Star Citizen: Pillar Talk - Alpha 3.8

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   yes no I am going to bring this home in one take let's do it got it no pressure no Wow everybody and welcome to pillow talk I'm gonna have some fun conversation here and we're taking a little bit of time out of our busy schedule to talk about what's coming in 3.8 which will be right after citizencon yeah big thing that we're shipping with 3/8 is planet tech v4 which is a major step forward for how we realize our universe and star systems and the place that most people will have seen it in citizencon would have be micro tech which is also getting shipped with 3.8 now we're only shipping micro tech itself not its moons new Babbage and the spaceport exteriors will be

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   there but the interior of it won't be until 3.9 just because we really want to do it right but you know we've worked quite a lot of sort of the environmental effects in citizencon you know showing outside of Microtech flying down and just seeing how seamlessly transitions they're transitions to detail there's no popping was no LEDs that you can appreciate you know you're in a snowstorm and you can barely see and on your you know helmet visor it's slush or on your canopy that's slush or you're in a rainstorm there's rain drops you're going through a cloud what we've been developing and we've talked about a little bit is what we call the actor status system basically there's a Visio chart of every single thing that affects every single other thing and what we wanted to do was not just wait till this is all in but do some stuff that's extremely relevant to what we're doing

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   right now and the most relevant that you have on an ice planet it is obviously too cold so we want the characters to be reacting to the cold and as you guys have seen it in citizen already hypothermia isn't just you know your suits don't warm enough so take some damage and you die that is kind of the typical game II you know here you have some temperature I give you a number oh you can't handle that number because you don't have the right suit on and you die it's not that simple for us I think it's got much more of the fidelity that you've come to expect from star citizen where it's it's not just some simple game plan before we had room system which is just just breathing so you you have oxygen you don't have oxygen but and also our suits before we're just purely damage mitigation yeah you know on bullets or projectiles coming at you now with now with this we I think for internally we classify as basically

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   combat or utilitarian for the armors and his right and so then it gives us purpose for the utilitarian armors sure and you've got to make a decision as a player if you got a horny you can only store so many armors you can only store so much stuff so you're talking about the visuals you're talking about you know the impact on the characters themselves it's it's interesting to think of what this means in terms of the potential to customize the economy for example the shops what they're selling in terms of clothing and armor would be dramatically different on a nice planet like Microtech versus you know a you know a planet that's you know bringing a burning hot or a planet that's incredibly toxic etc I guess things whether we're more or less to like I mean if you're selling a bathing suit on you know Microtech but it's also like imagine a place it's it's like you

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   would expect to see lots of you know fairly deep you know wool jackets and stuff on a cold planet whereas you'd see t-shirts elsewhere weather whereas you'd see more utilitarian gear over on Hurston you know stuff that's you know intended to deal with you know the noxious fumes and pollution over there not only that the tool set for it we have is far far more powerful and actually artist friendly and quit to you so ya know I mean it's an exciting thing for the artists like that to give you an example is that you know you know that we do making this transition any any any technological transition that we make within the game we usually have to bass back backtrack over a bunch of old content that we've had in place and it's not old but you know we still we have planets we have moons so when you're changing underlying technology like that you got to be able to make those updates but of course we can't spend the six

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   months that we would have taken to you know make damar in the past and we were able to within about two months or so and speaking on Marcos behalf maybe a little bit here two months and everybody there shall keep we were able to apply those updates across all the planets I mean they started from its basic start from scratch on rebuilding robotics right they rebuilt all up current planets and in Microtech and it all the moon in two months and that's work that we've been working on for the past two years previously these evolutions are important with these tools especially with one as large as this because as we make them as we make more of them we learn so much about what we would like to do in the next one and then we can apply that backwards and then we learn some more and we can apply back it's like you know we've been in the first iterations of them there was

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   very little hand adjusting in the next iteration there was a little bit of hand adjust and everything is just evolved over the course of the over the course of the years it and it kind of lends itself to just what's gonna work better for the artist what's going to give us that sort of feel but in the amount of time that we can actually spend on it um so I think it's really important component of it 3.8 is going to have server object container streaming so Sox as we call it so what do you see its gameplay benefits from my standpoint the biggest one will be AI and kind of the way that the ships feel in combat as well as the fps in combat with our server frame rates the way that they currently run it's basically seven to ten frames um you know when we get it running that 30 frames a second on the server you'll say major so it's a lot less precise

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   than what the client is and so they get out of sync and them you get weird behavior a lag and so if you get the server frame rate which our target is 30 frames per second up then the experience on the client-side is better and just a lot of that weird AI behavior that people see or doors not opening when they should open isn't actually necessary a bug it's just that the server's gummed up as so far behind it it's not telling the client in time to do stuff exactly from my point of view the biggest the the biggest improvement on the sock stuff is really going to be the fact that it's going to break us free from these limitations in terms of how many locations and how much content we can put into the solar system so it's tangentially related to what Pappy is saying in regards to he's talking about the frame rate side of it I'm well you know the part that I'm saying is well now and get all these new locations without impacting the frame rate at all

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   because your server is the serpent zero on is still only loading what's absolutely necessary for the players drawing your server and so what this is going to allow us to do is put more out post more space stations more derelict ships you know more caves you know all of you know all of this content that heretofore we've been you know so constrained we've had to we've had to basically weigh everything from the point of view of well what is this gonna do to server performance because we know every single server regardless whether there's a single player there is gonna have to load this and so we've we've already been in the mode for the you know for the last quarter to two where we're starting to get very sensitive about bringing a new content whether we can afford it we've been that way since since our core point in I mean I think with three seven we wanted to put at least 100 caves in yes and at least 100 in I think we got 15 I think

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    right now if you take a look on the servers I think it's anything like half a million entities you know it could be millions to be millions of physical entities and so even with really powerful servers which we have that can take more time than we want so the whole idea of server OS is that you try to only have the bits you need to be simulating with and therefore the frame rate should be higher so our target server frame rate is 30 frames a second and like you said currently with everything overloaded with content it can get down to five or six frames a second and that's when you don't have such a great experience even if you have a high frame rate locally absolutely yeah and and for me it's on that two different sort of polar sites that have those so on the technical content kind of side the the big difference is actually because we deal with the tools and the developer tools on that side I

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    think the biggest difference for us will be some some internal differences the turnaround time for us to run so you know we're using so much RAM right now on the server so to be able to spin up the entire universe on a local dev box I'm just you know a normal kind of workstation was getting the point that either one it took a long time to get that thing loaded because without server object container to me it didn't work like the client did which was just loading what I needed to it was gonna bring everything in so that took some time but then additionally we're at a point that you would just run out of memory you wouldn't be able to do it so we even put developer tools in place to be able to exclude stuff from the universe but that would mean that if you ever had to do testing on any of those ones you've excluded you got to shut down restart up so basically the developer workflow is going to be a lot better because the turnaround is to be a lot quicker the next stages is using the tech in the editor also in

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    squadron 42 for the same reasons where you know we the the level of detail that we're putting into all the locations and just our systems that we have in squadron you know requires you you couldn't fit it all in memory and you won't want to fit all the memory in the server OCS which is basically a kind of an authoritative version of the world view that you can sort of move a viewpoint around and stream in just the bits you need and stream out it would make a big difference for that yeah when you're when you're iteration loop just takes that that amount of time I mean you'll move things once you'll move things twice and then you'll be uh it's okay I mean I kind of spend ten minutes from it you know making that little tweak but you know that's what star citizen is we're about that kind of quality we want that kind of iteration ly so things like elevators you know glitching out with you falling through them halfway through them and did the server basically being at a different

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    frame rate or you know ships inside of ships or when collisions happen it comes down to a feel thing things a responsive things are actually feeding back to you when you expect them to when you hit a guy he's actually thought when the ragdoll happens you see at the same time so to me it's kind of those those two things there's a bit of feel in that the responsiveness and and the developer workflow in and in the end you know being able to load a lot faster will this allow us to increase the play account in the short term you know we have servers yes can we have more players in one seven in theory it definitely should I think we're at the point now to where we haven't yet done sufficient testing that we would basically want to definitively say one way or the other that's certainly what we're thinking we're going to want to be you know we're certainly gonna be doing tests and seeing how far we can push it it is possible that as you completely

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    remove one bottleneck that you expose some other things that also need to be dealt with and whether we'd be able to whether those would be you know egregious enough in terms of a problem or whether you'd be able to quickly you know patch them up and deal with them and push it out with three eight with a player account or whether some of that stuff would have to move to three nine that that part we don't yet know but that's definitely where we're headed yeah and to explain why that profiling is so so important and that the real reasoning behind it is that they're they're there's gonna be a sweet spot for us where it makes a lot of sense to actually yet have that exact player account it could be as it has a little bit to do with how players play where they're gonna be positioned within the server but you know conceptually you could end up in a state that we've got you know let's say 200 players that are in every single location every single object container and it's actually all loaded in the end but it really depends on how the players are playing but we will find a sweet

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    spot in here because there is an edge where we go too far that it's actually not helping you see much but I think even in that case we're still gonna be better but that but that's a perfect that's a perfect example of where socks is really it's a building block towards you know the future in terms of yes if you actually had a perfect distribution of players then you could you know you could wind up eliminating much if not necessarily all of the benefit of socks the server mesh would eventually fix this by simply going out while you're over in this area we're gonna make you to a server that only covers items in that area and therefore you know the long term path will deal with that you know very elegantly the server side OCS we don't have the full universe persistence in so we're gonna have a more enhanced version of persistence in

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    three-point-eight than we prevail have so if you buy things or rent things or do stuff with in-game money be diverted and the in-game money you earn will have the ability to persist it between patches even from 3/8 onwards but the proper persistence is I go anywhere I take my Elroy's cup put it I you know get my coffee at the Space Station I take it with me I get on the spaceship I fly to a planet I walk in a forest i litter I drop it on the floor in the forest I get off I fly away and then Sean flies to the forest and sees an hour a cup when he arrives in that area so when they grab it and they sell it you come back and you think that there's a bug in the game because it's gone the second stage of the Sox is the foal persistence comes in with what we call

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    the eye cash which basically will save out all the state and position of any item in the game when you move away from it so if you have to which is what's happening on the server right now it streams out like what's there and right now we're persisting it in the server's memory but you aren't persisting back to a cloud database just yet so if you play the session you drop stuff put stuff February all persistent in the session in three eight server OCS but in a future version I don't know when I crush is coming in but with that what will happen is besides us saving the state which we already will do a memory in three eight it will then save it to a back-end database so if you come back a week later and go to that location as long as Sean hasn't come and stolen my cup and I go back to I drop my cup on

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    the forest the cup will be there and the really cool thing about that is that all the dynamic items whether they're you know cups or spaceships or guns or armor suits or a note you leave someone will persist in the world where they are and I don't really know any MMO that has that level of detail at that at the scale that we have that allows you to do that and so that and that is very cool because once that's running that also means that like you want to create a settlement on a planet you can't you can't yeah that's that that's the big part of it is its emergence and they're actually affecting the the world the universe in in in so many games it's all very scripted it's all very you know the world but hey after you know two hundred fights and all that there's no direct affection right but this is actually an evolution by the

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    players there do I get in creating settlements setting up things I think that's exciting in three eight you know being a front of Fight Club we have something else coming which i think is kind of cool we've teased a bit this is a real exciting feature that's actually coming and it's not just melee combat with your fists it's mainly combat with some melee type weapons and I'm not sure we are going to introduce a knife I believe into the P you will put into the shops and everything so with melee combat you get the ability of course to make some punches and it's not just you know simple one punch one punch we put you know a little bit of thought into this a little bit of fun into it there's some combos that you can do you can decide to do you know a heavy right or or a quick jab gonna be quick and you can block at the top of it but it's important it's not just like a permanent easy block where you're just

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    like you put it up and then no matter what they do they can't hit you no no it's positional as well huge props right now to that to feature team because I mean they were they were proper OCD over getting this thing done I mean I remember seeing a video that and I think they just sped it up they showed me sort of pass one past you and then it got and that was a problem when I see versions you know 58 I'm going oh nice nice nice guys we've already started to integrate this into the law system so that punching on other people is a crime you will haven't you know there will be penalties about it yeah yeah well that's that's the whole person law system which is we can basically mete out different levels of punishment different areas like so for instance maybe in grim hex no one cares you can get into fistfights but if you're getting into a fistfight

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    in the middle of area 18 that's not so cool another reason why this is actually really important is there will be certain areas within the game to where you're restricted from carrying weapons prison being one of them it's like when you're in prison you clearly you don't actually have yo guns or any of the traditional stuff so if you want to be able to defend yourself you'd better be fairly good at hand-to-hand fighting the last part of melee which I didn't mention was also the takedowns which is another thing that that comes in as part of that so that is something that you can do player two player it's nobody's paying attention or anything like that you can you could avoid it a little bit but you also get that component of it too so if you get a nice cut fist you've got a lot of different ways to to take somebody out and of course the other big one that will have a very big impact on some of the missions and stuff is the potential for stealth gameplay you know that type of stuff whether it's whether it's actually knives or just yes I want

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    takedown sleeper holes you know whatever else we've got some cool mission stuff coming in you know three eight the biggest introduction would be the eight ninety jump mission and then from there we're doing a lot of kind of quality of life passes on the way that the mission works how things are doled out to the player what actually happens in the mission some of them are a little bit boring and figuring out how we can interject new things and same with interjecting AI and and other aspects to freshen it up yeah that's one that we want to capitalize on going forward I I think we're at the point now to where the combat is mature enough and some of the other looks improvements to the combat that will be entry eight that you haven't seen that people haven't seen in three seven I did even see in the video we did with because I was super early

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    work in progress on the other 890 job mission that I think you know all the time the AI is getting better their ability to puff find you know beyond three eight well you know just puff finding on planets or you know arriving on a ship getting off a ship getting you know coming in Isreal transitioning between different deserves people going riding AI riding the trap friends yeah but that's that's a huge but but that's one of the most interesting ones to me which is on three eight just a later I would say it will be in three nine four zero also one of the things we're delivering with three eight is space stations or rest stops you want to tell us bit by that because so greatly expanded from what we have yeah just the overall size of them the visual difference between them the hub sizes

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    that are in there the way that we procedurally generate them we've got halves we've got Elroy's having them in low orbit around planets so they'll basically be a sort of geosynchronous station that will be for each one of the major planets you don't have to go all the way down through this you can go there you can save in all of it versus having to go all the way to and also certain people that have people that have certain strips that will not be able to land on planets they can go that yes they can go there and then obviously get transferred down one of the other long-term projects we have is sort of the combat right so there's the FPS combat which you get you know you already hinted at that you've been increasing some of the reaction and the speeds it's still got more to do I think there's some more networking stuff we have to do to make that better vehicle combats another big one right we didn't mention that is coming in two three

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    eight is the Animus missile launcher it's a FPS missile launcher it's got a three missile sort of range the gameplay is not as simple as you know lock missiles fire and basically you're gonna do a lot of damage it's you need to get in close enough or first you need to wear down there Scout ships or first you need to knock out the defensive turrets or first you need to do you know one of a number of different things so that you can actually get that torpedo you know through those defenses and actually impact these you know these big capital ships where we really want to start drawing a multitude of players and/or AI units together and get them all fighting and make feel like one big fleet battle as opposed to you these much smaller scale things that we've had today and there was one thing I was gonna say that on the vehicle experience team is kind of a cool thing that I like for 3a is you know we've implemented this look-ahead system which sort of simulates the way

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    you are like if you ever look at you know like tirado's had all these really cool you know badass flying stuff but he's gone you know he's using the or I'm not sure of his truck or he's using a pipette tracking but you know you can see as a pilot or as a car driver you know when you're turning you you actually look you turn in so the look-ahead system basically manages a bunch of things where your velocity vector is going to be where your target is and they all have different weights and then it waits the camera towards there but not terribly so you basically get the feeling of oh yeah I'm looking I'm looking into my turnaround you know kind of going towards a target so the cool thing is that you know the cockpit now it sort of feels real and visceral around you of course you can turn off in the options but I really feel that and we've also been tweaking the chase cameras yeah so they so they they're more fluid there's more options in terms

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    of you know even if in when you're on foot we have like a kind of an over-the-shoulder sort of traditional third-person game view in a further out view in your first-person view so then we've got a bunch of quality of life sort of gameplay adjustments we want to be making with well I mean there's just the general fixes that we're trying to go through and and improve whether that be UI or UX with that stuff the same with missions if we're seeing any kind of funny bugs that will affect the actor status or even combat we're just trying to slowly go through and work through those those vehicle experience the actor experience as well as just the way that the character interacts with things yeah there's a lot there I like on the quality of life stuff one of the things that we're putting some focus on now to make it yeah work much better than has

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    in the past is to apply increased pressure when you've actually broken law when you have a wanted level on your character right now it's like when you run upon you know a secure unit you know a cop he can actually call for reinforcements etc but those reinforcements always only spawn on the edge of your radar distance and then they have to conventionally travel towards you and there are multiple problems with this one is those ships can't actually the the AI ships can't currently employ their afterburners to knows when they're pursuing you and therefore it's very easy for you just point your ship in the opposite direction and get away from them and since it's all geared towards when you actually you know engage with another ship and you blow it up there's some sort of reward for many of them this is another thing we're actually adding rewards for a lot of the ships that historically haven't had them so

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    that when you get interdicted you're getting assuming you actually hang around long enough to actually fight it out with these guys you're getting some sort of benefit for your efforts so that everyone that you engage in it's not like oh well what's the point of fighting this guy and burning through some of my fuel or my ammo when you know when I'm getting nothing out of it now you know we are actually dangling on occasion some significant rewards you know obviously you know those are more rare but you're always kind of like what you're gonna get when you crack it if you sort of ID them then potentially that pirate had a bounty on their head and you'll get paid money for actually fighting them versus just having to fight yes get out of it yeah that was another thing that would that we've been focused on which is actually on these on these characters that engage with you they can now optionally have a wanted level and if you actually go to the

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    trouble of scanning them and identifying and figuring out that they had a wanted level then the implication is that after you killed them you would have retrieved you know the black box their body you know whatever and turned it in but for right now what we're gonna simply do is if you've verified that there is a bounty on this particular character and you kill them then you immediately get the benefit okay oh great I think that was a pretty fun conversation about a bunch of stuff that will will be up and coming in star citizen this year of course it's not everything we're working on because we've got cool stuff down the road but as you can tell there's a lot of stuff that's coming together that's I think really making the game come alive and has a huge you know opportunity to make the game emergent and yeah just allow for gameplay that we haven't seen before so just definitely makes me excited I think it makes all these guys super excited to so but I'm looking

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    forward to everybody playing three-point-eight and seeing lots of cool screenshots and videos and tales of venture thank you very much [Music]