10 for the Chairman: Episode 65

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] [Applause] Hello everyone. Uh, welcome to another episode of Temp for the Chairman. Uh, by the way, in front of me is a very cool uh uh 3D printed sort of game prototype set. Uh I have a old friend of mine that used to work with me a long time ago back in Origin is uh doing this uh this sort of new board game startup and doing uh things with 3D printing and tile sets and so it's actually quite cool. Uh this one's I think called microvirus. So anyway, he dropped it by today and as a as a present and it's uh anyway cool. Uh

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   it's kind of amazing what you can do now with 3D printing. But let's get back to Star Citizen. So this is 10 for the chairman. This is where I answer 10 questions uh asked by subscribers. Subscribers are the uh subset of our community that contribute money every month to enable us to have um you know really uh high amount of community interaction and uh content. Um and so we really appreciate it but allows us to do uh this um show 10 for the chairman around the verse all the things like bug smashers or ship snape and also jump point which is this sort of huge uh monthly behind the scenes magazine that goes into say how we built or designed a ship or when it came with a certain game feature has also fiction and talks about various locations in the um in the Star Citizen universe. Um and um so you know,

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   thank you very much uh subscribers for um sort of funding that because all that content really trickles into the uh the website and the full game and allows us to really have uh more and better interaction than I think uh pretty much any other um game out there has. Uh so thank you guys very much. Um I think it's been a pretty big week this week. So uh I recorded my last 10 for the chairman on the Friday and we played it on the Monday. So, uh, that was just before we launched the social module, which I think has gone over, uh, really quite well. It's, uh, I mean, you know, not a lot you can do in art court, but, it's amazing how much people can get up to when they get together with their friends and they can emote and they can glitch through walls and, uh, you know, I mean, uh, it's pretty awesome to see people figuring how to fly an Merlin around or, you know, get out to certain

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   areas that we thought you couldn't get to. I have to say that um uh you know it's a puts a smile on my face to sort of see people working together and doing things to achieve even if it's trying to glitch through a wall uh in in Art Corp. And um uh you know we're actually going to be planning to do uh fairly continual updates uh on um on the sort of uh sort of art corp social side and we'll add more locations and then you know we're going to have some very cool stuff in the multi crew. Uh, but Tony's got some pretty cool things planned. So, we'll have a uh hopefully a pretty decent drop um towards the end of this month that we'll have a whole bunch of new things for people to do. Um, so that should be fun because we'll see what people get up to uh doing that. Um, but yeah, it's great to see everyone play it. It's uh, you know, it's just very small aspect of the overall game, but I think, you know,

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   people are now starting to sort of see kind of the pieces and and have a better idea how they'll come together and more and more of that will be happening. So uh so that's uh so that's great uh you know congratulations to uh Tony and uh you know the core team in Austin who uh were sort of playing lead on the social module uh supported by behavior who uh you know did a huge amount of the sort of um modeling and construction of art corp and they've been doing a lot of our other environments that you saw a little bit of the preview of NYX. Uh there's a lot more to Nyx. It's uh uh yeah looks fantastic and we've got quite a few other locations that look amazing. So, as we get to the point that we can fly between them and show them, I think, um, you know, it's there's really going to be sort of atmosphere and identity and and you'll feel the places. They won't feel generic. They won't feel random.

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   Um, and you know, we don't even have AI or NPCs running around uh these locations. You can't even buy things yet. So, it's I think it's it's going to be great. So, I'm I'm uh I'm kind of excited. It's like a little kid in the candy store. I just it's you know, I'm having to wait too long till Christmas, basically. But, uh, it's doing good. So, thanks uh very much for everyone's support on that. Um, I mentioned last uh last week or this this uh I'm recording this on Friday for Monday, which is a a bank holiday here or it's not really a really bank holiday, but it's Labor Day in in uh the US. Um, so I did mention that uh the community hub should be available. Um but um uh it wasn't because uh we were testing it. Uh but Jared and a few of the people that he was having help him test it found some uh issues that needed to be addressed.

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   So Turbulence hard at working on that and uh it should hopefully fingers crossed uh by the time this airs on on um Monday which is Labor Day uh the community hub should be live. So uh if it's not then there's probably a few more little wrinkles that will come but that's the that's the goal they're all shooting for. So it'll be really cool to see the community hub run and all the videos that people have done on I mean you know all the social module videos are are awesome. U so you know that's exactly the kind of content you want there. So um so hopefully that'll be a new thing for you guys uh to play with. All right on to uh the 10 questions. Um so let's start with the very top one from Grand Chef who asks is the multi- cruise ship tech something specific to multi cruise ships or will it be generic enough to be used for single seat ships?

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   For instance, will my Aurora be coded like a retaliator, allowing me to have one people in the bed while I pilot the ship and a third one just standing behind me even if the ship is tagged single sheep uh single seat ship. So yeah, the short answer is yes. So what's what's going to happen on all our vehicles if they have interiors uh which the Aurora has, it has a very small interior, but it doesn't have an interior. Uh 300i would be another example of this. If they have interiors that you can move around in, they will have their own local physics and therefore um you know you can uh you know have someone piloting it and someone maybe back in the bed. We haven't implemented sort of life support and oxygen issues yet. But the system uh that we have in terms of the pipe system and and our item system, that's actually something that would be fairly easy for

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   us to do. So sometime in the future, we would probably have a sort of life support system that would have so much uh oxygen or air or ability to support so many people. And maybe there could be a case where you would have too many people and it would stress the system. I don't know. But you uh you know in the multi- crew release should be able to uh get into a aurora and have someone also get into the roar and get into the bed and take off and fly and it will have its own local physics. Um so there you go. Next question comes from uh Zanic who asks when or if procedural generation content is implemented will a location be saved after being generated so that returning to the same location remains the same as when it is first visited. Basically the answer on that is yes. I mean generally what happens with uh procedural generation is that um it's deterministic and by deterministic it

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    means that uh it will always uh deliver the same outcome um every time that you sort of visit that location. Now normally what happens is say for instance uh you have a planet and that planet happens to be in a certain 3D location. Well that 3D location can be used to be sort of the uh magic number that you're using for generating that surface of the world. And so that planet will always be in that 3D location. Therefore it its surface will always be the same because it's you're putting in the same sort of magic numbers to the procedural system to deliver that. And and that's part of the key of the procedural system. It's like if you see the videos on No Man's Sky, you know, they talk about how, you know, you can go and come back and go and come back and it will be the same uh sort of planet um when you do that because it's

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    it's all based on sort of maths and magic numbers based on the planets here in this location or uh you know whatever particular seeds they're using on sort of the procedural uh system or generation. So um so yes that's the case and then generally if things could change on it you would sort of save the delta the changes that happened on that procedural location so that if say it was an asteroid that was uh procedurally generated and then you came and mound it say mount some of the voxels uh we would we would have the asteroid with its starting sort of terministic number and then the delta of the voxels that were taken away and that would determine the the current shape of the asteroid. Okay, next question comes from Zondor um who asks, "Various games have had issues with creating a social community in bars. Will there be things that actually

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    draw players to the bars in the Persistent Universe?" Well, yes. I mean, I think I've I've talked about this for quite a while. You know, the bars in general will be a place to also get missions. So, there's sort of more formal places to get missions. So, like if you wander around Art Corp, there's the job well, right? So, this is the official art corp uh job um area where you know art corp's giving jobs for people to trade things to escort things to do various uh missions out there. But, you know, if you go into the bar, maybe there's someone sitting in the back corner and he's got a special mission for you. Or maybe you can go and talk to the bartender and he'll give you a tip or a tidbit that will lead you on uh a search out in space to find a derelict where there's some valuable equipment that you can salvage. Um, so Barnes will be sort of the place to sort of keep your ear to the ground. Uh, find

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    out kind of what's happening in that area of the galaxy, potentially get some sort of non-standard missions. And uh, you know, they also would be places where you could sort of meet up with friends or see who else was sort of hanging around in the galaxy. And we'll probably do some fun things like allow you to get a drink and if you drink too many of them, you'll sort of stagger around, which is kind of what we did with the drinks cabinet um, in the hanger. Um, so yes, there are quite a few things to draw you to bars. Um, okay. Next question comes from Bad Donkey, who asks, "How can players warn NPCs of an impending attack? For instance, a player finds out an organization is planning an attack on a lawless base run by NPCs. Will there be a mechanic to warn the NPCs to activate the base defenses and defend against the incoming fleet, or will the organization's fleet be allowed to disembark and mass and start slaughtering the base NPCs?" Well, I'm

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    not sure about players necessarily warning NPCs of an impending attack, but uh generally if we have NPCs on a base and they're sort of it's their base and they're defending it, they're not going to be dumb. So, they're going to be sitting there. They'll have perimeter defenses. They'll um you know, detect people that are hostile to them. And uh so if an organization wants to come and take over their base, they certainly will defend it like uh like you would expect uh AI or NPCs to do. Um, so that that's fairly uh what uh that's kind of what would happen there. I mean, we'll have a certain level of MPC sort of um control or command. Um, you know, so for instance, if you hire NPCs uh to crew to, you know, be part of your crew on your ship or or an NPC to fly escort for you, you can give them basic instructions. I mean, it's sort of a little bit, you know, the wing commander

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    style. You know, if you're talking about the wingman, you can say, you know, form on my wing or retreat or attack my target. Uh, so we'll sort of have that kind of stuff that will be available for um AI or NPCs that you are working with or communicating with whether they're on, you know, a bigger ship that you have that you've had crew for or, you know, you've had some people to, you know, escort you or you're having them fly a big cargo hauler full of goods that you're taking somewhere and you're playing escort. So, uh, there you go. William George asks, "What is the difference between a missile and a torpedo in Star Citizen? They seem to fill very similar roles but are apparently distinct sizes types of weapons. Yeah. I mean, you know, in space, not the not the hugest difference between really the functionality of a

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    missile and a torpedo. For us, really sort of the determination is more about sort of the size of the payload and the speed and the turning ability. So torpedoes are really sort of much bigger yield uh missiles essentially that that can't move as fast or can't turn as fast but do vast amounts of specific shipto- ship damage and you know so tendly you know I don't know whether you want to think of them as super big super slow missiles but that's essentially what they are um and sort of they're sort of more keyed for sort of uh bigger ships so multi you know sort of the the multi cruise ship level or above uh of of ships um you you know, missiles in general are much quicker, accelerate much quicker, turn much quicker, um much better, have more sort of tracking options and uh and uh but not as much of a sort of payload or or yield. Um so

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    there you go. So hopefully that that helps it. Next question comes from uh Kan who asks, "With the recent mention of the various multi-crew roles on ship shape, are there any plans to add additional seats to the base retaliator like in other ships it size?" Well, we have, you know, quite a few. I mean, obviously each one of the turrets has its own um uh sort of seat, so to speak. We have sort of the engineering station. We have the pilot station. Um so, I mean, for the first release of the Retaliator, I think those are going to kind of be there. Um for some of the extra modules that we've added, you know, those potentially will add some seats. Uh and you know, we'll sort of review it as we go along. I mean, if you think about uh what's happening in the constellation, I mean, you've basically got uh you know, your gunner seats plus you've got a co-pilot seat and your captain seat and really a second

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    co-pilot seat that can sort of do other things, but they're essentially controlling functions that say the engineer will be controlling back on the retaliator. I don't think we're planning to add additional seats just yet. Um but of course, you know, as we play the game and balance the game, you never know if we sort of deem it it needs it. But uh we're definitely going to have more functionality happening uh in all the multi- cruise ships and have the ability to sort of do things like shield management, power management, um you know, equipment management, repair, all the rest of stuff. Okay, so next question comes from uh Medin Chen. Medin Chen, I know a lot games, I guess I know a lot of games where the game play was destroyed by bots and gold sellers. How will you prevent this? Well, we're gonna like everyone that

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    tries to build big online games, we're going to try our best to um uh prevent that. Um, you know, I wouldn't say that we're like any more, you know, we got we're we're smarter or you know, more of a rocket scientist than some of the other people doing online games. I will say that um you know, I think gold selling happens no matter what. But you know, one of the reasons for instance why it happens in say something more like World of Warcraft is that you can't get the gold from Blizzard. Um or at least when I used to play you couldn't. uh uh but you know in our particular game you know our sort of uh plan to bring revenue in that will pay for the servers and will pay for the customer support staff and will pay for us to build additional features and content is to you know either sell the base game

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    people joining the game right they just come in they buy their game with the ship and now they've joined Star Citizen or uh you know people um that you know don't have a lot of time but you they really want that shiny brand new weapon or that shiny new ship. And so they're like, "You know what? I'm going to just buy some UEC this month or this week. Um, so I can go and and uh buy that thing I want rather than going out there and uh, you know, flying 10 missions to earn the money inside the game. Um, and so we are essential, you know, with caps, we're going to be selling the equivalent of gold. And so you can buy it through the source. That's a big difference than getting it from somewhere else. Uh and then on top of that we are going to have sort of um you know just like you would in the real world uh some level of sort of control over like you know players transferring

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    money to each other and stuff like that. You'll never be able to stop someone just selling a straight account. But you won't be able to just go oh yeah here I'm wiring you know uh a million UEC to someone. I mean like you can't do that in the real world here. If you I send too much money to a friend of mine, it's you know deemed as income to that person and they'll have to report it as taxes. So there'll be some level of sort of uh you know kind of um control over that in the same way in the real world to sort of prevent people sort of doing that kind of thing and we'll probably have a sort of a limit on the amount of cash transfers between players but it's super early days to figure that out right now. So, there's a bunch of ideas of how to try and make it fun and fair and and balanced, but it's it's super early. Um, so, you know, I wouldn't, you know, I'm

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    sure what I just said may have gotten a bunch of people up in arms, but I, you know, I wouldn't start 20 concerned Freds just yet because, you know, we're going to try and have something that we think works for everyone. Uh, that makes it as fair as possible. So, to try and get rid of the the gold selling uh bots, um, you know, again, that's just something that, you know, you're concerned about. we're, you know, we're using a uh policy of sort of kind of semi-rusted client, but um checking on the server side uh that, you know, we'll be looking out for people that will be sort of trying to game the system. Uh and you know, I think uh the other thing to really uh remember is that um it's uh it's not kind of the same competitive setup that you've really got say something like World of Warcraft where everyone wants to race to the top level um so they can hit the end game. Uh, I think, you know, there'll be a lot of things for people to do and they can

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    fight and play against NPCs or against other players. Sort of up to them, choose their own play style. So, uh, you know, I'm just hoping sort of the open world nature of it will allow a lot of, uh, uh, you know, people to have fun. But, you know, like I said, we're not we're not necessarily smarter or or better at this than anyone else. So, I'm sure we'll have to combat this and we'll try our best to make sure that it doesn't ruin the game experience for the rest of the community. There you go. All right. Next question comes from Zen Monkey who asks, "With the newest ship designs, Vanguard, Retaliator, as well as the reworks of some of the other multi- crew ships. I've noticed a move to isolate external facing positions, pilot, gunners, etc. I'm curious if some of these choices are a way to use design to help solve technical issues." Not really. I mean, I'm assuming that when you're saying it's isolate external

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    facing positions, it means that uh you know, you have a gunner in a turret and then a pilot over here and and they're not in the same place. But if you take a look at the constellation, there's three people in the front seats of the constellation. So there's not a particular design uh choice. Uh I think it sort of does it comes out of what we um think that works for the ship itself. So a lot of the functionality is driven by the need. So something like the Vanguard or the Retaliator are sort of military ships and you know in those sort of cases it sort of feels like you've got the pilot and then maybe you got the gunner and they're obviously not necessarily going to the same place whereas the constellations sort of more a little more of a sort of communal team ship and it's more general purpose and so you can see you know the the three main crew members sort of sitting in the those front three ships seats not ships. Um so it wasn't really to do technical

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    it sort of depends on the on the ship itself. Next question comes from Archangel who asks if Arc Corp is a relatively small landing area as shown in the social module and there was talk some time ago about a thousand players per server instance, how many landing pads will be on Art Corp? Uh how will selecting those pads, landing, and keeping those pads occupied work? Or will you just be able to will you just not be able to land until there's a clear pad? Don't think there was ever really talk of a thousand players per server instance. I I know we've talked that we were hoping to get somewhere between 50 and 100 players ultimately on a server, although we're not close to there yet. I think social we're about 25. We're hoping to to boost that significantly um for the next social release. Uh we made some good strides

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    obviously in Arena Commander it's uh 16 right now. We have to do quite a bit of optimization on the space vehicles spaceships because they're very heavy. They're not they're not as simple as just a player because they're, you know, like a hornet itself has, I think, 70 items that all work and do their own thing and have to beworked and so they're much heavier um than say, you know, a person running around art, but again, we've got a whole bunch of optimization stuff that we're going to do that so we can have much more ships uh flying around. Uh so there wasn't really ever talk of a thousand per server instance. There was uh talk um you know which is a sort of longer range goal about the possibility of getting multiple servers to work cooperatively together on one sort of big area instance and split it up. So if that was

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    the case if you had if you had 10 servers and each server could handle 100 people then potentially you get a thousand people. But um you know that's sort of a a very long-term goal and you know it does have its own issues because uh you know at some point you run into rendering issues and all the other things that would happen then. But in terms of landing pads on art corp uh you know right now we have one I think we've discussed having you know more than you know a couple but in general um it's it's segregated in such a way if you notice where the landing pad is to the customs to going through the customs to actually going out in the foyer of our that is to allow us to sort of almost instance the uh landing pad area. So you can land, you get out, and then you go into our corp. And then while you've gone back, someone else could be landing in that pad while your ship was um sort of, you know, put away in its hanger

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    somewhere. Um so uh but you know, that's all the sort of stuff that we're going to try to um get uh uh you know, to work as smoothly as possible. We've got some stuff that we're doing for the multi- crew uh that will be sort of in that direction. Um uh but you know in general uh we will sort of normally allow you to land um you know if there's slots in in art corp uh so there'll be several options for that and uh so we'll we'll go from there. Last question comes from lock Austri who asks will there be a pipeline for landing zones like there are for ships also will landing zones be released in stages like art corp uh is with the stores and the like coming in later or will the landing zone be fully fleshed out by the time we are able to

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    walk around it so definitely there is a pipeline um we don't call them landing zones we call them the environment pipeline um that's actually led by Ian Illand in the UK who runs the UK environment team and also So supervises the environments that are being built um by behavior. Great strong team. You've just seen a little bit of their work. They've done a whole bunch of stuff. Schubin looks amazing. Nyx looks amazing. A few of the other locations we're working on look amazing. Um and uh so um you know it's it's a pipeline that's not too dissimilar to ships in terms of some of the modeling and building uh setups. uh you know we start with concept and uh then we sort of move our way on to sort of white box and then gray box and then we start applying the materials and the pond mapping and the textures and stuff like that. Um, as far as the landlord be releasing stages like Arc Corp, um, uh, you know what will

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    happen as time goes on and we create like when we're at the point where we're leaving one zone going to space, landing on another zone, uh, those zones will come in more fullfeatured, right? They'll come in with ships, they'll come in with AI running around, doing that stuff. The reason why Art Corp's pretty bare right now is because some of that functionality is still being worked on, so it's not ready for prime time. So um you know that you know when we need to we need to have uh persistence working um properly uh for us to really sort of um have the shops work. So persistence is uh us saving your state your equipment off to the database up in the cloud for your character or your player account. Uh so what happens right now is that um when the game starts up, it just uh looks up what you have on your web

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    account for your sort of RSI account and says, "Oh, he's got, you know, the hornet and he's got the constellation and he's got this item." And so it adds it to your account. Um but it's not particularly persistent. You if you change what you're wearing or change your load out, um that's really not saved back to the database. We save it locally on a local um text well XML file. Um, but that's a very short-term solution. The real proper solution is changes to your state, changes to your ship, whatever, whether it's getting old or dirty or broken, they get saved back out to your entry in the player database, uh, the persistent database, and that's what we need to have running. Uh, so it's actually one of our next milestones, but that's what we need to have running. So, you can go buy or sell stuff uh, in the in in the Persistent Universe. So you can go to a shop and

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    buy a weapon and then now that'll be in your you'll you'll have that weapon and when you come back into the game you'll you'll be owning that weapon. Um and so uh once the shops and all that kind of stuff is working persistence working when we launch a new environment it will just come in with its appropriate ships and you know its appropriate AI going about their daily uh schedules. Um so I would say later in as the new environments come in they will be much more fully fleshed out. you're just sort of seeing art corp grow and functionality and features come in. It's sort of like our you know I mean sort of saying uh you know test kitchen or test bed for some of the PU and social stuff. That's what's happening in art corp. The same's going to happen in multi crew. So multi crew is like the space version of that and art corp's like the sort of ground environment version of or us testing a whole bunch of stuff. So

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    Tony's got a whole bunch of plans for really cool AI interactions, some things to do down on the environments that isn't just walking around and emoting or waving at people uh or glitching through a wall. Um so I I think you know you'll sort of see that you know the possibilities uh come around via sort of multi- crew and sort of social and then in the background we'll be finishing out these other environments and we'll sort of at some point just turn on some systems for you to explore around and bam it will be kind of there. Uh so you'll sort of see a lot of the kind of like functionality and features sort of come in in like I said multi- crew and social uh and you'll be able to give feedback and sort of kind of see how things are coming together and uh that's all aiding towards um getting the persistent universe done and out there and it's all and also will be aiding towards Squadron 42 too. Um okay so there you go. That's it. That's the uh

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    last of the 10 questions. Uh thank you very much for listening. I'm hoping you're having a great Labor Day. those of you that are in the US and those of you that aren't. Well, I'm hoping you're just having a great Monday. Uh and um it's been great talking to you. I'm, you know, the social module release has been great. I'm hoping the uh you guys will like the community hub. Uh and we're all heads down uh working but having a lot of fun and really appreciate everyone's support. So, everyone out there that's back the game, uh thank you so so so much and thank you very much to the subscribers. All right, I will see 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.