Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Connecting the Universe

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] growing Oh hello and welcome to around the verse our weekly look at the development of star citizen I'm sandy Gardner and I'm Chris Robbins so as you can see we have a nice little gift on our table here so we had Jeremy visit us from New Zealand with his daughter Chloe unless this is gifts it will open it on camera what you have to do okay maybe I welcome it I easily off camera but impressively enough Chloe actually and you much more about starters and then I have a father so that's pretty cool so as well to the future stars of those what's apparently leave the clues something that is very

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   cool you will be oh wow look at that okay so hiding it is the kuru a symbol of life new beginnings growth and harmony support and loving protection honey thank you very much that's awesome Jeremy and Chloe brilliant okay I will get our table go back through your paper if you want okay alright so so we have some great news to share today so later this month spouses and we'll be the featured story and tweeting world magazine the magazine spoke with a number of our art directors about how

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   they became game artists yes they did so if you're interested in a career as a game artist this will be a must read when it comes out on May 17th yeah so just a character art director who spent some time updating our various alien character designs you know you've seen recently the Banu and we did a sneak peek of the Vandal this past week and what we'd like to do right and share you sort of the updated Jean sculpt which will be shown in the 3d World magazine but I'll give you guys a sort of heads up there you go Rajan has undergone some changes since we last saw them pretty cool yeah no they certainly have now let's go to ask

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   them and tell them to their studio updates hey guys jake ross here producer here in austin there have been some exciting developments in the austin studio this month and we're excited to share them with you for this week's studio update with two six three out the door we are finally moving forward with our major features for the big three-o patch the austin design team will be responsible for several things in the upcoming release first and most notably is that we've made progress on adding commodity trading in the game since several things need to come together on the tech side for this first the LA programmers have been furiously working on the shopping code rewrite the commodity kiosk and shipper system so that commodity trading can be possible not much to show you guys visually on this just yet but our next update should be in a great spot to give you a first look second we have been finishing up several of our first batch of usable requests for our first round of shops these are created so we can get the four

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   required disciplines design animation tech art and system design on the same page about each useable to intended purpose and functionality once all the required assets are created it will come back from a design to do the final hook up next we're plotting out our first mission giver experience for 300 getting miles Eckhart into the game as the primary focus there are necessary building blocks to make this happen as you can see in this conversation tree there's quite a bit that you'll be able to do like give a constant stream of missions and enable players to earn reputation and higher to your mission options as we're still in our planning phase this print hasn't quite started just yet we'll hopefully have more to show in our next update finally we're in the middle of breaking down the Leske landing zone this write-up details all the things you'll be able to do in this location some of these include how players will smuggle into the city and

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   which content will go into side tunnels its placement of the mission givers and their content the factions within Levski and the political aims of these factions we want don't want to get into too much detail and spoil the end result for you but we've got some awesome things planned for this landing zone and can't wait for you to see it evolve into the vision we've currently got in the works on the art side ship artist Josh Koons has been busy completing the damage model pass on the Cutlass black by far the most time-consuming part during this phase is creating the intricate trellis work on the parts that get blown off like the wings and the body he works closely with tech art to make sure that ship breaks apart and receives surface hull damage in the correct areas once damage is completed it also marks the stage pipeline where the ship is pretty much ready to go all that's left is to make the laws the PU animation team is currently updating all the existing

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   usable animations to use the new robust usable system this will save us on our memory footprint and allow us to create a large number of unique animations more quickly we took advantage of our desks getting rearranged to set up our mocap system we needed to do a quick pickup shoot to capture a few things that has popped up it since the last shoot we captured picking up crates of different sizes from different heights and operating door controls and various other transition animations we're also working on picking up two-handed objects as part of our looting system with this functionality we will be able to interact with more objects in-game this opens the possibility for more missions and activities if you see a box on the ground and you want to pick it up you'll be able to walk up to it pick it up carry it back to your ship and put it in your cargo hold for transport back to your hair the austin ship animation team is wrapping up the reworked version of

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   the correct cutlass as well as creating new zero-g enters and exits animations for the drake dragonfly we are also in the midst of improving our cockpit experience by adding hid reactions button presses and updating our cockpit layouts to maximize the overall cockpit experience more on this to come this month has been a busy one for the back-end services engineering team as well we've been focused on bringing diffusion our new back-end services architecture online and ready for primetime we're converting some of the more trivial services such as friends analytics authentication and presence from legacy architecture to fully diffusion ID services running with our news language we are moving next into the larger and more complex services like persistence cache game server management and matchmaker and persistent database these services will be broken up into smaller micro services to meet our performance scalability and

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   availability needs the game server and client are very close to being diffusion eyes as well which will close the communication gap between the back end and the front end in addition we're making various optimizations to the system such as a technique we call router biasing this allows us to apply advanced bandwidth control bandwidth techniques between services types in the diffusion network Austin cue is focused over the very earliest parts of April was testing to get to 63 out of the players with multiple PTU pushes leading to 6-3 going live the team spent a lot of time supporting the live build over the first week April most of our new hires finished their basic early training in the month and have all begun testing alongside their mentors full-time on both persistent universe and squadron 42 after do six three went live austin q i shifted full-time to game dev branch for testing this has been both to continue

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    work on stabilizing the branch and you begin more rigorous testing in preparation towards three o some of the items we've actively been testing are several new ships in depth sweeps of some of our procedural planet environments for bugs testing mega map improvements new implementations for player interactions identical conversions movement system for tree factors and a new field of view controls to name a few the development teams have been lining up new documentation and data for QA to polish up our test cases to ensure we are ready to jump on new content as it comes online one of our testers has begun working directly with the austin animation team to clean up new mocap files for the development teams several other team members have also been engaged with in-depth testing of new and updated indian tools alongside the frankfurt qi team ensuring that the new tools will function as designed so our designers can better implement and create content the player relations team spent a full week with

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    benoit and the turbulent team working on spectrum improvements they also added a couple new team members that are excited to continue to serve our growing community needs a particular relevance to three oh the player relations team has started adding new a vacati and updating our PTU ways as we know everyone will be excited to test out the new content when it's available that's all I have for you this month guys thanks for watching and for your support we'll see you in the verse hey guys here's the April update from turbulent and the platform team so this month we've released spectrum version version 0.33 which contains a new type of discussion called nested threads which is basically when you reply to another reply it will go into a nested format so you can see a discussion trail out from a specific reply and the first

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    level of these replies are sorted by default by votes so most uploaded subtrees get uploaded to the top this is very reddit style type of discussion and so when you start a new discussion on spectrum 0 3 3 and up you can decide which type of discussion you want to start whether you want to start a chronological classic thread which goes in order or a nested thread now the this new type of discussion we hope will allow more dynamic faster threads and obviously the upload feature is going to be useful for a lot of the community teams for many of the features that they want to do like gathering questions now this project goes so fast that in a month we've been able to release 0 3 3 and get feedback on it so we know that not everybody likes nested threads and so we plan on

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    look trying to transform this from a discussion type to a view option so that you can decide how you want to view a specific thread or all threads so if you like chronological you'll be able to view them as such and nested you'll be able to choose that as such so we're still looking into how we're going to do that but we're listening to your feedback and we're saying that this might be a more powerful feature so we're going to get it done one other change that we're looking for also for nested threads is how unread status works currently it's a bit iffy so you can put your a red marker we're going to try to see how we can improve that as well as do a little staff tracking in there so you could know from the top of the thread list which have been I've had a staff response it's going to be particularly useful for descriptive forms also included in 0 3 3 is the

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    ability to flag post for moderation so this also works within your org and obviously in the public community where you can flag a reply at thread or a message for moderation and so moderate public moderators in the case of the public star citizen community can come in you know intervene and your private orgs than all your officers or people who have the moderation permission will receive a notification and then it become investigate and so that's how we handle the flagging in spectrum also one more updating or three three is progress on mobile support for the keyboard system that we use and so it's way more usable than it used to be still not perfect but at least that we've done massive progress there and we're hoping to get it fixed in the next release for all types of cases so look

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    forward to that currently the team is working on next release which is 0-3 for the main feature that we're looking to add there is some more refinement on how we use tags as sub forums and so the we're going to surface these tags at the top level on the community index in the channel list so that you can actually jump directly from a global community and next to a specific tag within a channel and so the second part of that is that we're going to also allow you guys to bookmark a tag just like if it was a channel it's in itself and so this will I think give us the functionality of a subform while keeping the tagging system in place which is a very nice way to just make this very dynamic so hopefully we'll see that served before

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    also the major undertaking where we're doing is adding way more filters and work on the search subsystem which will basically power all of view my own post view somebody else's post so search by author search by role which also allow you guys to search for deaf posts and then all of this feature set from search will power a new mini profile so you'll be able to just jump directly from to a list of posts from a specific player directly from the mini profile one other feature which is more of a banking thing that we're working on is virtual lists you might have noticed that we have an issue rendering long presence within the chat lobbies so that's why that backers grew is usually collapsed by default and the general form and so we're working in a

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    technical solution called virtual list that will allow us to just render what we see plus a buffer and so this will save on performance and allow us to have everybody present in the buggy list anyway and so we're going to be able to use virtual lists for that but also for other features like in the chant Lobby one of the most reported issues that we have is you can't jump directly to a message and then go back in time virtual this will allow us to do that because we're going to change them it's turn mechanism for lobbies to be able to do that so we're working on this in zero three four in the meantime the research team from spectrum is working on the overlay which is basically a four spectrum desktop and integration between the game and spectrum and so the this is basically taking our Redux application

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    store and moving it to an area where two processes can basically benefit from it and so this way we can have an overlay that's over the game and your desktop client synchronized without having to double the resources for it so that's what what the guys have been working on the work has begun as well on p.m. groups so the ability to basically refactor the current 101 p.m. system to have more than one person in a group so you can have basically some kind of a party system for specific lobby so this is what we're doing on the research side on top of what we're already doing so I'm just back from Austin with a few discussions with the team at CI G over there where we presented the new design for some of the art that we're doing for the site revamp so that went really well and so we're hoping we can't show it just yet but we're hoping we'll be able

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    to showcase some of those changes to you guys before we actually get to do them one thing that between now and our next monthly report that you'll see is that we're going to be doing some pretty major infrastructure changes by moving the platform to a new set of hardware hopefully this will not cause any disruption but there should be a small downtime since we're lifting shifting everything but that's going to be one of our major tasks upcoming when I'm done filming this video which is pretty cool and so otherwise we'll see you guys in the verse so just looking at Eckart's conversation tree really shows a complexity we're putting into our mission givers building the logic system that drives these interactions is very complex due to the size of the lands of our universe and mission system but I think when it all comes together it will be pretty cool

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    pretty cool and when it comes to building that universe there's a department essential for keeping it all running take a look I'm Mike Jones and I'm director of corporate and publishing technology for cloud Imperium games and right now I think that's the longest title we have in the company and it's based because of the merging of our DevOps and our IT departments and so my responsibility for IT covers the hardware side of things and the infrastructure side of things but the network and the security and the server deployments and all the automation and

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    all the orchestration that goes into that is all built here with our DevOps team so there's not a single piece of that that is something that we got from someone else so the you know there are a few services that we make use of that are commonplace but for the most part are our systems are all custom designed specifically for our needs and the reason for that of course is this is a very unique game we have very unique needs and so one of my main focuses this month has been our build system and the need for more build resources our current build system is made up of six high density servers with a grand total of 240 V cores and 2.3 terabytes of RAM

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    this is chock-full of build beams and we recently introduced at the tribe build system which is just as many more build systems that are designed to do a pre compile when there's a code check in helps maintain the stability of our build system and the builds as they come out as we continue to grow our system we're seeing more and more traffic coming through and more competition for resources part of what's happening is we're dealing with problems that we haven't had to deal with before on previous game projects have been on we thought we were doing something big and it's nothing compared to what we're building here and so that just the

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    amount of assets alone the art the the pre-compressed data that's coming in is a tremendous amount if I do a transfer of just one version of the build over a 10 gig network it can take a half hour to 45 minutes and this is why we have to break these jobs up and it's the same with the rest of the game we break things into pieces so that we can do more in parallel that's how we get it going fast and that's the only way we can make this work under our current deployment our primary build system consume six so spread across a vmware clustered environment this configuration allowed us to add tribal to the existing environment but as we grew we saw increasing resource contention this pretty much leads to longer wait times on a tri build job by adding three more

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    hosts we're able to completely isolate try build from the primary build system and this is important particularly for the engineers who use try build constantly a lot of people don't really realize why it takes so much more to to build these builds inside the build system rather than the kind of compile that we do on our desktop computer and in the traditional sense when you're compiling on your desktop you're doing one thing you're bringing down source code and you're making that compilation of a client or a server whatever you happen to be working on but in the build system we have many needs and we have to do all of it so in addition to building both the client and the server I'm building release and profile on multiple branches

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    sometimes as many as three so this means that anytime a build a build request comes in we're we're spinning up a large number of virtual machines and we found that with the size of this game the build times can really spread out so we break those jobs into many smaller pieces and this is why we can accordion the build process out into this mist this much more server hardware the reason that we choose to host our services externally rather than internally there are just a myriad of reasons but it gives us a tremendous scalability and flexibility I can I can pay for just exactly what I need instead of having to make this

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    large capital investment on a whole bunch of gear and then all the bandwidth so that people could access and if you think about the multi region launch that we did recently we wouldn't be able to as easily do that if we had stuff located and physically stuck in one data set and this leads us to the need to expand our build system so today we're expanding our current rack of six hosts by three more hosts we'll be including a total of 72 more virtual cores and a whole lot of networking and it's going to be really fun since our current enclosure was at capacity we added a second enclosure and wired it in ultimately we plan to move all host to the first enclosure and all storage to the second enclosure for simplicity but we have to take that in phases we then

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    rack the servers from the bottom to the top in order to leave room for future expansion once we got them installed we realized our fiber cables weren't the right link so we move the servers up a bit to account for that temporarily once connected we installed and configured the software for use we can do that pretty fast now since everything is virtualized in our own little cloud environment from there it's a simple process to migrate the virtual machines over with vmotion this means we can completely migrate a running system over the network with zero downtime each time we do one of these jobs we end up with a mess of cables it happens all the time and I feel like I'm constantly fixing it in fact it's kind of a thing now and everyone likes to see how long it will take before I fight it and fix it which usually isn't that long I do

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    this pretty much at every studio I go to now once we had all the parts we were able to get the whole thing up and running in just under three hours as a result we're now seeing much less contention in the build system and now we've got some room to grow again and I'm sure we're going to need it there you go so that's pretty cool and as Mike said we're developing a very unique game as very neat needs and tends to throw unforeseen obstacles after all our departments while developing a game like this is exciting it also takes time to overcome some of these obstacles and you guys know and one thing that makes us unique is the variety of ships you can fly in the pu so if you're a subscriber you can fly the drake Buccaneer as part of the ship is a month also subscribers get the Gladius Valiant as part of a flash sale this weekend so if you're interested in

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    learning more about this check out the link in the description yep and so that's it for today's episode please join us tomorrow for happy hour Friday 8 a.m. Pacific jared huckaby will interview brand chambers about everything that's happening at the Frankfurt's you do so that will be a pretty cool upset and you know after this week happy hour will air bi-weekly so don't miss tomorrow's episode but before we go I want to thank all the subscribers who make this show possible and also other shows like happy hour yeah and we're also grateful to all the backers disappoint development star Suzanne squadron 42 we wouldn't be able to make this game without you so thanks for watching and in the spirit of may the fourth we thought it would be fun to show you a little glimpse of Mark Hamill in the cockpit of squadron 42 awesome we'll see you around come on lieutenant first we clear our assigned patrol and

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    we'll rendezvous with Trey oh hey lieutenant make sure Trejo understands this is your op she goes off again like what happened to sing I'm pulling it oh I'm not gonna be your dad if that's what you're asking kid is just a nickname a few of us in the IT department started

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    building custom computers and getting them a little bit fancier and fancier and so finally we started having a bit of a competition it's kind of a thing for us that we we continually compete with these projects so this is this is my build and then one of our other guys Paul is working on one which should be ready in a few weeks and he's probably like usual he's going to beat me and then I'll turn around and beat him right back thank you for watching so if you want to keep up with the latest and greatest in star citizen squadron 42 development please follow us on our social media channels see you soon you you ever get pressed in the throat