely can hire NPCs to do jobs for you. So, it's not so much that player organizations will recruit NPCs, but they definitely will have the ability uh to hire NPCs. Um, so the organization could be able to hire NPCs and individual players can hire NPCs to fulfill roles, whether it's, you know, on a spaceship or standing guard, um, you know, over your asteroid base or, um, you know, other kind of, uh, roles. So, there's definitely going to be a fair amount of NPCs. Um, you know, actually I was just looking at the, uh, uh, we were doing some stuff for

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   Squadron 42 and the Idris that you're on. Uh, which, uh, you know, it doesn't really feel even like a frigot anymore. It's massive. Um, but you know, I think we had 71 MPCs in the sort of in what we're calling the interstitial, which is basically when you're aboard the ship running around between um, sort of the combat stuff, there's still loads of stuff to do. would go around talk um you know hang out with people develop relationships and uh I think you know we had 71 um MPCs uh in the ship to sort of fill it out where it sort of felt like yeah that was you know potentially a good crew. My suspicion is um you know we still got some issues on the rendering side but my suspicion is that we will probably always beyond even the um you know player cap which because that goes back and forth over the network and whatever we we're going to

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   be kept uh on that sort of lower then we'll be able to have the total number of sort of um I guess you know people running around in including NPCs and players. So there'll probably always be a balance of NPCs as well as players. And um and you know, so therefore, you know, if you've got a bigger ship, even if you know, you've got eight of your friends and you're all on a uh you know, on the on an Idris, you're probably going to have some MPCs also that you've hired that would be, you know, there as security or running a few of the other roles as well. So anyway, that's a sort of long answer to the organization recruiting MPCs. Um so there we go. Um, okay. Next question comes from uh Sigette or Sijet, I don't know how you would pronounce it, who says, "Will we see Vandal pirate NPCs use different types of loadouts such as stealth, bomber, etc." Um, yes,

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   absolutely. So, um, you know, Vandal pirates, general people have people use different equipment, different loadouts. Um, and, uh, you know, so some people would, you know, have sort of the stealth, the recon set up, some people would, um, you know, have sort of the brawler setup. Um some people would have the sort of nimble and fast um kind of setup. Uh and definitely on vandals, you know, we we've got, you know, light fighters, uh bombers, um you know, sort of the medium fighter, which you've seen, which is a side, but there's a whole selection, not any different than than uh you know, was in Wing Commander with the Karathy. So, uh there'll be plenty of variety and it'll be um it'll be very cool. I mean, I think uh you guys are going to like um Squadron 42 stuff. it that is like its own AAA um uh you know uh massive title. So uh it's

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   it's going to be good and we're ramping up for that um uh this year. So uh uh starting um April we're going to be doing the performance capture um and um before that motion capture and um anyway we're in production on a bunch of stuff and it's looking really cool. Um, all right. Next question comes from uh Kamisar who asks, "Can I fly from a space station in Earth orbit to a space station in lunar orbit without engaging my quantum drive or will traveling between such points require the use of quantum drive?" Uh, that is a good question. Um, so, uh, the way we're setting up the solar systems is that they're all, that's one of the big reasons why we went to large world is that we're all going to be one, um, sort of contiguous or continuous space. So it's not like separate maps for each one of these sort of local areas. They're

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    like a orbit around Earth or orbit around the moon. Um but they will be very far apart from each other because obviously um you know scales are pretty big. And even though we're probably not going to be fully realistic size for a solar system will be some factor of a tenth or 100th or something like that, it'll still be relatively compared to what you're used to in a game massive. Um, so, um, what would probably happen is if you went to fly just at our normal speeds, which aren't particularly fast, um, it would take you like days, uh, to get to another point of interest. Uh, I don't doubt that there will be one or two die hards that will sort of do that, like the one person that was, you know, going across the Minecraft map forever. Um, but generally, you'll you'll want to do quantum drive to get there because, um, you just don't want to take all the

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    all the extra time. Uh but um the system would handle you just flying and keeping on flying and keeping on flying and uh finally getting there because you were actually all on the same uh map. Um and that's why we need the large world. Uh okay. So uh Black Eagle asks, "What happens if my communication systems and engines are blown up, but the attacker decides to just leave me helpless out in space? Will I be doomed for all eternity to wait for another player to come around and rescue me? or will there be a mechanic that makes an NPC visit me after 30 minutes of inact in inactivity? Especially out in the sort of persistent universe, we don't want anyone to just be floating out uh forever, not doing anything stranded. So, I we'll probably put some mechanics in place that um you know, sort of you get auto rescued after a certain period of time. uh we don't have a specific uh timeline for that but

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    that's part of the thought we've had on the design is that yeah obviously if you're I mean because it's not so much even your engines are blown up what if you've ejected and you're floating in space and you know so the kind of idea is there's probably some kind of you know beacon built into your you know flight suit or whatever and you know then there will be people out there that actually like earn money by rescuing people and so you could be a mission for another player to come and rescue or another NPC to come and rescue you um and then you get back into uh back into the game Um, all right. Next question comes from uh Spectronic, which I guess is spelled SP3CT R E Y N C. Uh, the Mustang recently saw performance changes in AC 1.0.2. How are these changes achieved in an engine that physically models ship movement? These changes affect

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    maneuverability across other ships. So, specifically in the Mustang, uh I think if we were uh you know, I'm not um 100% up on exactly what we did on 1.02. I know on uh 1.1 we've been doing a refactor to um a lot of the IFCS and flight um control modeling and some of the background mathematical um uh models we're using in terms of like how we're um uh kind of uh doing our solving uh to have a more predictable uh consistent outcome um to the actual physical ical simulation. So hopefully in 1.1 there should be some more stability on some of the flight

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    issues that you guys have seen recently. That's still a work in progress. So uh touchwood for 1.1 maybe 1.1 afterwards I don't know. Uh but generally before that if we're doing um changes we're mostly doing things like uh adjusting thrust on various thrusters adjusting uh mass and stuff to try and balance it because we don't have any sort of per se you know rule that says okay well this ship rolls at this rate or whatever because everything's physically simulated. So we sort of have to do things like move the position of a thruster around move the thruster mass uh you know change the the actual thrust that it puts out or change the mass of the ship. Uh so those are the things and I know that we've had there's been a couple of Mustang issues that we've noticed like some of the booking although I guess that's appropriate for a Mustang uh to book. Uh but we've been

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    trying to address those and they'll be you'll see more in 1.1 or 1.1.1 depending on whether um it makes it in. But that's something that John Pritchette is working on as well as the ability to toggle ESP on and off and on just like we can toggle comstab um uh G safe off and on. So there you go. Uh, so generally the changes when we do localized stuff for ships don't affect all the ships just because we're changing stats on the ships, but some of the stuff that we're doing now that John's doing will just make the system inherently more stable and predictable. Um, and that will affect all the ships and hopefully the that they should fly a little better and feel a little better and and of course as people add and change things along the way, sometimes the flight stuff gets a little worse and worse because it's all properly physically modeled and we have to go back and rebalance things in terms of like weight distribution and mass and

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    stuff like that. um just like you would in the real world. Uh okay, next question comes from Cal Alosis who asks, "Is there any plan to allow us to replace Squadron 42 missions in our Simp?" Hm. That's a good question. Uh I think uh I think we kind of had the idea that you could replay the missions just like once you played it, you unlocked it and you go back and uh replay the individual missions. Don't know whether it would be from the Sim Pod, but that's a pretty good idea. Um so that's a pretty simple answer for that one. Um, next, uh, question comes from Pregnant Bear who asks, "What kind of handheld weapons do you envision besides guns? Can we expect to see swords and hammers?" Hm, good question. Uh, well, we're definitely going to have uh crossbow cuz um that was uh something we did with the Shroud of the Avatar and

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    we've got a pretty cool crossbow design which I think we've shared with you guys. Uh we are going to have melee. So, um, uh, you know, in the very early stage of the FPS, I think it's just straight up simple random brawling, but the long-term plan for the melee is that you'll have some basic sort of, uh, you know, you know, punch or duck kind of moves, but then you can actually go to different places around the universe and perhaps you can go to, uh, you know, Tavarian dojo and they you can learn some element of a Tavarian martial arts and then you'll have some extra moves to use. And so, you know, you can engage in hand-to-hand combat, and the more moves you use, um, you know, the more options you have against someone, the more defense you have, the less, and if they haven't had the same level of training, they may have less options to block or defend themselves against you. Uh, so it'll be kind of cool like if you, you know, you spend a bit of time, you

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    basically pick up some new combat moves around the around the universe, uh, that will do that. So, we'll definitely be having that sort of on on the kind of melee uh, basis. Uh, I think, you know, we pro we definitely have knives. Um, I don't know so much about sword and hammers. Um, so shortterm probably not. Longer term, yeah, why not? I mean, it's not that different than a knife or um, you know, some of the melee stuff I'm talking about. Um, not sure that we'd, you know, get to the point where you both would have knives and you would or swords and you would fence, but, you know, you know, who knows in the long long long term future. Uh but uh generally I would say it would be sort of kind of the melee stuff you would expect in a modern world setting which would be mostly um things like uh knives and you know very you know how you fight with your hands uh and then obviously guns and things like crossbows and stuff

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    like that. Um okay, next question comes from Zip Zag who asks, "How are resources going to be handled in the persistent universe? Once a field has been mined, will we have to wait for it to respawn or will new asteroid fields be created elsewhere in the same system?" Yeah, I mean our plan is that most of the elements around the universe are persistent. So I mean you know there'll definitely be massive tracks of minerals in asteroid fields and you know they can be mined for quite a long time just like in the real world. Um, but once it's mined out, the idea is it's persistence and you would have to move on to a new one. And we're going to have most systems have lots of opportunities for sort of mineral uh mining like asteroid fields. And a lot of the asteroid fields won't even be marked on maps. And so there'll be a whole sort of explorer/pro prospector career path where you're actually going around and

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    flying around in empty space looking for asteroid fields and then scanning them to see if they've uh you know got minerals and then maybe laying a claim to a certain area in the asteroid field and going back and f in the UEE um sort of office of uh you know mineral rights or whatever we're calling it in the UEE empire. Um and so uh I think you know what would happen is people move around whether or not um the the various fields regenerate. Uh you know I think you know when me and Tony have discussed it right now we're not planning necessarily on to have that happening. Uh but longer term we may do um generally just because uh you know you don't want to drive everyone out of the center systems after all it's mined out. We're planning to have quite a lot of resources in in everywhere that will be pretty hard for the player base to exhaust uh you know right away or anytime soon. Um so there

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    you go. So it's mostly uh find new asteroid fields created elsewhere in the same system. Um question from WildShot is will scans reveal which pilots are real and which ones are NPCs? Hm. That's a good question. I've I've said before in the past that it would be kind of cool that you didn't necessarily know who an NPC and who a player was from a distance. I definitely think uh when you get close or you scan, you're going to know because you sort of the whole idea of like getting a sort of ID uh you know kind of like an identifier number um is to you know like the handle is to sort of be able to identify you know who that player is. And so um you know if you get one that's a real player then it's a real player and if you get one that isn't a player you'll know it's an NPC. So I think you know scans will reveal which are real and which ones are NPCs but that would probably a more sort of

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    in-depth scan and maybe from the distance you wouldn't necessarily know. Okay, next question or the last question comes from JJ Guru who asks how is the 64bit transition progressing? Is it a required change before we see the multi cruise ships in 2.0? Okay, so it's going quite well. We've basically um in fact uh when everybody gets 1.1 they will be playing uh the engine that is mostly in 64-bit. Um you're not going to appreciate it because it's all still in our old maps. Uh and we haven't uh the final element that hasn't been moved across is the rendering uh side of stuff which has to go to camera relative. the rendering, the 3D pipeline is all still going to be in 32-bit. Uh mainly because the GPUs all run in 32-bit. And there's also not much reason to be greater than

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    32-bit on rendering because when you're figuring out what's around you that you can actually see, that's perfectly fine inside a 32-bit range. What it is not fine for is a huge solar system that you're going to travel millions of miles across. Um so um you know we've essentially moved everything except for the sound module in Cry Engine and uh the sort of rendering uh pipeline to 64-bit now. It will be actually in 1.1. Um so it's kind of part of our sort of uh regressive testing I would guess uh the way I describe it. Um and uh so we're in the middle now of doing the camera relative change. Um and the camera relative change is sort of basically what you do is you take you know the camera in it sort of global position 64-bit um you know any of the elements you're rendering in their global 64-bit positions and then you figure out the the relative distance

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    between them and that gets turned into a 32bit number and that goes through the rendering pipeline. So that's what we're in the process. So uh you know we're almost done with it. Um, and like I said, when you guys play 1.1, you'll basically have most of the code running in 64-bit, um, for all the positions and matrices and quats. Um, but it'll just be dealing with, you know, areas or ranges inside our current map range, which are designed to, you know, work well with the precision of 32-bit, but, uh, you'll mostly be operating on the 64-bit code. Um, it is a required change for the multi cruise ships mainly just because, um, for we got a bunch of stuff. It's, you know, the large world, uh, plus the local grid physics stuff that we sort of demoed a little bit when we did Gamescom last year. And all those sort of come in. Uh we have this thing called the zone system that we're working on. Um that is allowing us to

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    sort of aortion um uh do a much better job of efficiently efficiently um organizing and oluding uh or updating um entities, objects, uh render elements in a sort of sparse um area structure. So like typically most FPS's um you know they use something like an octry and an octry works really well for um something like an FPS level where there's a pretty constant density of objects in a very you know and they're all pretty high density right you're running around FPS level you're not actually moving that fast so you have objects everywhere like you know every single you know meter and stuff like this so there's like literally thousands of objects building up the level you're running around or tens of thousands of objects but in the case of Star Citizen you know we have a very different problem because we've got um

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    objects that can be of high density like a a spaceship um you know and that spaceship can have lots of moving parts and can have people on board it. Uh but then you can have a whole empty area of space with nothing in it and most of actually space is empty and then occasionally you can get to a battle where there's a you know spaceships firing and firing lots of laser bolts and so that little area will be fairly dense. Well, arc tree is really inefficient for that sort of um difference between sort of as you know a very sparse amount of data and a very dense amount of data. Uh so we have uh we've been working on uh the zone system which has been led out of our German office which uh is essentially staffed with um you know basically quite a lot of the engineers that built the engine we're using um in the very original space. So, we'll have more to announce

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    down the road, but we we we basically um you know, we've got some, you know, like legendary the best people you possibly could hire. Um and so one of the things we're working on, you know, they're leading up finishing off the large world, but also the zone system. And the zone system is um the the the thing that will allow us to be much more efficient about updating stuff. Uh so it'll make our rendering more efficient. Uh it will allow us to sort of olude, okay, I'm here's a big spaceship. um you know I'm I'm outside it so I'm not in the interior zone so I don't need to render the interior zone I don't need to update the interior zone so in terms of like pack you know dealing with these sort of you know bigger space combats where you can have some big ships like an Idris or even a Bengal and then smaller ships like the fighters and then people running around inside the ships and outside the zone systems really good at

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    sort of being able to break those down into different sort of areas of um data density um and so that's kind of uh sort of uh what um working on and again the zone system like I was mentioning on the you could fly between areas well you could think of like um earth right you're in orbit and earth that's one zone and orbit and moon is another zone and then you between them there's nothing and then as you enter the zone it says okay let's stream in let's stream in the moon and let's stream in the space station that's around the moon and let's stream in the asteroids that are hanging out here uh and then let's stream in um you know the spaceships that are hanging out here well now of course also the space station in orbit around the moon could also be another zone inside. So basically we stream that and it comes with its own attached zones inside and so anyway it's it's really good for sort of updating and rendering and you know sort of occlusion and all

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    the rest of stuff. So uh so so basically the zone system and the 64-bit um and the local grid are all things that we really need to have the large ships work efficiently uh in a place where you know people can come and go and we can have lots of stuff happening around because I know there's a lot of people have sort of been wondering well how you manage to have these big spaceship battles and uh it just requires a different uh approach in how you're going to um update and how you're going to render um you know and how you and you know how you even communicate on the network because the zone system also would be used for so basically the zone system would use for sort of figuring out what IDs you're using what sort of level of up network updates you would use what level of updates you would use what you see what you don't see um uh so it's it's all those things together that's that we're

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    going to have that in the multi- crew uh ship combat and then also that's sort of the foundational stuff for the big space flying around over huge distances going from planet to another planet and all the rest of Uh, and that's in progress and um, you know, I I think it's going to be uh, pretty good. We're seeing some like really great uh, performance gains going the zone system way as opposed to the traditional Octry rendering system way. Um, so there you go. That's probably more of a technical dump than you guys were expecting, but uh, uh, that's it. And I I think we have at the end of this show uh, we're changing it up a little bit. So, we're going to do like a little sneak peek uh of uh um the Retaliator um as an in engine shot. Um so, enjoy that and I'll talk to you next week. Um and I would just like to thank everybody that has backed this game.

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    You're enabling us to build something that is above and beyond uh what I think anyone else would ever be able to build in the in the industry. We're building something really special. um the stuff that we're you know I see that we're working on design and all the rest of stuff the potential of it I just think it's going to be um you know it's going to be a great experience and thank you all for uh supporting it. Thank you all for being part of it and uh letting us uh build this with you. So talk to you next week. Bye. Hey guys, thanks for watching um Temp for the Chairman. Uh if you guys would

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    like to uh see more episodes, go here. If you guys would like to subscribe to our YouTube channel and always keep up to date with all our video content, go here. And uh if you guys would like to watch episodes of Round the Verse, go here, please. And I will see you in the verse.