Wingman's Hangar ep048 . December 6, 2013

6 December 201300:43:091,192 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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Hey everybody, welcome to the show. This is Wingman's Hanger episode 48. We're only two shows away from our one-year anniversary of 50 shows. That is amazing. And it's all thanks to you guys. We're pretty blown away by that, too. Um, if you don't know what this is about, this is kind of an inside look at everything that goes on in inside CIG and on a weekly basis what we're doing while we make this glorious Chris Roberts project Star Citizen. Let's get right to it. Well, coming up today, we have the weekend review. We have an interview with outsource manager Shawn Murphy. And Sean and I go way back. There's some pretty interesting stuff to talk about there. We have forum feedback coming up with your questions and videos. We have a new surprise segment, something I think you guys are going to
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like. So, we're going to change things around a little bit. We're moving forward feedback down in the segments a little. What's going to come later and then it's going to lead into a really, really nice surprise, which I think everybody in the verse is going to be excited about. So, what went on this week in review? Well, finally the Austin office got signed. All the lease papers are signed, buttoned up. The lawyers got involved. took an extra two months to get it done. But that's what happens when you get lawyers out there, but they're important. They protect us and we know that and probably a lot of them are pleders as well. So, thanks to that. But it's signed and we now have a move in date. It's December 28th. We're going to be buttoning up the Austin office and uh and getting all the stuff together. And Mike Jones, who you'll meet at another time, is is our IT manager. So, he and I are probably going to have to
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work that week between Christmas and New Year's to uh to get the new office up. So, when the when the people from the Austin office come to work on January 2nd, they'll be in the brand new office. And of course, we'll show you what what's going on along the way. So, thanks to you guys there, there was a stretch goal for it. We're getting out of uh I mean, you see the hanger here, but we are really in a basement and we're excited to be getting out there. It's it's going to be nice. It's going to let us expand a little bit. We're pretty short staffed at the moment all over. Uh and it's really really good. We're really excited about it. Looking forward to it. And again, big thanks to you guys. Uh more thanks for you. I mean you got it's amazing. Uh live stream. We had an incredible live stream last week. We didn't have a wingman's hanger because we're doing the live stream. Uh Chris uh running that out in the in the Santa Monica office and um you did a incredible job. I'm sure you guys have
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seen it. It's it's really really good. If you haven't seen some of the important parts are on our website and the inside CIG pieces. You should check those out. So thanks to all of you for an incredible live stream. It was really really fun. Um and we'll continue to uh to do those from time to time. and that's up to Sunday. She'll let us know when she wants them and we'll get them out to you. So, it's how it works. Jumpoint came out last week and it came out on Friday. We were closed, but we still came out with a jump point. If you are a subscriber, you know what? How cool this is to get Jumpoint magazine. Um, what started out as a six to eight page process is now 50 to 75 depending on what what we put into it. And it's it's pretty cool. It's definitely worth being a subscriber for. And as I alluded to earlier, something's coming up later
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for the subscribers in today's episode as well. Uh, we have Oo, it's time for fan focus. From time to time, we here at Cloud Imperium like to see some things that inspire us that fans have done out there. And Jason Alaska did a good job of putting together this Constellation brochure. Now, you guys know we do brochures uh as well for all our ships, but Jason, you did a really good job and we wanted to point that out in case others missed it on the forums. Really, really cool job. Thank you. And guess what? Forest has stopped by today because he wants to show you something. Now, we've talked a little bit, Forest, about PBR and what that is, physicalbased rendering. Right. Right. So, we thought it'd be kind of fun to show people rather than doing the
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headcamp thing, let's just show people what's up. So, you want to want to walk them through what we've got here? Yeah. So, uh, we I actually took the, uh, engine for the 300i. Um, it's a was a great model that our very talented artist Chris Smith uh, put together for us and took the original version that's in the engine now and then ported it over to like the PBR stuff. Um, just like a little disclaimer, this is like an early look at it. Right. Exactly. And there's a lot of things in there that aren't actually uh, finalized in there yet. Um, so this is more of a look at how we can separate materials uh a little more realistically um as to what it was before. Right. So let's go and take a look. Once you start it up, let's show let's show people what we got. So the one on top is the PBR. That's correct.
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And so what exact This is the This is the engine. And you can tell the difference. The one kind of the bottom looks a little gamey, doesn't it? Yeah, it does. I mean, it does have all the detail and, you know, it looks good with all the scratches and everything and that's one thing that we don't have in this version. Um, and it has baked AO, which we also don't have in the PBR version. But, uh, if you notice in the one that's the bottom right, it kind of all looks like metal like all the way across the board. If you look at the one on the top left, you obviously have your leather. Uh, you obviously have your I went with like a dull anodized uh dark metal with some aluminum. Um, then you got your little chrome rings. So again, this was another example of just how much detail that we actually put into the models. And I think that the PPR does a good job of actually demonstrating that. Oh yeah. So here's another example. This was the chrome before. Uh this is the chrome now. Every
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ship needs some chrome, man. A little bit. Yeah. A little bling. Amazing. Now we're going to be doing this not just the engines, but to the entire ships themselves, the hangers to everything, right? Everything. Wow. All right. Well, there you go, guys. That's that's PBR and we want to give them a little look at that and thank you Forest for stopping by. Absolutely. And now it's time for a studio report from Manchester, England. Take it away, Aaron. [Music] Hi, this is Aaron Roberts coming to you from Foundry 42. Um we're in our temporary space, but the great news is we are going to be going into our new space on Monday, uh which we're really excited about. um because we're getting kind of crowded here and we've also had to have one or two guys working from home for a few weeks and so now we're all getting together which is just
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brilliant. Um so team's growing as I said in the last few weeks. You've obviously met Nick and Derek and Phil um before um but also we've got our art director Paul Jones who's joined us. Um we have our one of our lead programmers uh David Gil who's joined us. Um we have Andrew Lei uh who's um one of our concept artists and also Bjorn Snestra who's um one of our um artists who's joined us in the last few weeks. And we've really just got going on a bunch of design. Um uh we're actually now really getting into some of the mechanics and fleshing out um you know for the intro uh for the for the first few missions and so forth and things. So hopefully in the next few weeks um you know month or so we can start actually just showing some stuff to you guys which uh hopefully you guys will really like. So, what have we been focusing on? Well, um we've really been working hard
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on the the military obviously aspects because of Squadron 42. We've been looking at um you know uh basically all the new ships we need on the military side, especially the capital ships. Uh we're spending a lot of time making sure that um some of the uh battles and the fleets involved because we obviously that's going to be a big part of the game are going to be some really epic battles and some very large ships. Um, and then in the game as well, we're now just working through um, uh, basically a lot of the elements that that are going to be obviously in the persistent universe as well in terms of, you know, how um, you know, you you navigate uh, within the within the game. Um, how you know, you navigate through stuff like asteroid fields, you know, how mining and so forth works in that sort of level and things like that and how things are set up. Um, and also spending a lot of time working on AI for um, for the space fighter combat um, and and in areas like
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that. And so that's kind of what we've been focusing on and we we we have uh pretty big plans to bring um you know a lot of this on quite soon so we can start getting this tested and um also the work we do on Squadron 42 also will filter on to the persistent universe after that as well. Wow, that's pretty cool man. He's getting to move in a new studio and so are we. And right next to me now is Shawn Murphy. And by the way, before we get to Shawn here, something special is coming up here after uh forum feedback. So make sure you stay tuned. I know. I think they're going to like it. Hey Sean, how you doing man? Doing pretty good. Welcome. Now you're pretty new. You've been here a couple weeks, right? Uh I think three weeks today. Three weeks today. And what is your role here at Cloud? I'm the uh art outsource manager. There's a lot of art in this game. There is a whole lot of art and there's going to be a lot more. Yeah. And we just kind of took a look at the
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PBR there with Forest and um yeah, there's going to be a lot more. And so you're tasked with going out there finding other houses that can help us make this game and in the in a quality bar is pretty high with what we're working. It's extremely high. uh some of the talent we're working with is uh pretty amazing. So uh you know the people we're working with have to really live up to a pretty high standard. That's true. And but that's because they've given us the standards which we have to which we have to set and you know obviously Chris sets a pretty he cuts a pretty wide path there in in what he wants to do as far as he expects top quality. Yeah. I mean he you know he wants to make it look real you know and that's that's as immersive as it gets and so yeah it's going to be like playing a movie. So, how you catching up? You able to catch up with their name? Uh, yeah. I think I'm I'm mostly caught up, at least at the high level.
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Uh, there's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of moving parts going on. So, here's a question for you. So, like we're doing we're doing uh we're working with three lateral, right? We're trying to get to work with them right now. Why don't you describe to the folks out there and tell them exactly how Yeah, I know. We we've been meeting about this all week, right? So, let's talk a little bit about what's going on with three lateral and, you know, and Yeah. So, that's uh kind of the hot topic right now. Um we are uh talking to three lateral about doing um facial motion capture um and doing you know really high resolution scanning. Um we've been looking at the quality of facial animation in Rise and we want that to be our baseline. Uh you know for what we're going to see in the game. So, we went to the people who did, you know,
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the best we've seen so far. And we're talking to them about uh we're getting ready to start some testing with them. Going to do uh I think we're looking at four heads right now and and getting some really high resolution scans and uh testing out conversation system and things like that. So what they do is they take the the scan of people's heads and then they create a mesh underneath and they basically scan the head on the mesh and then they make sure that all the uh morph targets or or morphs line up to when I'm like I'm speaking to you that's going to look like that in game, right? And all the movements, eyebrows, eyes, everything. Yeah. They shoot um you know they have this whole cloud of cameras that that sit around an actor or model's head and they have them uh you know create all these different
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expressions which is pretty hilarious to watch. Yeah. Um and then they use that as the basis for uh animating you know uh we'll we'll shoot actual animation later and actors recording dialogue and they'll they'll use that to create the animation. So, the cool thing for uh subscribers and pleders and everybody out there is we're getting to use a lot of the things that they've actually pledged for. Like they they they got us a motion capture studio. We're using that to with facial cad headcams to capture that. Um they with the the facial rig capture system that we're doing with with them that we're going to be using for this. That's something they also got for us in Stretch Coal. And one of the nice things is that Three Lateral is actually customizing their rig to match the one we've got. Uh so it'll it'll what we see in the test is going
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to look like what we're going to create. Again, high poly extremely lots of triangles. Now you that's really cool and that's kind of typical that's kind of typical of what what an outsource manager does. And now you and I have worked together before. We have way back in the day. At which company? That would be at Origin. Origin Systems. And what project were we on at Origins? We worked on uh one of the iterations of Privateeer 2. Yes, that's right. So, so we've been kind of dreaming about this game for a very long time. We have. This is this is kind of the dream that we used to talk about back in those days. You know, fly around in your ship and you land and you get out and you walk around and and explore and all that stuff. So yeah, that was the Now for those who don't know, there was a private tier 2 that was started at at Origin. It was you, me, Pete Shellis,
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Yenowine. Chris was obviously the leading the project, but we were working with like Tracy Hickman. Y um and that project uh got cancelled when Chris left to go to start Digital Amble, which which I left with. And then I think you went to Prophecy after that, right? Did you work on Prophecy? I did. Yeah. I I uh designed the Midway. There you go. See, there you go. And so he's the he's the spaceship guy, right? And so um so then privateier 2, the darkening, which was Aaron's project, uh got renamed Private Tier 2, was it just called The Darkening, renamed Private Tier 2. And so it's funny because all the guys we've worked with for, you know, years ago, I mean, all the guys over at Foundry 42, yourself, myself, Olivier, obviously Chris Roberts, Mike, you too, right? So say hi, Mike. Hey there. How you doing? See, all of us have been like together
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for a while. It's kind of fun to Oh, it was like homecoming. Yeah. You know, when I walked in, it's like, hey, well, we're lucky to have you. You're doing an amazing job. And the fans are going to get to know more about you as we go. Now, you are a Tolken fan. I am. What uh what's your favorite? Which is it just the the Tolken series that you like, The Hobbit or the What? Um you know, all of it. Uh I have read the Sylmerelion multiple times. You read the Sylmerelion? That's a hard book to get through at times. I've read that multiple times. I've read um the letters of J.R.R. Tolken. Unfinished tales, book lost tales. Uh I go deep. My nerdom doesn't go super wide, but it goes really deep in this area. You know what I got the other day which was funny was a friend of mine turned me on to the BBC did a radio dramatization of that and I got
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the I got the CDs and Ian Holm played uh Froto. He did. Exactly. Isn't that I know funny, right? And it's like you're driving around and I don't want to get out of the car cuz you're just listening. They do an amazing job now. And I also went they also did The Hobbit back in the 60s and I have that I'm going to listen to that later. It's a little different. I still don't know how they're making three movies out of that book. But I I'm gonna walk away and uh nerd out. So yeah, fair enough. Fair enough. And you were born in where? I was born in Ankura, Turkey. Turkey. So you spoke Turkish. Uh my first words we lived with a uh my dad was in the military and we lived off base with a Turkish family and my first words were actually in Turkish. It says right here that you can recite almost all of the original Conan the Barian. The Barbarian. Yes. I watched that movie a
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lot in the uh in the 80s. If it still comes on, do you you watch it? Oh yeah. It's a channel stopper I'm flipping around. It's like there's a few of those. Shaw Shank Redemption is another one for me. It just grabs me in the mouth. I'm obsessed. Oceans 11 for some reason for me. Well, there you go. There you go. Well, look, thank you very much for joining us. And you know, I think the people out there are ready for a nice existential break with our very own art director, Mark Skelton. So, after eating, do amphibians have to wait an hour before getting out of the water? Wow, guys, that was pretty cool. Now,
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guess what time it is? Time for That's a lot of Fitz smithies. Too much if we're being honest. That's way too much. Um, so let's get right to forum feedback. We've uh we've got a special show this week and we got feedback and then we've got something else coming that we're not going to talk about yet, but they get ready for um from Tortuga. Cool. So, can you eject before your ship is destroyed? I think you better eject before your ship is destroyed, cuz after it's going to be too late. Little bits of you ejecting everywhere. Not so good. Your eyes are blue. One blue that way,
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one blue that way. That's death of a spaceman. That is true. From Mason Grim, can you overclock your power core and run it above the red line to increase power to the thrusters and or energy based weapon systems or even to feed more power to your shields at the risk of damaging, destroying the power plant or reliant components? Okay, that's a really good question. So, I think we've actually had something similar to this before. We've talked about the systems before, but yeah, I mean, basically, it's not just weapons. You can overclock different components on your ship. So, the important thing there is that you have to be careful because you could burn it out, destroy it, or just run with a lot of extra heat, which makes you easier to spot. Nobody wants extra heat. And by the way, this this next video was sent in by Grey Lobos.
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Hey there wingman grey level back this time about gray level back again with question whereas regular gasoline if I purchase something back again I'll be on the inside even carry things there wingman grey level back again with a question this time about safety specifically the safety of the ships that we'll be flying I'm over here at a US do inspection station just had a level two inspection done in the past but that brought up the question in my mind will there be inspections in the verse as well. So, that was a lot a lot of videos. A lot of trucking. That's not gonna do the mother trucking joke. It was very busy. Yeah, he was busy. So, yeah, you know, he was busy and he sent us some videos. So, appreciate that. So, but we chose the one we like the most. So, um will we experience ship inspections in space?
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What do you think? It's not a bad idea. I mean, it's not something we've really thought about too much, but I think it sounds cool. Yeah. I think you know we're building those we're building those way stations for the jump points. Uh there we go. Scan you on the way through. Make sure you're not carrying anything illegal. Well, the UAE is going to want to know if you are um friend or foe. They're going to want a piece of the action, too. That's probably true. From Michael Sliver, he says, "Something I've been wondering. Will we get some sort of livable area? I mean, the hanger is cozy and all, but is there a possibility of living somewhere like an apartment or an in a house planet side, but you you can't sleep in your Graycat buggy? You can if you're like small. I mean, but are are we going to have housing in
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the game? Is there going to be housing? We are going to do something like that. We're going to do a hanger expansion system. Yeah, that's true. That's a good point. We are currently working on a hanger expansion system. And so you'll get a kind of a taste of that as we go through the next few months where you'll have living quarters and you know we'll be building out from the hanger on these things. While you know we have multiple teams don't forget in multiple locations. Some are working on dog fighting which is with Santa Monica's primary responsibility. We're we're working on the livable player universe here in in uh in Austin. So um you know and then Erin's obviously doing Squadron 42 and stuff over there. So we we do a lot of that together but we also uh we're all building experience together. So yes is the answer to that question from Ireina. Hey guys, Nikki Batgirl D'Angelo here. As you can see, I have my hands full. I was wondering if I have an
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LN and an LX and I apply an LN token to my LX when my boys are covering my six, could I then remove it later when they're at school or football or out with their dates and just use the LX as my exploration ship? or does that burn that token and turn it into another LN for good? Just want to know single moms, we don't really have that much money to spend it all ship for every one of our children. Cool question. And the cute kids. Yep. Um and the answer is that once it's used, it's used. Um the upgrades aren't something you're going to pick up in the game. You're actually going to apply to your ships uh starting today. Uh on the website, you can uh go in and turn the ship in your package into whatever the upgrade you purchased was. We'll have details on the com link this afternoon. There you go, man. That is topical. And another person also
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asked, "It's one upgrade per ship. You can apply multiple upgrade packages to a single ship." That's right. You It's not a good way to get cheap uh cheap equipment. Oh, yeah. They're always trying to game the game. Well, you can't blame them. You know, that's good. Um from Gabrielle Ksa. In the event of such damage, for instance, failure of one engine on a dual engine craft or damage to the output nozzle of an engine, damage that would make the ship want to veer off course, will the ship's flight computer adjust the output of the maneuvering thrusters in such a way to keep the ship flying straight while the controls are at neutral, or will it be the pilot's job to compensate for such disturbances and fight the controls to keep the ship flying in a straight line? I think that's Gabriel Agot. Yeah, it wouldn't be a show if I wasn't butchering somebody's name. Again, my
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apologies. Tradition. So, um, how's that going to work? If a thruster is destroyed, are we going to is it going to compensate with a computer? Is it going to be, you know, you're going to have to do it with your joystick? What? I think it's going to try to compensate as much as it can, but there's a point of no return. You know, at some point, you just don't have enough thrusters left, so your ship starts going. That might that might be a good time to practice that ejection, but That's right. prior to blowing up. There you go, Gabriel. Good job. So, yeah, you're welcome. And now our subs our surprise segment is coming up right after this week's most valuable posts. Hey everyone, welcome to MVP. I'm Ben Lesnik and I'm here to tell you what the most valable post this week at the RSI forums was. First, a little bit of
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business. We've made some changes to the RSI forums in the past day or so that you may or may not be aware of. Now, uh, people with Backstar Citizen will show with a green badge under their avatars, and, uh, people who haven't will show in, uh, black and white. So, if, uh, you want your avatar to be in color and to be able to access some of the deeper areas of the forums, you need to pick up a Star Citizen package. I am, uh, I'm okay, though. Now, on to the uh, most valuable post. This week goes to uh, post you may have seen about the brand new merchant. This thing right here. This week's award goes to Gishord for his thread about which end is the front of the Bandu merchantmen which it turns out is a very touchy topic because it led to 48 pages of heated speculation. Uh one of the great things about this
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community, every little thing matters uh just like it does to the team here. So, after all that talk, we we tracked down the artist who created the ship and our uh our visual director, Chris Olivia, and we confirmed that the uh elongated end is indeed the front. And everyone seems to be happy with that. So, Gishord, thank you for keeping the forums interesting this week. You're our MVP. Now, I'm going to hop in my constellation and fly out of here. Thanks, Ben. And now, the moment we've all been waiting for. Since subscribers make all this possible, along with Jump Point Magazine, Wingman's Hanger, all the stuff we do out there as far as filming and getting stuff for you, we thought it was important that we put something special together just for them. Hello everyone. So, this is the uh
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inaugural uh 10 for the chairman uh segment that we're going to do in the Los Angeles show. And this is where we take 10 questions from subscribers who um their generous backing allows us to do all this uh community um uh communication work, video uh and this show here as well as the stuff that we do in Austin like Wingman's Hanger and the behind the scenes stuff. So, thank you all to subscribers. Um and we take 10 questions uh every week. Uh and uh funnily enough, the very first question is from 10. Um and he asks, I'm curious uh to know about the hardware setup required to run uh Star Citizen on full HD on Max Details. Uh so that's a really good question. It's uh it's hard to definitively say that now because we're still early in the development process and new hardware comes out um every year. Um, so, uh, generally we've been
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aiming that the very high end of hardware now is kind of, uh, what the what we think the sort of mid-level will be by the time is the game is fully finished. Uh, so that would have been a GTX 680 or now a 780 on the Nvidia side or on the AMD side, a 7970 or now the R9290X on the AMD side. uh and you should be able to easily run in the highest of details uh the game in uh 1080p. If you want to move to 4K um you'll probably need sort of that very high-end cards that will be available uh smoothly in 4K that is uh next year or maybe uh current day uh sort of high level to mid- highle card but two of them in SLI. Um and you know the engine scales really well so it it can you know it will it will take whatever you can
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give it uh in whatever resolution you give it but you can also scale it down and it still looks pretty good. So if you don't have quite that highest end hardware, it still will be a pretty good experience. So um I hope that answers the question. So now let's get on to the next one. So Murus asks, "Now that CI is development infrastructure ready, are you planning on toying with new ideas for future projects after Star Citizen is released? Some vague schedules for bigger expansions to Star Citizen Squadron 42 or even non-S Star Citizen related project?" Um, so the answer to that is we're 100% focused on Star Citizen here. And the way that Star Citizen is uh being created is once it's released, it won't that won't be the end of Star Citizen. We're going to actually planning to be releasing content on a very regular schedule. We're actually hoping to almost be weekly if we possibly can. Um, so we'll be constantly updating the persistent universe, adding
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new features, locations, ships, um, characters, um, over, uh, hopefully years and years and years and years. I mean, obviously the requires on people playing the game and, uh, still being a viable enterprise, but, uh, Eve Online's still going 10 years later, so um, uh, we would love to be in that same position. Um and uh then we'll also do uh some additional story uh segments very much like Squadron 42. So Squadron 42 won't be the only single player experience we do. We will be doing additional uh experiences like that that um people will be able to uh play inside the Star Citizen universe. So the answer is yes, we are going to do a lot of stuff in Star Citizen, but not so much uh we don't really have any plans for non-S Star Citizen stuff because we sort of view Star Citizen as a it's it's it's not a short-term commitment. It's a very
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long-term thing and hopefully um you guys will all be playing and enjoying it many years to come. So, on to the next question. Okay, Buran asks, "Will radar shadow be present in the game?" So, yes, the answer is yes, radar shadow will definitely be present in the game. Uh we have all different kinds of sort of radar signatures you can have, whether it's uh sort of a heat signature, electromagnetic signature, reflective signature. And we're also thinking of different ways that you as a player could shield yourself from someone else detecting you. So, uh there will be an aspect of um being able to sort of play sort of the stealth angle. Uh and you know, maybe you can shield yourself behind an asteroid or maybe you can shut down a bunch of systems so your signature is really small. Um or you could coat your ship in a certain kind of armor that would give you a much lower reflective signature. Um so we'll definitely have radar shadow be part of
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that. Uh, and uh, we're hoping and think it's actually going to add a lot of um, fun to the gameplay and nuance because uh, there's just a lot of different options for people to to to take things in space and that's kind of part of the thing that we're pretty excited about with what we're doing with um, Star Citizen. Okay, on to the next one. Uh, Whiplash asks, "Is the plan to just make dog fighting an arena style shoot them up or will there be some specific scenarios to test?" Okay. So, the answer on that is in the very first iterations of uh dog fighting, there will it'll be mostly just an arena style uh shoot up head-to-head uh or flying against some AI. Uh maybe two teams, you know, red, blue would be sort of the standard teams, although we think we may switch that up to be a bit more fun than red versus blue. Um and uh then maybe later on we'll do some scenarios. But the idea of the dog fighting test isn't really to
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um you know deliver a fullyfledged game like you would normally expect. This is really for us to sort of test the backend infrastructure for multiplayer, the balancing of the ships, seeing if the flight model and everything is fun. So, it'll be an iterative process. So, you know, the the early parts of any of the modules are obviously going to be a lot rougher than the final polished version is, but it's all in the effort of making the game as good as possible. Um, so, uh, so I guess bear with us on those. Okay, on to the next one. Uh Hern asks, "I'm interested to learn what what Chris's personal preference is for his uh hands-on uh throttle and stick uh with Star Citizen. Does he prefer pitch and roll on the stick or pitch and yaw?" Uh so that's a pretty good question. Um generally in the past in in Wing Commander, um it's been sort of pretty much a pitch and your setup. Uh but we're, you know, I'm playing around with
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the idea that, you know, we have G-forces on pilots in our sort of dog fighting part. And obviously in that case just as a human being you can take greater gravity um in the vertical then you can uh you know eyes out eyes in or in the lateral uh G section. So that's why one pilot will roll and then pitch if he wants to. I mean he could do his rudder and do this but he'll do that cuz he can actually do it quicker. Um so that would probably affect whether it would be um uh pitch and or or um pitch and roll. I mean, right now the default is pitch and your with a roll on the rotor pedals, but that may actually change to be more accurate to a real plane, which will probably be uh pitch and roll on the joystick and then your on the roer pedals. Okay, on to the next one. Uh Ice asks, can you clarify the PVP slider? I see a lot of threads where
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people believe this affects the whole game where I believe it to only affect the random encounters during the autopilot. Okay, so the PVP slider is uh an input to the game's matchmaking system uh to give it a hint of kind of like who it should be matching you with. So um what happens is when you fly around in in in space um you have, you know, you're in your world view, your universe view, and the server up there is basically looking at where you are and it's looking at everyone else and all their different machines and and basically seeing where everyone else in the galaxy. And if it feels like, oh, there's someone close to you or there's an AI that's close to you, it it basically would tell your local client, okay, this person's close to you and and that person would be streamed into your instant or that AI would be streamed into your instance. And so the PVP slider is essentially a an extra variable for the matchmaking criteria.
00:31:50
So the matchmaking criteria is uh on a whole bunch of things. So it's on things like ping, which is, you know, obviously we don't want to be putting people together that there's huge latency. um uh you know it's on whether who's your friends, who's your enemies, who's your people of interest. Um also um it would uh have some level of uh skill rating in there. So we'll kind of sort of track you know are you a new new player or you super experienced and based on that um in most of the areas cuz uh uh you know some areas there won't be any they won't it'll be whoever's there versus whether it's PvP or not. Uh but if you basically said, "Hey, you know what? I I would prefer to have more PvE than PvP," um it would give a preference to uh the AI flying around rather than a real player. So if there's an AI pirate and there's a real player pirate, it would drop the AI pilot pirate into your instance to fight
00:32:41
if you were more towards PvE than PvP. You definitely would get other players streaming to your space that wouldn't be hostile, say maybe a friend of yours or something. So, you could definitely get a co-op um kind of feeling. That's going to be an ongoing process. But the whole idea with it is you should be able to fly around the game and if you wanted that more sort of private freelancer experience, that's kind of what will happen to you. It'll just be mostly you'll see AI and then if there's other players, there'll be probably friendly players or if you're in like certain areas of space where there's no holds bar, then it definitely could be a unfriendly player. But you'll sort of know that okay, well, those are the dangerous areas. So, if you're a new player and you don't really want to be dealing with um tough other players, then you probably should avoid those. And, you know, I would like to say one other thing is you definitely can have NPCs that are tougher than any player could ever be since it's, you know, a computer that runs it. It knows exactly
00:33:27
where you are and it and it can calculate uh you know, the correct firing solution much better than a player could ever do. So, the I think it is a bit of a a misnomer to think that um NPCs aren't necessarily as tough as um as real players. In some cases, NPCs could be tougher than real players, but uh but essentially the slider just sort of allows you to affect um the kind of people that were streaming to your space as you're traveling across uh traveling across the galaxy. And uh hopefully that'll mean that if you sort of want to play the more privateeer style game um and just by yourself, you can have that experience. You want to play with your friends and sort of co-op against other AI, that can happen. But also, if you want to mix it up with other players, that will also happen too. And you know, we'll have some other stuff. I mean, I know that there's always a question where people always worried, well, what if that's an exploit and can you change
00:34:15
it dynamically? And we're not going to let you change that dynamically while you're flying around. So, it's kind of a setting that you have as you fly around. And like I said, there are some areas that are no holds barred and those areas will also have some really cool stuff in. So, I'm hoping at some point like you get brave enough and you get good enough, you would go to these areas uh to, you know, I don't know, get this one particular kind of weapon that you can't get elsewhere or salvage an alien wreck. Uh but you have to take some risk to get there. So it's a sort of riskreward basis. So I hope that answered the question on the PVP slider. Okay, on to the next one. So Roberto Elena asks, "Are you willing to redesign cockpits, size of displays, fonts, field of view, etc. once the final specs of the Oculus Rift consumer version are known if you think that is needed to be playable, enjoyable with the Oculus Rift? I would say that uh if the Oculus Rift works correctly, we we shouldn't have to do
00:35:03
that. And uh we would not be redesigning ships or cockpits or anything for one peripheral that we're going to work with, even if it's a peripheral that uh everyone's excited about. And you know, we're excited about it. I sitting right on my desk right now. I will say that u you know, we're pretty uh in sync with the uh the Oculus folks. Um you know, we have the uh HD prototypes uh you know, in uh Austin and here in LA. And um and obviously the new stuff coming out, we we we sort of get to see it in a very early stage. And I would say that our current setup is going to work really well with it. And uh you know, we're focused on making that sort of uh sort of uh kind of VR uh aspect of the game work, have the seroscopic goal work really well. So I don't think we'll need to redesign our assets, or we probably wouldn't, but uh we're pretty confident
00:35:50
it's going to work well with uh the way uh the way everything is shaping up as it is. Okay, on to the next one. Uh, Ron Miel asks, "In the dog fighting module, how will our ammunition and missiles be handled if there is no store or economy to reload?" Okay, so the idea with the dog fighting module is that um you'll start in the hanger and in the hanger you'll be able to open load up the hollow table and then you'll basically, you know, use that to decide what your load out is on your ships, what ammunition you've got, etc. And then you get into the cockpit of your ship and you fire it up and then the outside of the cockpit sort of, you know, I don't know, like turns into the hollow deck and now you're in space. Uh, and uh, and then you fight there. But while you're flying in the dog fight module, actually out in space, you can't uh, reload. You can't reload your missiles or anything
00:36:38
like that. Uh, but between battles, um, you'll be back in your hanger and then you can adjust your load out. And, uh, that's kind of the fiction. It's sort of the fiction as you climb the cockpit, it goes into simulation mode. Uh but that allows us to leverage the stuff that we already have in the hanger. Uh because the whole point of this is to sort of build on game systems. So we don't want to do custom stuff just for a module. We want to do it the way it would do in the final game. Nactar asks, "But what module do you plan next after dog fighting? Care to share what you are planning?" Uh I'm guessing Naktabbar isn't uh first language isn't English, but uh that's cool cuz we have uh lots of uh great supporters from around the world. Um, so the module we're planning to do right after dog fighting is the planet side module. Um, and that one is the module that's more focused on down
00:37:25
plant side environments going into say a space bar or into this into a shops to buy and sell items or goods and and uh, you know, sometimes I think we've referred to as a social module because we're going to allow that's one of the modules we're focusing on to let other players be in the shared space and test our MMO back end and maybe interact with other players on a sort of avatar social basis. Um, so that will be the next module that we do after the dog fighting module. Okay, so Bess asks, "Is the plan to release Squadron 42 and the Persistent Universe at the same time, or will one come out before the other?" Good question. I mean, from our standpoint, um, I think we want to give you Squadron 42, or at least part of it before the Persistent Universe is finished, so to speak. Um, and we're kind of toying around with how we can do this with
00:38:12
Squadron 42 in a way that sort of falls into um, the methodology we're using and sort of develop methodology because I think giving you the whole Squadron 42 is just an alpha may not work as well because it's a story. So, it needs to be fairly polished as far as it do as far as that goes. So, one of our thoughts is uh, to take Squadron 42 and sort of release it episodically. So, uh, you know, before the game is fully finished where you play the first x number of missions that are nice and well done and polished and then the next x number of missions a month later and so on until you've worked your way through Squadron 42, which would lead you up to the, uh, sort of beta of the persistent universe. Uh, so that's currently our thinking. It's still in process right now. Um, but we'll see. But when the game is finished properly, um, you know, obviously Squadron 42 and Persistent Universe, Star Citizen would all be sort of in as
00:39:01
part of the package. Okay, that's it. That's the last that's the last of our 10 questions and our first 10 from the chairman. So, thanks for sitting with me. Um hopefully I didn't ramble too much, but uh I hope you all um found my answers uh uh useful and enlightening, and I'll catch you next [Applause] week. Well, there you go. there. You got the subscribers got their questions answered directly from the man himself. And if you want your questions answered from Chris got to be a subscriber. So, thanks a lot for that. 10 for the chairman. Look for that more often. Love it. Love it. Love it. Want to thank you, Chris, for doing that. Want to thank subscribers and pledgers again for doing this. It's a lot of thanks for
00:39:49
subscribers, but I think you guys have actually earned it. And coming up this week, hanger update. What? Say what? Yeah, it's coming. We're uh we're testing it right now. We want to get it ready, get something going. We got two of them we're planning to put out before Christmas holidays. Um, I don't want to give too much away because it's more fun to be uh surprised. So, that's coming out. Um, office moving and planning working. We're working with, as I said, Mike Jones, the IT director. We're going over there and checking the wiring and make sure we get everything else going correctly. Um, we're going to have a gigabit line there, which is really exciting for those of you out there. It It's amazing. We need that level of speed with distributed development that we have in Montreal, Santa Monica, Austin, Manchester, and Perforce servers at all locations. We need them, you know, exchanging information and sometimes some of the files are rather large. So, the the more bandwidth we
00:40:36
have, the better off and more efficient we get. Uh Smy's in town today. She's doing some interviews, which ah I don't want to give too much away, but it's always good to see her. She's got some really cool stuff going on. And uh we want you to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you find out exactly what's going on when it's going on. You get a little alert, a little alert. Apparently I can't speak English, but if I could, I would tell you you get a little alert and you'll know the first one. You'll be the one of the first ones to know when things happen and and I'll try to quit stumbling along here. Submit your questions in the RSI forum. That's where we get the forum feedback questions in the general chat. If you're a subscriber and you want your questions answered by the man, you need to submit them in the subscriber area. That's where those are going to be and we'll draw from there in that pool every time we do that. And please check out Wingman's Hangover 15
00:41:24
minutes after the show. It's kind of a join us in chat roll. We'll have a little fun. We'll talk directly, maybe take a Skype call here or there, but we'll just chat and see what's going on. It's kind of a little more informal, which Yeah. Hard to believe, I know, but it's a little more informal than this. And, you know, it's more personal. We just get together and and hang out and that's always a fun thing to do. And remember, if you want your stuff featured on Wingman's Hanger, send it in. We just might use it. Two episodes to go until we hit the oneyear anniversary. See you in the verse. Aw, it's okay, baby. We can wait. What
00:42:28
if you just use your hand? What? Excuse me one moment, gentlemen.

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.