Star Citizen: Pillar Talk - Alpha 3.9

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] gentlemen welcome back to pillar talk [Laughter] that's it so pillar talk just a real quick recap for what you know reminding people what these are so during the week we generally do inside star citizen star citizen live those shows are a little bit more about the what and the how whereas this show supposed to be about the why generally before or during a release of a couple of a patch for star citizen so we have 39 that's the one that we're all talking about that's hot on the lips these days so we've got a lot of content as you guys probably know nothing new that new missions new babbage's three moons are come in

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   prisons actor status system is fear of prowler and then 50 updates volatile cargo and so much more however those features are more we'll get there so obviously many of those features have been talked about a lot lately and some of our shows so we kind of want to talk about other features 3:9 features and other tech being put in I'm 39 so I wanted to jump in first to unified friends list every night John Tracy yeah they're gonna take us through this so why do a unified friends list well you got to understand what unified friendless really means because we had separate friends databases there was a couple different ones basically that didn't necessarily talk to each other so for example on spectrum I might have added Paul as a friend on spectrum I wouldn't necessarily vote and never transitioning to hate never see that in the game it's the same place first if I

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   added him in the game as a we called a platform friend I wouldn't see him on spectrum so that was kind of the first thing to work out and that took some back-end services to make sure that this was all talking to each other and coming from the same place now on top of that we wanted to make that Hall real-time so as somebody on spectrum is adding you we wanted to see that in the game immediately whether it's on your web platform your game it's all the same you can see it it's live and you know will continue to finish it off which we're being great when the VoIP and the toy it's an occasion between the platform and in game as well as the as a more rich presence so um can I win oh yeah look Shawn's on Hurston I can actually be in spectrum exactly seeing Shaun and I can see you can see these in it he's in the PU right now he's in Stanton on her right so it's just it's just stuff that you know honestly it's just needed to get worked out and this is the evitable

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   you know starting mark for what is really the social management tools so it's not full rich presence yet we can't tell you exactly where in the verse there I can say you're online and you're in the pew and there was one thing as well that you know I really hope for probably move into and it's something that you had mentioned a long time ago and I think it's a the orgs really want this but it's being able to within some sort of social panel social control be able to work on you know the military calls it radio etiquette where you know the commander can talk to the captain captain can talk to the pilot pilot can talk to but let the orgs sort of organize that stuff so all those controls whether that's org alliances and you know all these kind of things that that's that's where this will all go to it gives the players the ability well if they had the ability but an easier way to play together which

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   which really should just be a no-brainer should just be that easy I wish we could do it with our emails but yes we could so that's so great so the unified friends list obviously is quite a cool feature coming plus the foundation we've got here but persistence you know pause are you obviously did some stuff for three eight two yeah right and so now what do we got four three nine and what you know why that's maybe ever done the question to ask what persistent does for us what does this mean I guess you can you can I mean we got a three nine the stuff that you've it so far on three eight to you will stay with me personally I think it's a big step in the right direction we can we can lose some in-game persistence but we can't really lose people like they're on UEC or their items they're bought and the

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   ship they're bought in game and hopefully we've cleaned up some of the initial glitches of it I mean of course I think well you know if there's an exploit and someone's figured out a way to get a couple billion credits we reserve the right to either individually edit those people's accounts so we can just take the money or the items away from all orders general kept or just do a general cap as Paul says or even you know occasionally we may decide well you know we need to just reset the database and do a general white we're going to try not to do that if possible but you you you never know because we're constantly adding in some of these structures so you know we've got our next you know the next stage on the persistence which fourth of all I talked about is it's sort of the I cash side of it which is more like more fidelity in the

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   resistance so what we have right now is so saying saying Luisi write-ins you haven't we're storing those in a way that can survive the patches but we're not necessarily storing like every items we need to I cash the foundational that sort of micro persistence to do the physical inventory and that's a big thing and the other thing that opens up which is sort of the next stage which is sort of like bigger things but it would be now because we can persist anything you can be a player or an organization you can go down onto a you know like all those beautiful shots that people share a banquet sack and go I'm gonna set my homestead up here well we will with technology there is then that is what we need to be off to do that and that is our plan so when that's online we're working on the aspects that would include sort of what you would call base

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   building so you would go there you have to bring in the right resources and sort of create your little homestead of your base so organizations or players can create their own areas and of interest and essentially will help sort of build out and populate the resistant universe as much as we on the game design side so as we get these things on as you get closer to there okay we get closer to this sort of completely sort of dynamic universe that you can sort of go anywhere leave things build things destroy things pick things up it's it's it's you know and I think when you get to that it's going to be pretty amazing exicting like I cache is obviously one piece of the puzzle which is our internal high-speed database to store all that data because obviously that's a lot of data right of every single bottle can can be persisted and restored but

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   even I cache is just one piece where servos yes is a big big part of their to write so something needs to take the data and stream it in and swim it out and restore properly there's a lot of tech on a road developed right now which obviously won't see like all the features you talked about like they come eventually when people won't see them in 390 the foundation yet yeah because we like the services on the server for example when we wrote that out in 3.8 which was a big win for us I think people out there they they were like oh we expected to be like better performance or whatever while in reality it is one giant building block to like get to this full persistent universe

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    right now this all without other tech which is not there yet you don't really see the benefits yet but for us and Tony it is it's a real big milestone to get to exactly where vision where we can where we can store every single object and we can stream that area out and we push all the changes player data to that like we pushed that up into the data base and then when someone else comes back to that area we stream it all back and it comes back in the exact same stage if you have the eye cache and you have the server streaming what do you have they work together that's those two are necessary for that of a measure oh yes extend the server lashing because we can have you know tens hundreds of servers all communicating with each other they just we just need to be able to save out any arbitrary area with its full state which means whatever items

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    were there or not there or whatever you know to some back-end so that when we come in we can stream it back in weather we stream it out on this server or this server this server the state is the same between all of it and then you also should get much more of the performance impact so yes well like Paul says why you don't see the front end feature yet getting these things in they're actually quite exciting exciting for us technically because once they're in that we know okay now that enables this next stage and once we get these several stages in then all of a sudden all this great sort of dynamic tactile you know universe with state that could go there with many many players all together in the same areas becomes possibly know there's just so many layers of it um and we talked about it in the last pillow talk exactly and it was all theoretical but I did mention one other benefit during that last pillar talk that

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    absolutely was in place and Paul mentioned it but the load the thing was just generally now default for developers your your it's about seven gigs when it loads up it's it's almost it's so light well comparison to the 45 that it was before exactly loading the entire universe and now is it as a developer we have one server and one client and I'm the only client and I see like a lot of benefit is that oh it's crazy yes a big big benefits behind the scenes yeah exactly the call a life not just in the front end which is this long-term thing but all these benefits even developers so it's really cool yes some that you may not notice so with three point nine we're focusing now on quality of life with this release yeah and quality life can mean a lot of things as far as the player is concerned so from my standpoint a big focus has been and it's mandated from from Chris and Aaron which is the deep player

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    experience that you know that probably like for playing the game it so there's no frustrations there's no annoyances there you can do the things they can play the way they want to play when they want to do it basically in an intuitive way but I think it also goes down to you know a more technical level which is sort of build stability we're definitely trying to have a stable build and try to at least be as stable as a previous build or even more stable and we're willing to hold the build before it goes live for a little longer to get to that stage so we'd rather not push it out and say oh we've we've made exactly this day but it's crashing all the time and so as always there's always the balance between like oh so you can't spend too much time on it because it's very development and you also but it also needs to be enough time so people can actually enjoy the game and like start

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    playing the game I tell you and and you know sometimes it sort of goes up and down a little bit because you know for instance server OCS right that actually was a massive fundamental change in the backend because like parts of the universe just would not exist in the server anymore and they used to and so we would see issues that would get with that that we would never see before and so you know I think when sober OCS came in at the beginning you know we you know we took a little hit the stability but we've been fixing and moving those things up in general we're doing lots of little things I think also by the way isn't in this 3:9 we've reduced the lying time for FPS stuff yes so star Marine will be much better and so will the PU and the PU but the Pugh benefits and I think

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    when did I talk about this last on that I see I can't remember when but yet but the P benefits are tiny bit less than arena commander because it's really good when the server performances once we get 30 frames a second on arena crowd of gray everything's great once you get the little crater II you know to the this is the 5s or so but you know we don't we don't I guess it does still happen sometimes when the players get all spread out but anyways yeah yes it's in there and yes there is an improvement especially for a fresh server or when it's running really fast it's alright so another thing we've been working on player interaction system personal inner thought improvements Sean you want to tell us a little bit sure so you know when the players are playing it very commonly they'll have to go to the button mappings and you've seen this on live streams or anything it's escape goes to the control okay how do I pull

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    it flashlight okay how do I do the Dancy mode okay which by the way is my pet peeve because it's also my mic tested always changing it to what is DS and I'm like wasn't hosta used to be on J and they was like yeah and I think maybe it's on now or we got ahold are in this reload is the worst when you're standing there is a director are I'm sure as the CEO going how do I go through the person again yeah or well that's an easy one it's like a quality of life improvements on this yeah and we used to joke that the button bear in his truck you know and like it just got changed but anyways to do away with that completely not only having good default mappings anyways is to be able to give the players some ability to not just remap that but to have access to all their actions in game contextually and quickly mm-hmm also opens up like for instance like one of

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    my pet peeves is with all these great emotes yep but before to access them here to go to the chair and it's like slash down so whatever if you know they're there and if you go there and then their whole idea of the personal and thought system was to sort of open up you know different stances or action like whether you could want to be dancing or sitting down or whatever it would be yeah or you know all the various emotes salute and so it's just one place you can go select it and the concept is sort of it's a little bit I mean because you know I've talked about this for a while which is a the starcraft method which is youtube there and you can play Starcraft with just the mouse but once you start to learn the hotkeys and you sort of become the yeah you yeah you're the pro player you can do things much quicker to adapt but we

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    need to what we need is just someone all they know is the simple you know FPS WASD running around their interaction key a mouse and with that you should be able to do everything figure out how to use a ship how to use weapons how do all these things access all these actions and that really was the idea of yeah that was the intent that was the exact intent that he that he gave to us which was you know make make playing the game a little bit easier that's really whether that comes down to is is making playing that easier out of the gate that was the thing because yeah the controls haven't really changed but your access to those days so now you don't have to go into our key mapping stuff which actually isn't connected to our illustrator you have to go into a big list and figure out where your where your keys gonna be yeah or where your where your buttons gonna be yeah within the inner thoughts within the radial you

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    can just assign the key right there and it even tells you what it is so you can get dapped your style of play in sit you to different shortcut commands if you want or jewel kind of remap it all right there where you want it to be so that's really nice but then further to that we've got shortcuts to different categories so the idea here is that your interaction system or your inner thought system is is is like a very very it's a lighter version of the mobi Gus it's what you're doing in stitches so you're not in barracks preparing your weapon and taking it all apart and cleaning it and doing everything but you're reloading it or you're changing out the ammo really and I mean you kind of touch on a bit but the other thing that I think is really cool with it is the fact that you can map any you can bind any key to any of the action and you can re bang dynamically right there and personally I thought there's no going to

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    an option screw like you go to an option screen you do it here you literally it's like it's kind of like as you're going car radio you just hold you know number one for a second and then it's programmed to the station you're on right well this is the same thing which is like you're gonna hold the key down for a period of time and then it binds to that action that you're highlighting and the personal thought and so you can sort of rebound on the flavor face it you commonly doings you go oh you know what I'm playing with my group and I want to be able to give them some hand singles because we're playing fps and I want to be able to go like this so you combine that to whatever you want to whatever Keys you want and you can move it around so if you don't like for instance me thing I hate holding our for to holster I would rather have and I like H would have probably in fine for Alistair right so but I mean that that's I think that's

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    a big UX usability yeah positive for the game and those those are all the kind of little things that we need to get into the game that's why you know we're kind of taking some of the stuff into the to the new role where they're kind of pushing some design and some of the feature teams same idea that we used to do our developer tools with just for our players because it's like you know push the player experience make it easy for the player to play our game a little bit and and I'm really liking how that's going and I think it's working yeah all right all right so attachment UI so that was something we wanted to talk about a little bit more we're segue to that I think I have to say wowzers oh that's a good one I do owe me a while sir okay give it to me all right ready so speaking of boost to our user experience right let's talk about new attachments UI wowzers there it is okay now that got my vows or

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    it will describe so the attachments UI is pretty straightforward you go into a mode through their personal inner thought system you can go there or there is also a shortcut to it where your weapon comes up in here it's basically like the inspect mode that we had when you were going shopping for the weapons so you could take a look at it and you've got attachment points on it and within those attachments points you got barrel one you've got our underbarrel one that you've got the scope one as you mouse over each one of them you'll get a list or actually not a list it's gonna be a grid so within that grid view so let's see actual options and then you just go be a grid of the things you have that that's right and yeah it was a you know we went from list and now now it's the grid looks great like that that works a lot better because you can kind of see what it is rather than seeing and VTAC 18x whatever like like you know what I

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    mean so yeah you can see the scopes you can add them right on there you can swap them out as you go and you can also stow your weapon which will keep those on it with an option for later that if you pulled out another weapon you can pull that attachment off that weapon and put it on the other one and also it like I said it when we shift to physical inventory and just be more tactile this is necessary interface process because you know pulling up your character is a thing that's like a paper doll yeah like an you know an RPG paper doll thing sure and we want star citizen to be much more sort of Institute tactile I see things and rank with them hey I need to put a scope on it you know put a scope passionately and so we want to shift towards that and so these are you know like you've been talking about in this session a lot of the stuff our building blocks towards cooler and bigger stuff that's coming

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    down the road it's already kind of got benefit and it's cool but you know it also enables some of the other stuff without these these sort of functionality and features and we won't be able to do some of the other stuff that we want to do and I think ultimately will give you a pretty cool experience absolutely and it's and it's it's a it's a great point because all the features that we just talked about like all three of these things the unified friends player interaction system personal inner thought as well as the attachments UI it's all done through building blocks we couldn't have done it without building blocks and actually there was one little thing that came out of the attachments and it when you're holding the weapon like this it doesn't do it as much justice as it should like when you have inspect mode it was cool enough but really the pose of it it oh man the guns are cool I really I'm it's just it gave me a new appreciation for

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    the way the weapons look because you get so used to seeing them dude I mean the Philadelphia and also to understand the modularity of it they spend all the time to like break them up properly to like fit all the sniper scopes properly and all the stuff and now you can actually see that like I stopped stop seeing it so much but then you know the tires I'm just I'm really happy with are they okay maybe talk them about new Babbage and the moons okay I want to cover that like what's coming into this and and how they were made and I really think an environmental site you know like I think some people just think oh yeah you know like its new Babbage landing zone what's special about that but I think there's a lot of it's make starters and

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    specialists that our locations even though we use procedural tools their health sort of create at scale they're very specifically authored there you know we haven't long we have a universe we have a history and you can feel it and so when you visit the places you feel that and I feel like that's kind of one of the things that makes to us is and special even though we don't have a billion planets or anything yet you do feel like when you go to Microtech it is different than you're going to Hearst and for instance when you go to the moons and so I and as we build tools to allow us to sort of create that stuff quicker but still with that same level of quality OB be great but I really love that and I feel like the varmint team did an amazing job on new Babbage and it's gonna be fun to go around here and yeah get your burger I'll get your coffee or just hang out and then and you

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    know there's another nice thing which we also shut off an IRC is that we have the ability now to sort of change our like states based on the time of day so you know it's also the interior beverage one of the really cool things about is it's one of the first implementations of that and also you know there's a whole area there's a whole bar with a DJ and at nighttime there's laser lights and it's a party scene and during the daytime it's a bit more of a sort of a chill day drinking scene and it's it's it's equally cool ya know it's it's it's great the three moons which I think we've also done some IFC on you know that's you know they actually created those in the room you know I think it was like two weeks per moon one person so you know it was three moons each one took two weeks basically

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    and those look great I mean there's some of our best looking one so and we're you know now that teams off doing some stuff in another star system which is looking quite good but that's another story after three night but I think there's going to be a lot of fun definitely keep people busy for a while so I think that that's really cool and then you know I think the other big thing in 3:9 got it let's see and the other big thing entry nine is the prison switch and kind of the top which i think is unique consequence when you have something like a law system and so you know end up in a prison and you got to do your time and so there's a consequence to it and we got some fun stuff like you can potentially find a way to escape from the prison you can also go down and sort of reduce your time spent by you know

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    mining down in the caves there and basically getting what we call merits there will sort of reduce your your time earned and you know that's it's kind of a fun incident and it's also it's a very beginning building block of now fully fleshing out sort of the law and law enforcement which would include bounty hunting side so we've got a lot more stuff planned for the prison stuff going beyond this v1 implementation we've got we're you know we you know we'll have the ability to have you know prison fights and all sorts of kind of fun stuff and you know on the other side the bounty hunting side you know we've got some stuff long-term we're you know we want you to be able to track down other players secure them you know put them in your ship take them drop them off at the most you know the local advocacy office and then that person wakes up in the

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    prison you know and you'd be able to have hopefully track them long term and so we want you to sort of basically play that Mandalorian style and I mean like if I watch the Mandalorian which I'm not sure everyone in England gets to watch this yet but it's definitely over here it says great but we watch them and Laurie and it feels very much like what I it's it's a sort of star citizen experience which is you know it helps they stole the Cutlass but they did steal yeah well you know you know David Hubbins if you did work on although he did do that he didn't do the colors but they is a great concept person burn but anyway the big idea of like sort of bounty hunting and tracking someone is stuff that like we're working towards so there's a lot so the prison is like one

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    of the elements that's again we talk about putting bits of the gameplay there and of course we're going to build on top of it and I think by the time we finished all this stuff it will be really cool and that's all the power of things like things like the prison system is like one element that would add towards making your piracy and bounty-hunting and sort of law enforcement cycles all work and that's one of the elements but it still needs other stuff and and we will we will get there and that's kind of a sort of plan but it's this iterative point where we but another it's like putting another brick in the wall another brick in the wall and finally it's there it's always the last 10% which like brings it from takes 90% back to you but also it brings it from from okay there's some base system year to actually now it's a polished feature and you can use it intuitive and it's the challenge is like normal and normal game development you

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    wouldn't wouldn't be doing this out there publicly but we because of the nature of the of the way the game is we develop it with the community out there who support us it's a totally different way and I actually quite enjoy it because you get sort of the you get the feedback and the early feedback and and you can also make things better and more stable longer-term this way but in the short term it does present challenges because we always have to make sure that for instance we have a stable of build as possible you do spend a fair amount of time stabilizing a bill that we may not necessarily do if we weren't having to release something every quarter I think long term ends up with a better product because we're in a really testing it we're in a little getting feedback yeah but on a short-term basis it means that you always have to spend some time making sure your triaging your current

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    build and making sure it's working so that's time that you couldn't be spending on a feature of polishing it so you know if you're if you're expecting everything to be fully polished and working brilliantly the very first time you load it up then you know it's that's the big advantage people can like play right right away and they test out a feature like the quality but really cool not not just over on part of the last 10% where we polish everything where I'm a beta tester yeah you you are you're part of it like from day one almost I mean I would say a project of this guy I mean there's definitely some smaller indie projects where it's very like that yeah and that's very cool but like a project of like this size and the scale you know there's not many people doing

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    them and the people that are are the big publishers and the big publishers would never do what we're doing because they just wouldn't want to have to be open to that much feedback citizen is never getting cancelled we're just gonna keep working on this thing until it is the best damn space sim or universe simulator actually just say not really space it's a complete universe sci-fi simulation games possible and that's kind of cool and it's it's fun to be working on it cuz it's it's I don't know it's like the feel like Willy Wonka and it's imagination whatever you know whatever you can dream as possible alright right on I'm motivated yeah yeah well you know let's go I know I don't give you everything more to add I think

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    that's a great wrap up if you guys had anything else you wanted to add my things I think Kristen ate it yeah I think that I'm you here to here first stars is is never gonna be canceled do you hear that alright thank you guys very much for for coming and for the pillar talk and hopefully enjoyed it let's get back to work alright alright thanks thanks