Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Flight Plan: Air Traffic Control

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:14

   hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse our weekly look at star citizen's ongoing development i'm sandi gardiner and i'm chris roberts it's great to have you back Chris thanks after attending games gone I spent a few weeks at foundry 42 working with both the UK and the Frankfort teams on a variety of things including alpha 3.0 which we're making some great progress on that's right our battle against 3.0 s bugs and blockers continues and the team is hard at work on multiple fronts to get these issues knocked out as fast as possible currently the dev team has been focused on clearing out the remaining blockers while our dev ops team is going through the process of repairing the build for distribution let's take a look at all the hard work that's gone into getting 3.0 ready with this week's burn down hello and welcome back to burn down

2. 00:01:02

   our weekly show dedicated to reviewing progress on issues blocking the release of star citizen alpha 3.0 to the evocati last week we ended at 26 total must fix issues which was prioritized as 11 blockers 10 criticals and 5 highs let's catch up with the team on how we're progressing as we approach release Aaron is very keen to try and go to a party this week so what we've done is severely cut down the PTM us fix list those 21 issues are the ones that we're going to focus on the main focus for this like initial push to evocati is going to be the experience of the first hour two hours or so the the directors and the executive took a really good look at what we wanted to do for our first release of a car to be because we're really keen on getting this out to

3. 00:01:50

   to the evocati group and start for them to start testing things Jerry's probably Jerry shouldn't use right and labeled right and the time when I should be a chair so what I want is a very quick top-level view from the user of their group calling out like what kind of issues that the thing that I asked QA to do today in the Leeds meeting is I wanted them to just highlight the ones that they think are big evocati issues that aren't on this list and send that filter to you will recommend what we think out of the 13 issues that they've highlighted we think probably should be fixed I think there's one or two that we

4. 00:02:37

   think you know it's probably worthwhile but Aaron it's for you to make that call and that you can let us know if you want to add them or not just simply guys look and only 20 bees will nourish needs of silver once you guys feel to be guess you take off good suppose like a stop but I do think if you get the fixing forum fully for the ATT market please just be careful each other yes don't just safety us and also just take care make sure you get a check and so for things because that costs us more time anything when the basic build race kills you hear it kills morning and then

5. 00:03:28

   what for at least before that's a fine thing fix it might sound in my Dave don't go back sir we just need to make sure that were really careful when doing that stuff in that rather an extra hour make sure that's fixed and then China returns the next / today there was an issue where you spawn in in Levski and you can't get out of your easy hub room the door just does not open at all so we've knocked that one its head today this bug was this one here where the doors in the habitation pods in Levski weren't opening once the player spawns our animations and our assets are stored in separate places on perforce and we also have something called an inclusion list which is this guy here and this inclusion list has everything that's

6. 00:04:18

   included 43.0 in it it just ensures that we don't include stuff this shouldn't win 3-0 the animations which are these guys here weren't on that inclusion list and it was a case of three clicks for me to fix which is my kind of bug we found these bug recently a few days ago where QA noticed that when we were trying to use the air traffic controller to land or take off in a specific station and you were not giving any landing pad assigned or your ship was not a spawned like nothing was really working as intended and so the main problem we had was that it was only happening on release builds testing locally on development builds from my computer or QA on profile builds this was fine we're

7. 00:05:07

   checking it on the development build and it's easy it's a debug a lot of stuff because you can use a lot of Shiva's and just to get more information about the server about the client and what this particular issue was only present on release builds and so it's a lot harder to debug that information which men call us how to whitelist deceive us so we could use it I discover after going through the the logs was that one of the operators which is trying to answer you when you request a landing or takeoff was getting into a valid state and that was causing all the requests to go through the to the operator to just fail so he thought he could communicate with you but he couldn't we came in this

8. 00:05:55

   morning and notice straight away we had a little bit problem in that the bill we were wanting to use for the day had a pretty severe crash in in a something we call data core which is kind of as the name implies where a lot of data is stored in the build relies upon so that meant that as soon as we booted the game you had about an eighty percent chance of getting a crash with that there wasn't work around for this but it didn't work for everybody so we we really had to make sure we fix that one up in shipping only release builds nothing seems to work none of the network messaging is coming in from the server you'll try to interact with the door nothing will happen you open your mobiie glass and nothing will happen just nothing at all and eventually you get disconnected from

9. 00:06:44

   the server it turned out it wasn't quite as straightforward as we would have liked there was a few other edge cases we need to make sure that were they were working properly and you know all all the fixes worked through all the edge cases we eventually got there but it did slow down development a little bit another bug fixing which meant that certain people that couldn't use the workaround how to roll back to the build from the day before because of this server crash which we're still in the process of nailing down and should be a fixing for that as soon as possible once we've got a list of ships that we can check that are safe that aren't crushing the server then we can look at the ATC issue and and we'll just do that by spawning the same safe ships what that turned out to be was that when the

10. 00:07:33

    player teleported a part of his his body and his attachments is loadout what kind of store attached to the seat so when the ship got D spawned everything else we get this bond that was attached to it including a low down so your character was fine on your local machine and on the Sailor because it was a bit of code that managed to detach your loadout from the sea but it wasn't triggering correctly on remote clients so I kind of investigated that bit and found out that it wasn't the network code that was responsible we needed that little bit that was going to detach and the load out from the seat so once I found out most pass it on to m1 or guys in LA when we have to replicate that across all the machines and on other clients what was happening is we would

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    delete the ship and the teleportation call wouldn't get sent over to the client so we would end up deleting the player and the reason for that is if we pretend this cup here is the player and I'm the spaceship this cups parent is me so I for all intense purposes own this Cup if I get deleted or removed from the server so does this cup the only way to prevent the cup from getting deleted when I get deleted is to change the pairing so we need to make sure that that teleportation call gets sent all the way across all the clients so that this guy could teleport to the proper spot away from the vehicle and now when me the vehicle gets removed it's gone and pretty much that change was to make sure that we send this thing called a remote

12. 00:09:10

    method so when we do the teleportation on the server it sends out a broadcast using a remote method to say hey teleport this guy and remove them from the seat and send them over there then we'll get the delete message the ship will go away the guys over there and well everything's fine and dandy the Vokes can be quite simple sometimes you know exactly what the cause is just as soon as you see the book it's just a question of tracking it down fixing it and others are a bit more complicated it's kind of like layers of an onion you've gotta peel away each layer and that use involves passed it on to the next person in the chain they peel away their layer eventually get down to the meat of the issue the the center of the onion and actually fix the book my team is responsible for digital

13. 00:10:01

    publishing and with 3.0 imminent we've been doing a lot of work to enhance our systems and expand our capabilities and so I feel like we're ready to publish pretty much any time we get a selected build that's ready to go people know it comes with a lot of changes we just finished with amazing deployment for the time service and the shop service most probably by the end of today I'll receive that the configuration for the new probability service that also needed as part of 3.0 from Jason Healy and Tony Zurich with the introduction of any new service we always have to be ready for for all kind of quirks that available usually when he runs that the service and his machine to make sure it runs as expected he does not put on

14. 00:10:49

    consideration how it would interact in a full release deployment we used to take way longer to receive specs and contracts from the universe services team and introduced it in the pipeline but with good use of macros and good use of certain batteries now we will be able to introduce a new service pretty easy than it used to be however that doesn't mean that introducing a new service is not a lot of work we still have to monitor it closely to see what kind of resources it would obtain what kind of work look you can put it through and once we get the crashes that the QA team is easily able to reproduce fixed the number of people that we have in the evocati and just the amount of strange and interesting ways that they can think of playing the game that we might not have thought of internally allows them

15. 00:11:37

    to generate stability data that we might not know about provided that we get the build stable enough before we get it to them and since we value their time we want to make sure that the data that they're generating for us is actionable things that we can quantify and document and then get fixed before we release another build to them and our site as well whenever we have a large release like 3.0 we always like to make sure that we have enough room to add capacity no matter how many players we can get we are expecting a lot of players this release especially with the new patch our launcher the diff that should allow a lot of players and so many areas in the world to be able to match as often as you want was very little download sizes so we kind of took the initiative and I started playing with more regions than DWS to allow us to expand originally I came up with the stability score because

16. 00:12:25

    I think in arena commander 1.3 the players were being really vocal about the fact that the game servers were just not stable and not fun because it was crashing so often and just because of the kind of person I am I like to help people I saw an opportunity for something that I could do that nobody else was doing so over time the goal is to reduce the threshold for what we consider a failure I actually based the stability threshold for what we consider a failure on the feedback that we got from our players in 1/3 oh and so anything that's considered better than that patch is considered a stability pass as time goes on I'm planning to steadily reduce the threshold for what we consider to be a passing grade so we'll have less crashes per person

17. 00:13:15

    online per hour compared to what we have now because in order for people to get into some other really specialized parts of the game you'll have some people that may want to only do data running some people that may only want to do cargo some people that may only want to do fps and the problem with keeping things where they're at now is that those people are only going to encounter stability issues that have to do with the specific part of the games they like to play since we've honed in our focus on fixing major issues that impact traversal and navigation of our vast new universe we've made substantial progress on knocking out our remaining must fix issues for initial PT release to the avocado test group a spokes complete there must fix issues for initial release they move on to continuing to polish and bug fix more features that will be included in our next publish to PTU now at the time of filming this

18. 00:14:04

    we've reduced our total must fix issues by 19 this brings us down to seven issues stopping this first release to the avocado group so tune in next time to continue getting an in-depth look at the road to the star citizen alpha 3.0 release here on burned-down be sure to check back next week to see how much closer we are to getting 3.0 into the hands of the evocati now let's turn our attention today's main feature the air traffic controller system so we knew early on that it was vital to build a system that could manage traffic at landing zones and space stations to help juggle both the players that we'll be taking off and landing but also the NPCs that will be coming through not only will the air traffic controller system help keep landing pads organized but the designers worked hard to keep the process as immersive as possible so let's take a look at what went into crafting this vital system and see how it will help

19. 00:14:52

    keep you from landing a star fare on a landing pad that's way too small with the air traffic controller we have tried to get a feeling of realistic situation so when in real life when you have different planes coming to an airport do you need some kind of control you need rules you need a way of making sure everything is going to plan so we have been trying to to get the same behavior in star citizen so up to now when you approach an a station you just have to land and that was it now you have to request landing which implies a communication with someone and

20. 00:15:40

    MBC which can be a real NPC or a automatic voice one telling you where you can land or if there's no space available or anything like that and that's also a control over how much you can stay in a landing pad like security measures and so on right now players can just land everywhere I want it's nothing controlling them there's nothing saying oh you should park here there's no there's no rules to that and we needed to find a system that basically coordinates landing taking off and also creating more immersion on what actually like flight controls are the concept behind our game is to be very realistic in what we do so we do a lot of research and anything that goes on and especially that definitely does not leave out the

21. 00:16:29

    air traffic controller so we've done a lot of research into what air traffic controllers do when when we were on set when filming and pcap it you know it was it was really important you know because the game was really very much filmed like a movie and so as we as we went about tracking and trying to maintain and manage the content it was very clear that we needed to focus on the implementation side and use that as a way to track how the the pcap should be cut up in the way should be organized and so utilizing that that background of implementation I made sure that we tracked our pcap in a way that was ultimately feasible to edit edit the project and and and and actually track how how it was being cut up and on the on the editing board it's really a

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    behavioral thing and so while we can record all the context and all the different dialogue that we want it really becomes you know really comes down to our systems to really be able to handle it and yeah our engineering team is just phenomenal they are really pushing the boundary of what AI can really handle and and making it a real systemic module of behavior so that it's not just like you know oh these guys do this thing or whatever it's it's a real air traffic controller module that that that's that's defining all these behaviors and and and it's not even just one voice it's defining the whole ballet of all the different you know people doing all the signals in there you know at AI saying oh they can go you have to take off or you can land and you go here you know all those kind of things that's it's it's it's a whole ballet if all these characters involved

23. 00:18:07

    well one of the more complicated things is that it's not working like in in real life where everyone behaves us they should be right there's still a game and players do what they want sometimes so we need to make sure to have rules in place which allow players to actually have an immersive experience but also don't abuse other players as well and have like punishment almost when they not follow the rules we have to account for the necessarily stupid things like the player strafing the station or flying too close and you know they have to react in the way it's you know that is both helpful to the play good to know let's not do that but but it's also it's it's it's a game you know it happens and it's it's fun it's entertaining so every flight controller is its own AI when you

24. 00:18:56

    hailing a tower to request landing or takeoff you're gonna be in contact with an actual sub sumption driven AI which has depending on the station unique voice lines or generic one and you will talk specifically only to that AI and that will give their response so there's an air traffic controller entity which is a combined version of the seats we already have and the usable system of the designers are working on and then they I will sit down and basically have sensors or feelers you could say to check how many ships are in the radius what ships request landing what pads are free what are occupied what are the different stations of occupation of these pads and will then according to that address landing pads to players there's a couple of peaceful ones for

25. 00:19:46

    special stations like left ski or grim Hanks or Prada Lhasa and there's also like a generic one a generic computer system which also picks up if there's for whatever reason no flight operator available because our flight a brace actually like physically placed in the station so you could basically stand in the station see him talking to someone and whoever is on the ship would see the same thing so it's a one-to-one transition let's say that station gets attacked or that guy is out of an emergency or whatever is not there we have a backup system that picks up which is a generic computer voice and that will handle the flight operation them if you think about it we have a big amount of content to get you know and be like a big piece of cake you know the sponge is the primary the big part of what what we do but there's also cake needs some

26. 00:20:35

    icing needs some flavor and so we like to you know have a general kind of voice set that that is used across the the galaxy and we also like to have some nice specific characters that are placed in locations and give a good flavor to certain things like for instance let's key we have it we have a general ATC but we also have this flight ops dude in unless key that's kind of like a California dude like me and he's a great character and he provides a lot of good character to that to that landing space and it's it's it's fun for players to enjoy that specific you know character

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    set rather than having a just a big universe of always general you know characters running around so this a little bit more complicated on just triggering a voice and you need animations for an NPC because if you go to a specific place in the station you will see this NPC talking to someone maybe it's not you but he's talking to someone and you can see how he's communicating with other people we need to make sure this is synchronized in the network with everyone we need to make sure if different players are talking to the ADC ATC's air traffic controller you need to make sure that two people don't get the same landing area you need to make sure they are not told at the same time by the same pc because as real people they can only talk to one person at a time so

28. 00:22:12

    there are several synchronization and network issues we have to consider while working on this we have had some challenges regarding for example the how do you control items our current system usually has like a priority system to control which NBC is in charge of a specific item so you can have for example in a ship wanna me see controlling the weapons while another NPC is controlling the ship but if the NPC controlling the weapons leaves the pilot takes control over the weapons things like that because of this system it was not easy to get the air traffic controller controlled by several NPCs at the same time without having one priority over the others so we have had to do different systems in code so one single ADC can be controlled by several

29. 00:23:02

    operators at the same time since we're using the one-to-one transition like a live feed to that ai you're talking to you which was playing the animations that means only one a I can technically talk to one player at the same time so the particular challenge there was to get multiple ai's work together as a traffic control and true you could say and handle multiple requests at the same time and not get overlapped or like take requests of each other or portably interests the same player so that was a challenge we tackled with some ssin and the group activity behaviors we have to get them all working together in a nice slave fashion the typical air traffic controller is very much or at least for our system it's it's like an answering machine where you you know you uh you

30. 00:23:51

    call up a company and you like okay now they gave me through getting a landing pad and what to do and then they they they they tell you how to okay you know okay we need money you know pay pay for this landing okay well you don't have enough credits you know but it's it's it's the answering service that that kind of takes takes that when we designed the system we looked at two things mainly one was like real life air traffic control at the airport or at military vessels like an aircraft carrier and the other thing was there's also a lot of flight simulations out there were like it's not really an MMO but you have actual people sitting in a tower and directing other people to land and take off and give like a landing but landing pads technically but yeah it gives more lifes to the station right it is some more people you talk to in the station and they actually have feedback

31. 00:24:40

    for you and it's not always gonna be the same hopefully we have for like different variants for that the player has more interactions with the world itself instead of just having the ball giving everything to the player yeah I mean the air traffic controllers just it's just a great subset of what what we do here at cloud Imperium because it's it's just it's just the one many facet of all the different systems that we do and how we put you know everything into something so that's just a great example so another fun aspect of the air traffic controller system is that the person answering your landing request can also provide a little flavor to them at that location we've already done this with Eze lahmacun who's the atc at Levski his laid-back attitude is fitting for a

32. 00:25:27

    place like Levski but will stand in contrast a more professional or more automated controllers located elsewhere in the verse and that's all for today's episode thank you to our subscribers for contributing each month to allow us to produce all our video content also subscribers September ship of the month is the Drake Herald so be sure to share your favorite images and videos of the ship in the subscriber done and of course thanks to all our backers for your support with what star citizen squadron 42 are trying to achieve just won't be possible without you your dedication to the game and efficient is greatly appreciated yes it is and until next week we will see you around verse [Music]

33. 00:26:37

    thank you for watching so if you want to keep it with the latest and greatest in the star citizen a squadron 42 development please follow us on our social media channels see you soon