Around the Verse: Episode 2.09

3 December 201500:50:361,267 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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This video made possible by the ICC stellar surveyors and subscribers like you. [Music] Hey everybody, welcome to Around the Verse. I'm Sandy Gardner and I'm Ben Lesnik. This week in the ATV interview, Jared sits down with Persistent Universe director Tony Zurvec to talk the immediate future of Star Citizen. And then the live operations team walks us through the process of patching a build, which is something they've been doing
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quite often these days. But first, we're getting closer and closer to having our new studio set. What do you mean? It's all done. It's totally finished. Uh, no. This is uh ATV studio under What are we going to call this place? Like studio 42 or something under construction. Sawust does smell like sawdust. Um, Thomas Hennessy and friends have been uh building us our nice moving sets behind us. And in the very near future, you'll be seeing those in the show. And work on the rest of the studio continues. Talk about how the studio is coming together. It's coming together very well. That was in italics. Reading your stage directions. Ben adds color. Uh the studio is coming together great. Um kind of the the developer part is done and the community part is done and then they're building out the uh commissary and the you know living facilities in between them right now, but it's a it's a big step up from our
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last uh space. Of course, Star Citizen Alpha 2.0 continues its testing on the PTU. We're up to uh citizen number 110,000. Um at this point we are adding people by blocks of when they joined. Hoping to expand that shortly and we are patching uh gosh it's been almost daily for the past couple days. Uh we are on patch G as of this recording. We may be on to H your eye by the time you see this. Uh our bug smasters are making quick fixes to the errors and bugs that you guys discover and it's making for a more and more stable experience on the uh the road to getting this thing live. And earlier this week, we finished our third anniversary sale and our biggest yet. It was big, big, big. We had hundreds of different ship SKs available. Um, we hope everybody got the ship of their
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dreams this time around. Uh, of course, we we hit some pretty impressive crowdfunding numbers in there. Uh, 99 million. That's just it's hard to even think about. Thank you guys for that. Uh, we hope you enjoyed seeing the old ships come back. We hope you enjoy the new ones, the Archimedes and the Crucible. I got an Archimedes. Nice. It's It's gonna be cool. And with that, let's check in with our studios around the world for news from around the verse. Whoa. Wait, what? It's like a Skinner box or something. Hey everybody, welcome back to uh Los Angeles, California, the new office. Uh I'm Eric Karen Davis. I'm Darren
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Borlick. We've got a bunch of updates for you this week. Um a lot of stuff that's happening around the studio has been really focused on 2.0 as as you'd imagine. Uh Paul Randell and Mark Avent Allen, everybody's kind of getting in the mix to get this build fixed and ready to go for live. Yeah, stability is a big concern. Yeah, it's a big issue for us and we're very focused on giving the best experience we possibly can. So, every night, every morning, we come in, we send off issues to the UK, we get them back from the team over there in Germany and UK, and it's it's been a really good uh a team effort to get this build really solid and something for you guys to enjoy and and have fun with. It's pretty much been a 24-hour cycle. Yeah, it really has. We're handing things off in email. We're talking over Skype. It's it's a morning sync we're having every 9:00 in the morning with Chris Roberts and the team. It's been really good. So, on the art side, something cool, our concept artist, Germuk, he's been working on a concept for the Caterpillar. Yeah. So, as a
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ship, I think that people have been looking forward to for a long time now. Um, not don't want to give away too many details, but it's it's looking pretty beefy is the best way to explain it. He's working really close with Randy. So, Randy had shown that stuff off a few weeks ago and and they're really starting to dig in on the art side, how that would look. Yep. And finally, something that maybe you guys have been playing around with 2.0 is the new EMP weapon. Uh right now one of our engineers and designers Chad, he's been trying to implement new features into the EMP such as, you know, when the ship gets hit by the the lights will flicker off, your computer screen kind of gets disabled. Just just creating new effects for how the EMP will function. Uh on top of that, we're trying to nail down how the VFX are supposed to look, how the audio is supposed to sound. We want to make sure it's like something really impressive and really visual and visceral that you guys can recognize as an EMP weapon. On top of that, creating like, you know, a warning signal,
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letting letting the pilot know say, "Hey, I'm about to discharge an EMP weapon. Um, let know that, you know, this may interfere with systems." So, we're trying to create this this whole system of of notifications based around how this weapon is going to function. It's actually turning out to be really cool. It really is. We're excited if you guys play with it. Um, all right, that's it. Got anything else? Nope. All right. Again, I'm Eric. Con. See you next week in LA. Hey guys, Jake Ross here, associate producer of the Persistent Universe, and I'm here with with you this week uh to talk a little bit about jump points. Um the patches were pushing the PTU and character customization. Uh we're all back from uh Thanksgiving holiday, so we're all about 10 pounds heavier and uh you know, ready to get back to work. Uh so this week we've kicked off uh
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discussions on jump point travel. So, um, you know, we have our Stanton system that we're fleshing out and we're starting to think about, okay, well, with with Levky landing zone coming out, how are we going to get to NYX? Um, you know, so we're we're toying around with some different ideas, but we're starting to really um dive down into how that's going to work functionally in game. Uh, we have a lot of cool um artwork for how that's going to look. I know some of you guys saw that. I think it was at South by Southwest or or Pack South last year. uh or this earlier this year in Austin. So um that was done by Chris Olivia and it looks looks gorgeous. So we're just trying to figure out how to how to implement that. So that's pretty um interesting that we are now kicking that off. So um we're also pushing a whole lot of patches to the PTU recently for
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2.0. uh our operations team and our QA team have worked long hours uh and and uh dedicated a lot of their time even over Thanksgiving holiday to uh to push these patches out to you guys so we can get more and more stable as we look forward to live release of 2.0. It's it's we're seeing all the video videos you guys are putting up and they're they're really awesome. So, uh I know the a lot of thanks goes to the uh the operations team and the QA team for helping to put those patches out for you guys. Um lastly, character customization. um we've started discussions um doing a deep dive into the technology behind uh the customization and uh first iteration uh for for you guys. So you know we're starting to get um clothing assets back from CGbot. So we're we're messing around creating these um these NPC kind
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of uh well NPC civilian um loadouts in addition to the armor loadouts that we have already. Um, so in the uh not too distant future, you guys will should be able to um not just select from the three outlaws and the three mediums, but also have civilian loadouts that you create um using the clothing assets and the various heads that we have. So um that we've scanned for for NPCs, but that we'll also be able to use for players. So um yeah, so I think next steps after that will be to look at skin tone, uh hair, and the actual face itself. Um, so that's that's kind of what the the near-term near to midterm roadmap for for customization looks like. So look look forward to that. Um, yeah, I think that's all I got for you guys this week. Thanks. We'll see you around. Hello and welcome to England Manchester.
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It's Tom here, senior producer. Want to give you guys a quick update about what's going on here in the UK. Uh, now over the last three months, the team have been ramping up massively. So, uh, since September, just to give you an idea of things, um, I counted up before, we've hired over 20 new starters, uh, since early September. So, the team is growing rapidly. And, uh, we've had six new environment artists join us. We've had four new QA testers as help us help us ensure the build's good and stable uh, for you guys before sending it out. Um, and we've also had four vehicle artists work on all those spaceships that we've got going on. and uh a lighting artist, a new tech artist, a tech designer, and also a a game support representative and a customer service
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representative just to make sure you guys are happy and well communicated with. Um so yeah, the team's getting really full. The office is very busy. Um everyone's very much looking forward to the December live stream uh to show you guys all the cool stuff that's going on at the moment. And uh yeah, a lot of the team are very much focused on 2.0 and yeah, we're we're really seeing much more stability now. Uh there's far fewer uh crashes on the server and client crashes too and improvements into the uh performance. So really do hope to get you the uh build live to the rest of the community in the not too distant future. Um so yeah, that's the main focus of the team now 2.0 Z and also planning ahead to 2.1. And we're really enjoying seeing all these videos you're
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uh putting up online of all the the fun encounters you're getting in Crusader. So do please keep those coming. Uh that's it from me. So I'll say see you in the verse. Hey guys, Brian Chambers here from Frankfurt. Uh this week flying solo. Didn't bring anyone else in. Um team is busy so I'll just let them focus on what they're doing. Um, and it was kind of interesting today thinking about, you know, our group's been together, at least the core of us, for coming on a year now. Um, and it's kind of cool for us to see where we were and where we are now and what we've pulled together. Um, helping out this this global team and this global endeavor. Um, and it's all to your guys's help and support, the community, the backers. So,
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you know, thank you so much. um in the short amount of time we've been together um just kind of run through some of the stuff that we've touched um you know doing a lot of work with the UK team on Squadron 42 and the whole global team but um focusing on you know as much as we can as much help as we can there um within this building a lot of core engine work um a lot of things you guys know about other things that you don't know about that are going to be coming online and we'll reveal it in a cool way once it does. Um, we've done a lot on physics code and physics optimization and setups. Um, animation code, a good amount there and setting stuff up for animation. Um, even audio code, we have
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an audio engineer here that's um, we've worked together with for years. uh FPS design contributed a lot of that with Todd Papy is the um design director here and helping to drive our team and even other areas. Um global scheduling with our production guys here being able to help with the global schedules and help refine things and give best estimates and reschedu and so on. Um AI, I've brought in Franchesco here before. He's driving is our our lead AI programmer engineer. So, we're really driving AI out of Frankfurt. Uh, cinematics with Hanis, we're building up the team there. Um, Hanis and his guys, Jason Cole, they're driving the cinematics, pushing things as as hard as we can. Uh,
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weapons. Um, we have Toby, our lead weapon artist, so he's pushing a lot on weapons. Environments, we have a couple environment artists here. I've brought in some in the past. uh VFX, we have a VFX artist here, a senior guy, and he's been driving stuff a lot with the UK team. Uh character rigging, we're contributing with character rigging. Um and then ultimately on top of all that, also, you know, game optimizations, which are incredibly important, and bug fixes, which are incredibly important. Um it's complex. I always look at game development is kind of like a big giant puzzle, and you got all these parts and pieces that need to fit together in perfectly in order for it to work. And as we make changes and put new stuff in, other stuff can break. So, you know, looking at those bugs in a timely manner and and being able to really dig deep
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and understand what they are and fix them and get new stuff, new content and new fixes out to you guys is is really important to us. So, not really a weekly update, but I just kind of wanted to run through that and, you know, again, say thank you to the community. Um, the team's still growing. We've signed two more contracts this last week, I think. So now we're up to 32 and we're still looking into bring in a a good amount more. So thanks again and uh I'll bring in somebody next week. Okay. Cheers. Thanks for stopping by. Thank you to our studios from around the
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world for everything you do. Now, let's check in with the live operations team in Austin as they give us a look into patch creation and more in this week's ATV behind the scenes. Da da da. Behind the scenes ATV now. Hi everybody. I'm Joseph Holly. I'm a cloud solutions architect here in the operations department. Hi, I'm Miles Lee. I'm a operations engineer here in the operations department. I'm Keegan Stannifer, operations engineer here at Cloud Imperium. operations department uh covers all the servers that the games run on that the backers all connect to when they're playing uh the modules we
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we have released publicly. Uh we also run the build server uh which turns out to be an enormous amount of work. Uh in the past we've done some Reddit AMAs and some participation on the forums uh where we got a lot of you know uh feedback from very technical backers. So I know that there are definitely people out there who are interested in the stuff that we do. Uh we are very hands-on with you know uh all the servers in the cloud all of the servers that run the build system. Uh between those I'd say we manage a couple of hundred machines. Uh we work really closely with the IT department um and the developers. The IT department obviously uh helps us with
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the internal resources. All the build machines are internal resources. We keep all of those in-house. None of that lives in the cloud. and uh the developers obviously are the ones writing all the code and building all the uh or making all the assets that go through the build system. So we end up working a lot with them whenever uh we send something through the build system and it doesn't like it for some reason somebody's got a mistake or uh they need to go back and fix a bug. So we work closely with those guys. I'm responsible for the build servers mainly and I tend to do maintenance on those and work on uh performance increases for that. This mainly involves me babysitting builds at night to make sure they get to all our other studios and the other countries. And yeah, the big challenges we have on
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the build system side are definitely uh distributing all the stuff that comes out of that to all of our studios since it is a worldwide development effort. And we also have outside contractor studios. Yeah, we push a lot of data all over the place. Yep. So that's a big challenge. Um we also had a big initiative earlier this year uh where we rebuilt the build server to make it more scalable. The previous build server had been around since the company started when it was 30 some odd people. Uh now we're pushing 300 and it's really to the point where the number of builds that they wanted to put through the build server were just never going to work with the old build server. So we spent several months uh Miles and I working pretty heavily on redoing the build
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server. Yeah, we went from like eight 10 builds a day to 40 if we needed it. Yeah, good stuff. Um I mostly work on uh the patching system that we have. So previously we had a uh patcher that could only deliver the game at about 3 megabytes per second which um for a lot of people they have internet that can you know uh consume faster than that and even if they had faster internet than that sometimes they wouldn't get the full 3 megabytes and so with the patcher rewrite of patcher 2.0 know um I worked on the back end for the patcher and with the improvements that we made um we went from around 3 megabytes per second people could consume to um I can max out the pipe here which is about 100 megabytes per second that we can pull.
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So people are able to get their downloads a lot faster. It's a lot more reliable. It's easier for us to troubleshoot inhouse and overall it's a lot happier of an experience for the player um just in general. Um, besides that, I also work on building out the analytics pipeline both for our patcher as well as the game. So, um, we are able to use analytics to kind of track how fast players are, um, consuming, uh, patches from us so that we can see maybe there's um, some issues based on the region, maybe people with certain operating systems are having trouble with the patchers. And as for the game, um the system that I'm building out is so that developers can put in all sorts of hooks into the game that so when
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someone like explodes in their ship or kills another player, they can send an event through um the pipeline that I built out so that that all gets tracked and they can have graphs and you can correlate things like which weapons do the most damage um what weapons are players using the most, what ships players are using the most, how many kills people are getting in like Vanuel Swarm, um what ships are the fastest in race times. Um and this way we can do things like that as well as how effective each type of controller is. And then we can pass these analytics on to our producers, our designers, Chris Roberts, and they can all take a look at them and use those analytics to make a decision to push the game in one direction or the other so that it um is a better experience for the players. Right. to go back a little bit to the beginning of your analytics conversation. I think
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that is a really common misconception with some of our backers is they really only think of the analytics piece in terms of we're going to collect a bunch of data that we're going to use to balance the game. Mhm. There's actually so much more that we do with the analytics piece, you know, including uh tracking the number of people who download the game, uh tracking the number of people who launched the patcher, looking for behaviors that we uh might indicate a problem like you launched the patcher but didn't download anything even though there was a patch available, it'll, you know, send back to us that that happened so that we can use that to zero in on problems. So there's a lot of data we can get from that. So yeah, um earlier this year um and even going back into last year when we were having problem with multiplayer, one of the analytics that we um fall back upon
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was that we would look at the number of players who had started the game versus the number of players who were actually joining a multiplayer match. And using those sort of ratios, you can easily see where if that um if that percentage of players who's actually get able to get into a match compared to the players that are able to join a game or rather load the game up starts to decrease, then we can see that there's some major issues that need to be addressed. So uh I guess a normal workday for the cloud solutions guys I am one of the two people on the team is a lot of R&D trying to figure out what patterns work best in the cloud um proving out those patterns and then taking that to the developers. So, you know, if you're really comfortable with building a game from uh the standpoint of we own a bunch
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of physical hardware in a data center and all of that hardware is paid for. uh that leads you down a very different approach in terms of uh the pattern, the programming model, the design uh that you want to go through when you're making like the matchmaking service and gym and the dedicated game servers. Uh whereas when you're trying to build something that is always going to run in the cloud from the very first iteration uh that's going to lead you down a very different path of a uh very serviceoriented architecture u using microservices uh trying to make things very resilient to uh failures because we don't control
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the hardware. Um our cloud provider gives us uh virtual machines and every cloud provider they all tell you there is no guarantee that these will always be available. Sometimes uh a machine a virtual machine is going to go away. Sometimes an entire region of virtual machines is going to just disappear and uh you need to build your application and in our case the application is Star Citizen in a way that can survive those kinds of things. Um anybody who's really interested in that sort of stuff I'd highly recommend that you check out the Netflix tech blog. They talk really extensively about the strategies that they've used to build very resilient cloudnative micros service
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architectures. Um, and that's been a big influence on us. That's mostly what the cloud uh solutions team works on in a in an average day. Um, an average day for the build system usually involves coming in in the morning after babysitting the builds and debugging any problems. devs may have had with the builds when they get them and um going through any issues of if there were extra assets in the builds or if we need to pull something out of a build. Uh right. Or some bad code got checked in. Yeah. Or some bad code that caused the build to fail. And yep. Um that's followed up with moving on to per anything that can uh be implemented to further increase performance. Uh we're currently trying to paralyze our asset
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streams more so that we can increase the speed at which we pack files in our pack structure and distribute them faster. Right. So the the backers are probably familiar with all the game art assets. They all come in these huge pack files. That's been pretty standard in games for quite a while. We're trying to kind of develop uh some new pack structures that will work in tandem with the delivery method that Keegan's built in the new launcher that'll uh help us deliver only the changed parts of the packs. Since those are zipped files, that can get a little uh gnarly at times. So, we're working heavily on that. And part of that also uh goes back to the build system and trying to build each one of those packs at the same time that you're building all the other packs, right? The
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original build system that we had uh six months ago, for example, uh it just had to build each pack in order in alphabetical order. Uh so that process would typically take several hours. Um, our new process that Miles is, uh, working towards will, uh, kick off an individual little asset job for every single pack. So, they all happen at the same time and should cut down the the total time it takes to compile all the assets and put them in the packs by a lot. Yeah. Yeah. But one thing that you know when we uh talk about getting people patches are more efficient like doing incremental patching and things like that is it's not just building the the sort of applications that deliver them like when we put in the new
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patching system um with sort of incremental patching protocols that could look at differences in these files and try and patch the ones that um have changed. it's not just providing that solution but also working on the uh back and structure of how the packs are actually created. So um currently we are working on um taking these pack files and structuring them in such a way that um it works better with our delivery system. Yeah, our delivery system should be able to detect just the parts of the packs that have changed. That's something that a lot of backers know that we've been working towards for a while. We're aware that both our previous patching solution and our current patching solution have the
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potential to maybe send you more data than has changed uh between builds just as a function of the fact that those files are these big uh compressed messes. So it's really hard to disentangle and just change the files that need to be changed inside of them. Um, that's all complicated also by the fact that, you know, there's some security on those pack files to make them so that, you know, it's harder to tamper with and that's something that helps avoid uh, you know, players attempting to hack the game or exploit it somehow. It'll also help us distribute to our other studios a lot faster as well if we don't have to send the entire build. Yep. So, those are big things that we're working towards today. Uh, what's a day look like for you? So um usually my duties are spread between doing things like uh the analytics side,
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the patcher side as well as various projects um throughout uh both the operations department and assisting it on some of their efforts. So some days it could be um that some new analytics are requested for let's say that there's a new issue that people are experiencing in the patchers and we want to get more visibility on it. Then my day will be spent working on getting those analytics into the uh patcher and then getting that patcher out to the public. Um and along with delivering sort of the patches for the patcher um my duties also kind of include delivering the game patches to the public. So which can be a dayong task depending on the sort of uh release that we're doing whether that's
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public or a test universe release. And as for just uh various random projects that come up uh like mentioned right now I'm working with it on restructuring sort of the pack files that we have and making them work better for the patcher. Yeah. So patch day for us is a very busy time. Obviously the company in general is really busy on patch days. Um, since we do have offices all over the world, usually the patch gets generated uh after all of the folks here in the US are done. It gets generated overnight. People in Germany and the UK come in and immediately start banging on that build to see if it looks good. Generally speaking, we've got the build up on the PTU earlier. So, we've also tra track tracked down some issues from the
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players banging on it. Um, so they'll be looking to make sure that those issues have been addressed and the bugs fixed. Uh, if all of that looks good, they kind of have all day to work on it. Then whenever, uh, we get here in Austin a couple hours before LA, we start doing QA passes on it, too. If everything looks good, we usually try to have a thumbs up, thumbs down meeting around 11:00 our time, which would be 9:00 a.m. in uh in LA and uh towards the end of the day in Germany in the UK. And all the producers will sign off. If that looks good, then uh Keegan will typically start uploading all the data u to our CDN. uh Miles and one of the other folks on our team, Ahmed,
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typically spend uh a good portion of the morning uploading to the servers and getting all the data on there. And at that point, everything's kind of staged. And we put it all kind of on hidden services. This is a pretty normal thing lots of game companies do. So, we put it on a hidden patch server and we put it on hidden game servers. And uh by hidden I just mean they're restricted so only people from our office can see them and get to them. And then we give that information to QA and they try and log in and download the patch and play the game the way a customer would. And if that all looks good and we get everything uh signed off and rubber stamped, then you know at that point we start doing the stuff that you guys see where there's community postings that a new patch is coming out. We turn on the patching uh for the public. So you'll
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see new patches in the launcher and once you get those downloaded we will uh turn on the new servers with the new patch. So once you've downloaded the patch you can connect to those new servers and play. Obviously there's always the chance because we are uh as diligent as we can be but our QA is still just a couple dozen people. Uh so there's always the possibility that something has slipped through. So, it's always a tense few hours immediately after the game has been pushed live where we're watching it very closely to see if anything has slipped through or something crazy is happening that customers are seeing that we weren't able to replicate, try and address that as quickly as possible. That can sometimes turn into a really long night for us. But, yeah, there have been nights where we've stayed until 2, 3, 4, 5:00 a.m. after getting in at 9:00 a.m.
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that morning in order to get a a build out to you guys. And if anything does go wrong, we always have uh the ability to roll back patches. So if anything like uh if the game crashes on startup or there's something uh huge that needs to be corrected immediately, then there's always option we have to flip the switch backwards and go back to old patch and then bring up the old servers again. It's another advantage of the new build system is we can really keep a huge backlog of builds for us to fall back on if we need to. So, that's what the operations team does here in Austin. Uh, we do have a couple of other members uh spread out across the world. Uh, hopefully you guys will get to hear from them as well. Uh, I guess thank you very much for all your, you know, backing
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and, uh, giving us the opportunity to make Star Citizen. Thank you. Thanks, guys. Thanks, guys. Next up, Jared sat down with Persistent Universe director Tony Zurvec for a special two-part ATV interview. Thanks, guys. In this week's ATV interview, we're sitting down with the director of the Persistent Universe, Mr. Tony Zurich. Tony, how you doing? Uh, pretty good. Now, uh, we've gained a lot of new followers, a lot of new citizens since the last time you were on camera here. So, why don't you start by introducing yourself to the community and tell them a little bit about what you do? My name is Tony Zerbec. I'm the director of Persistent Universe, and that entails a number of different responsibilities. Uh, we do everything
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from guiding the development, uh, at the high level of, uh, what I'd call the peaceful AI. It's the AI that's going to drive all of the uh characters in the various landing zones that you're going to see throughout, you know, uh all these different environments. Um the the the non-combat oriented AI. Uh it's also involves the creation of all of these different areas that you're going to be visiting within the persistent universe. Um we've already uh we've already put out there uh area 18, which is the first of those. There's a whole slew of other ones that are, you know, coming down the pike and that you'll be seeing soon. Um, we'll get into, you know, a little bit of detail on some of those later in this conversation. Um, it involves a whole lot of, uh, work with regards to, uh, everything from, uh, shopping interfaces
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to how, uh, you're actually going to transition, you know, from server to server, the whole backend, you know, infrastructure, you know, for the networking and a variety of other things, you know. Sounds like most of what Star Citizen is as opposed to Squadron 42. Yeah. Uh yeah, Squadron 42 in general is a very specific, you know, uh a very specific experience. And if you play through it, there will be some variability, but by and large, different players will have very similar experiences as they, you know, traverse through the game. Whereas the persistent universe is intended to be a completely open-ended uh environment where you completely dictate your own path. Are you going to be a mercenary? Are you going to be a pirate? Are you going to be uh you know, you know, a a protector, you know, of the of the weak and
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vulnerable? Are you going to basically are you going to be a minor? Um the the sky is completely wide open in terms of not only what you do, but you know, how effective you are at it, whether you recruit other players to your cause to assist um and all these types of things. Gotcha. Now, for a long time, we just launched the social the social module. Uh, for a long time we talked about the social module was going to be inviting people back to your hangers. When the social module actually arrived, it turned out to be so much more than that. Can you talk can you tell us a little bit about why that change was made? Yeah, that was actually one of the later changes that I made and there were a couple of reasons for it. One was at the time just for technical reasons the code base had been split into uh a gamedev and a 120 version and so it was very difficult to get back all of the pieces
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of the puzzle that we needed to uh to basically do the shared hangers at that point in time. Um as of right now it would actually be much more straightforward. We're back. We're reintegrated. That's no longer an issue. Um, but that kind of goes back to the primary reason why I found Area 18 way more interesting as an initial release of the social module was that the mechanism by which you access it is the is the same for all the players. So when I go to my hanger, I'm in my own little environment. I then go to area 18 and I'm automatically shunted into a common area with all of these other players. That's dramatically different from me landing in my single player hanger and I invite you over and now it's just the two of us. And unless I specifically invite someone else and maybe they maybe they uh accept my invitation and maybe they don't, then maybe we've got a third
00:35:40
guy and I do the same thing and maybe we've got a fourth guy. Um that's much slower pace. You don't tend to meet people you don't already know. Um and so it just struck me that it would be much more interesting to a much larger swath you know of the community to basically put them in close proximity uh you know via you know via passive means. So all they needed to do was go to area 18 and they were going to automatically be combined with other players. This will actually touch upon some of the enhancements that we've got to uh to the very next milestone the you know the so-called you know 2.0 milestone which will introduce the million mile high club. Um we've got some specific enhancements planned for that release that will make going to uh area 18 that much more interesting uh
00:36:31
versus versus what it has been in the past. Okay. Uh since you brought it up the million mile high club uh we're going to talk with Mark Skelton a little bit later about it, but what can you can you give us kind of a top level overview of what the Million Mile High Club is supposed to achieve? Yeah, the Million Mile High Club is basically a private, you know, uh, meeting community area that was purchased by a number of players in the past. And so we're now delivering, you know, upon the promise, you know, uh, to those players. And what it is is the owners of those areas have the ability to invite other individual players or entire clans to, you know, to these, you know, to these areas. It resembles kind of a combination between a sports bar and an entertainment lounge. Um, we've decked them out with a blend between it's it kind of blends
00:37:19
visually technology with traditional uh wood finishes. So, it's got kind of a high-end, you know, technological, you know, look to it. Um, they're filled with aquariums, monitors. Uh, you have your own private bartender, you've got your own private dormen. So, it's really a way to, you know, uh, allow players to set up, you know, their own personal meeting area, um, to discuss, you know, whatever they want. And eventually once the you know once the uh the main game is online this is a great area for you know for people in a given you know guild or clan to basically head to to find other players that are looking you know that they know that they've interacted with before that haven't already gone out into space and gone to a different planet a different system etc. like these guys are literally waiting for other members of that clan
00:38:07
to arrive and then they, you know, they basically join up and head off. Um, and as opposed to having to do all of this communication through, you know, a typical, you know, chatbased interface and hope that you're on the same server and all that type of stuff, the there's actually going to be a lot more to it than that in terms of you'll eventually be able to deck out the Million Mile High Club with all of the trophies that you win, you know, from various competitions with the souvenirs that you purchase from different landing zones that you uh that you visit with pictures that you'll be able to eventually purchase, you know, on the walls. you'll be able to customize, you know, the artwork, things of that, you know, things of that sort, you know, type. That's exactly what I was going to ask, whether whether at some point down the line we'd be able to customize our million mile high club so that mine doesn't look like yours doesn't look like Ben's or whatnot. Yeah. And then that's actually something that the same
00:38:54
interface by which you'll be customizing that will also be extended over into your hanger and that will wind up hitting on the second iteration of the shopping will start to get into the ability to buy things and actually route them to places other than on your person so that you can buy a small trophy that you find you know from a you know from a small vendor in the bizaar area on Nicks and route it back to your million mile high club or to your ship or to your hanger somewhere other than on your physical person. So, the Million Mile High Club is cool and I understand that's coming in 2.0. What else does 2.0 bring as far as the social module planet side aspect? The the 2.0, you know, uh the 2.0 release will be the first one to where you can actually formally establish a party. And this is important for a number of reasons. Once you're
00:39:42
obviously you know out you know undertaking missions then it's got you know very you know uh you know uh very you know obvious benefits but it's got more subtle advantages in terms of when you are in your hanger and you transition to area 18 now we will no longer just select a random server according to how many players are there and shunt you to that. Now, it will give precedence towards trying to push you into the same instance where your other party members are. And this is something that we're going to be utilizing throughout the game in terms of there's going to be a hierarchy of things in terms of what my capabilities are versus other players on that server in terms of whether I'm a uh I'm you in a party with somebody that's on a particular, you know, server, whether I'm got them as,
00:40:29
you know, maybe not a party member, but they're a friend, they're someone that I actually know. These are all things that will be taken into account when you go to an area where we may have we may have two or four or 10 or 20 different you know servers representing different instances of that area. But what would be most interesting to you is to be pushed into a version of that area where there are actually people that you know and you know you've got a history with. Um it also uh adds some backend infrastructure in this 2.0 no version um that we're exploiting to uh allow us to create the million mile high club that's going to make it much easier for us to then link other landing zones and stuff into uh into the game in the future. It's all been uh very abstracted now at a high level to where the difficulty for example of adding nyx and having players
00:41:17
you know and having the servers spawn up versions of nyx and allowing players to shunt into that you know automatically according to you know uh whether they're a party member with someone or something else. Um it's now getting to the point to where that's that's very straightforward to do. Gotcha. Would that extend to things like I don't friends list. Is there anything like an enemies list or or or folks you specifically don't want to play with? Uh yeah, but less so. Um it's more for, you know, at least the the the current thinking for that is you would certainly be able to uh you know uh exclude people from being able to talk to you and things of that sort. Um we're not yet thinking that we'd want to uh that we'd want to prevent you from going to a particular server simply because
00:42:04
this player is actually on there. One other really interesting thing about version 2.0 is that it's going to add the ability what we call gym routing. And basically gym the generic instance manager is the service that you know sits in the background and it keeps track of all of the different instances that are instantiated you know across the entire universe. It also keeps track of, you know, which players are allocated to which in which instance and it controls when a player wants to move from one instance to another um exactly which one he's routed to. And so one of the, you know, enhancements that we're going to be making available in version 2.0 O is going to be the ability so that when you use an elevator, it will show you your destination, but it will also show you the different instances within
00:42:51
which you have other party members or friends so that you can select which one you want to go into. So when you go into your hanger, you know, now you'll be able to just select I want to go to area 18, you know, throw me, you know, wherever you want to uh do the best fit. But you can also see, well, you have three party members on this instance and you have six friends on this instance and you have 14 friends on this instance. Which one would you actually prefer to go to? And the one with only six friends might be more interesting because you're trying to get that guy to come over to your party, but he's not responding, etc. Whatever the case may be. I'm not that interesting. I don't have that many friends. So, uh, so sounds great. What, looking ahead, what's next? The next big one uh on our side after uh the million mile high
00:43:41
club, you know, 2.0 and all that is really going to be the shopping milestone. And that's the one that is for the first time going to give you the ability to start customizing your character. Um you'll do that via Cassaba outlet, which is one of the stores that's in Area 18 right now, but it's been closed off. You will have the ability to go into that store. There will be a variety of different uh types of clothing, you know, scattered about that shop. Uh shirts, pants, uh jackets, hats, shoes, you know, things of that sort. You'll be able to utilize uh a currency. There's still some debate over exactly, you know, what we're going to do with, you know, what type of currency and all that. Um and you'll be able to purchase these, you know, purchase these things to uh customize your character, uh how you see fit. Uh this will also be
00:44:30
the first test of the true persistence system. There is persistence of a sort within the game right now, but whether it's on the platform, the login side, or whether it's in terms of how you customize your ship, there are, you know, for a variety of different reasons, these are not the long-term solutions for the overall game. Uh what we've been focused on, you know, for, you know, for a while now is basically building out that the the back-end functionality and services and database, you know, abstraction layers and all that type of stuff to allow us to really, you know, handle persistence in a in the proper way for a large, you know, massively multiplayer, you know, game like this. And so this will be the first small test of that system is that those those pieces of clothing will actually you know all of those clothing transactions will be getting executed
00:45:18
via the server. Um the changes to your inventory will not be stored locally. They will not be stored over you know in a web database you know on turbulent side. They'll actually be getting stored in the persistent universe you know uh database. Um, one other thing that's going to uh allow you to customize your character to, you know, to a bit farther a degree will be right now, uh, with the initial release of the social module, we just put in a short, you know, a shortcut key so that you could hit F6 to change the armor on your character. And that was really a a very last minute thing that we added just because we didn't want everyone to look the exact same. And so now we've kind of built that out a little bit to where uh you'll be able to go to a particular usable in your hanger and you'll be able to utilize it. And at that point you can
00:46:05
see your character and you can either select standard civilian clothing which is what you would choose if you wanted to go up and basically access Cassaba and start changing your t-shirt and your pants and stuff like that. You can also select any of the six suits of armor that we're you know uh that we're giving you access to right now. Obviously, that will be restricted according to which ones you own, you know, for the final game. Um, we want to also allow the ability to, you know, for you to modify your skin tone, your face, and your hair. It's not yet clear how many of those will actually make their way into that 2.1 shopping uh milestone. Um, but if whatever doesn't hit there will show up shortly thereafter. Um, but that's the short-term instance allow you to modify those aspects of your personal appearance and also you know the the you
00:46:55
know your the the clothing that you're actually wearing. Gotcha. Be sure to tune in next week for the second part of Tony's interview. It's always so cool to hear from Tony. Um because basically everything he says is gold. Um I just love how it's two parts cuz of course it's two parts. It's Tony. This weekend is the 25th anniversary of the Wing Commander Secret Missions
00:47:45
add-on. Yes, the first expansion disc for the original Wing Commander came out uh 25 years ago uh tomorrow. Actually, we're celebrating on uh Saturday. We're going to have another live stream similar to how we did for the original Wing Commander a couple months back. And uh Jared, myself, and some others will be here playing through the game. We've got some special guests. We have some ships to give away and uh all sorts of trivia. So, please check it out. And now it's time for this week's MVP. Ben, the envelope, please. Oh, here is our lovely MVP envelope. I will not sniff it this time. This week's MVP is Jack Frack and his video showing the first cargo transport in Star Citizen. This video is especially cool because it kind of shows it a it's emergent
00:48:33
gameplay, which we're always amazed to see in this early stages of PTU, but B, it shows you how we're building the essentials into the game right now, so that when it is time to actually introduce cargo systems, oh, the pallets already exist and they can be put in a ship and they can be moved from place to place. Uh, so check it out. It's pretty cool. Very cool. And finally, here's your art sneak peek. Wow. Yay. Be sure to tune in to Reverse the Verse tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. Pacific on
00:49:21
Twitch. We'll be talking about that sneak peek and everything else Star Created. And it's our first new studio. No, it's not. It's our first. It It will be. It will be our first one from the new studio. Um so get ready to see some bare walls and uh wooden crates. And of course, thank you to all our subscribers for making this show possible. We will see you next week on Around the Verse. A round of verse. Heat. Heat. [Applause]

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