CitizenCon 2952: Full Broadcast

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   tell you what my favorite thing about the community is what am I going to say it's going to sound cliche but they believe as much as we do I love them because they continue to support us the only thing that's kept me going I've seen a lot of games and I've seen a lot of invested players well they're right there with us throughout the whole process it's unlike anything I've ever worked on the thing I really like the most about the community is um how welcoming they are to new players uh entering the verse for the first time new players every day and I find that they're always happy to show people the ropes I found it very wholesome when I first did the citizen con where I got to fly the Carrick everyone was so supportive and the cheers I got when we were flying through that Wormhole was

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   unbelievable their effort they put into like their creativity such as building a simulator inside of an entire RV or machinimas I love watching them on my lunch break I enjoy watching the videos on the content there was one recently on Twitter where it was like the 100 players entering the atmosphere that just looks really Grand I love all the memes some of the incredible fan art and passion drive that you see come out of them is fantastic how they come up with crazy ideas each and every day and surprise me I really like all the crazy Shenanigans I get up to in the Pu I can't cuss can I the new and exciting ways they find to break just the random stuff that you do it's not like like the gameplay we intend people doing crazy stunts in in their ships I'm from the character team

3. 00:01:37

   that's what I think it's cool when they show off all the ships cuz that's really the only time I get to see them they create the community by themselves and that's really really cool my favorite thing about the community community around events going to Bar citizen it's always fun to meet some of the backers they've all been lovely to meet in person even if they're like really frustrated you can tell it's just they have so much love for it I really like it when the community is very detail oriented about our work to see how excited they are about our progress how much inspiration we get from them from their ideas I love the genuine enthusiasm the quick turnaround on feedback I love that and how they're always interested in what's coming up I especially appreciate the people who are able to keep track of dates they you know call us out it really um impacts uh our decision- making process for um you

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   know what what did we do right what did we do wrong it is the most rewarding thing in in the entire development process we're not making the game alone we're making it with the community still keep facing us they really do make all this possible I'm living the dream we all are my favorite thing about the community it'd be impossible for me to narrow it down to one um and if if somebody said you had to I I'd probably just turn and walk away [Music] hi I'm Chris Roberts ever since I saw Star Wars as a wide-eyed 8-year-old I dreamt of being a hot shot pilot saving the Galaxy or a lovable Rogue making my way across the cosmos it inspired me to

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   make wing commander and his influenced everything I've done since then 10 years ago after 20 years of making games I was burned out so I took a break but I never stopped playing games nor loving them and now I'm ready to come back and I'd like to show you something I've been working on but I don't want to build any old game I want to build a universe I want to build the game I always wanted to build but I didn't have the tools to do until now one that you can fly off a carrier fighting heroic war on the front lines but also one that you can muster out and find your own fortune in the Stars wherever your spaceship takes you I want to be able to share this experience with my friends and fight against Real opponents in space not just Ai and I want this to be as good or better than any other game out there and I want to actively push the boundaries of what you can do in a game none of this would have

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   been even possible 2 years ago but with Moors law driving PC performance and costs and The Gaming Community embracing talented developers via crowdfunding I believe it is possible today I've never been accused of having a small vision and so I thought it was best if I share my ambition with you visually I'm pretty excited by how it's joined out so why don't you come join me for a sneak peek 10 years ago I stepped out onto a stage at GDC online in Austin Texas and revealed Star Citizen to the world we broke all records in crowdfunding helped Kickstart a Revival in Space games and embarked on a journey with all of you to build the most immersive virtual Universe ever conceived I did say that I'd never been accused of having a small Vision all those years ago every year since then we have celebrated our anniversary with what we dubbed citizen Khan a celebration of all

7. 00:04:49

   of you our community without which we would not be here when I made the original pitch for Star Citizen there were no employees no studios and just a proof of concept demo cobbled together cry engine by myself the help of a few people in their spare time you couldn't play staris as it was an idea not a game the first few years was more talk and not as much show but we managed to release the hanger module in 2013 Arena commander in 2014 and the first steps into the persistent Universe with star and Alpha 2.0 at the end of 2015 the real game changer was staris an alpha 3.0 which we released at the end of 2017 which allowed players to first step foot on fully realized and detailed moons instead of just traversing space 2018 brought the first planet in huren and

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   from there we filled out the rest of the Stanton system from AR Corp to Microtech and finally Crusader with its floating cloud city of arasin last year today there are just over 4 million registered accounts with 1.7 million of them having purchased the game and while we still have lots of features and content to build before I'm ready to consider Star Citizen da people are playing more than ever this year our average daily unique players is around 50,000 and we have peaked at 130,000 several times this year this Compares with just under 10,000 back in 2017 and 32,000 last year but the most amazing stat is the average play time of someone that logs in in 2022 is 3 hours a day back in 2017 this was 48 minutes 64 minutes in 2018 and then jumping to 2 hours in 2019 from there we've been

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   steadily increasing in 2022 alone people have spent 36 million hours in the verse so far so this is a testimony to the hard work the development and our onlin teams have been doing uh to make Star Citizen even in its Alpha State more performant and stable than it's ever been and the increasing amount of features and content they are available making for viable daily gameplay even in Star and Alpha State Cloud Imperium games has grown just as much today we're at 835 staff worldwide all dedicated to building the most immersive virtual science fiction Universe ever in the next few weeks we'll be welcoming 500 staff to their brand new studio at Manchester Goods in Enterprise City where we are filming the show from all of this is down to your patience and support building a game of the scale detail and scope of Star Citizen as it is conceived today that allows us to

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    seamlessly go anywhere from inside to outside from space to planet with no loading screens all with millimeter detail with everything being explorable persistent interactable with thousands of players online together the visual quality of the biggest AAA games is perhaps the most ambitious goal that has ever been set off towards in gaming I am both humbled and thankful of being being in the position of chasing my dream to build a truly immersive universe and it has only been possible by building it outside the traditional publisher system with a direct relationship to our secret Source you our community the strength of the Star Citizen Community is the real Unwritten headline to our longevity and future the connections and Friends people have made along the way the events organized inside the game and outside by the various orgs this year we've had 140 bar citizen events put on around the world with some of the most

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    recent being in China South Korea Singapore Paris and Florida the Chinese buses and had over 300 ATT attendees and a 5 m long 3D printed model of the retribution super Battleship from Squadron 42 built by the local community hopefully next year we can return to an inperson citizen con and I and the rest of the team at cig will have the chance to spend some time with you in person but for now let's get the show on the road 10 years ago the ship I arrived on was a single Cedar where we're going in the future we're going to need a bigger ship I present to you the only constant you may have thought it was green screen but we need something a little bigger for where we're going to entertain you and tell you about the game in the future here's a dedication plaque the only constant the only Conant

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    in game development is change constellation Phoenix my favorite ship uh prototyped by Robert Space Industries commissioned from London shipyards Earth Sal 3 launched October 2952 Manchester starport captain Jared H be Jared that wasn't the deal you weren't going to be the captain of the ship I sent an email oh that must have gone in my junk folder take a seat wel board it's not bad it's quite a nice little setup here isn't it we've been talking about this on an off since 2015 I know I had to do something to get you over to the UK hey you know he knows what I like uh so what do you have uh well let's do a science fiction drink uh can you do a pangalactic Gargle Blaster pangalactic gargle last year I um no I can do this really dry martini that we had pre-prepared before shooting wow hey

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    it's our first show we got to start small such look at that hey we'll get better uh so what do we T to uh well the past 10 years and the future the next 10 years and Beyond and the community oh we did that the same there go cheers and cheers we didn't even plan that oh right wow all right so that is strong that's why we didn't cut with anything so what do you think Stegman Cordon Voyager nice it's a bit blingy I mean you do look like you're a night of the Roxbury yeah yeah yeah night of the rockberry yeah twin I don't be a twinsy with you no let me check the rest of the set out but it's tailored uh it looks good on you not saying it'll be the same for me uh oh

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    wow look at all these cool artifacts you got this hadian artifact there's a bunch of stuff here that's really cool the citizen con trophy wow that's brilliant yeah well Dave had it hook me up you you're going to sit in my chair I am it's a very nice chair I like desk we got a Bubblehead this is a great place to interview people from what's it like sitting over there I'm getting a new fan appreciation for how awkward it is on this side uh so what do you think we should start the show I think we should start the show all right let's start the show um our first presentation of the day is planetary pyro pyro with our good friend maximilan kyes from our Frankfurt studio uh he's going to take you on a tour of six of the neat locations coming in the upcoming pyro system the first of our journey to 4.0 presentations of the day so take it away Max I really want my

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    chair back it's a very nice chair we'll talk about it my name is MOX I'm here on behalf of the planet content team today um I'm a senior environment artist and I want to show you some of the cool stuff that we worked on in the last 2 years so I have pyro 1 open already it's live in engine um this is like the current version of pyro so we're still going to do like a Polish pass on it so not everything is done done but we still wanted to show you uh what we have so far so the idea behind pyro one is that

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    it gets hit by solar flares like repeatedly we got some concept art from the concept art team and the way that they visualized these solar flare hits was like glowing marks and streaks all over the planet um unfortunately the tech for the the glowing part of it is still being worked on so we had to make do with what we could use um so it's not glowing um but you can still see a lot of the blue coming in yeah as you can see pyro one already has some volumetric clouds not all of the pyropets have their volumetric clouds yet so let's jump to the one of the blue spots on the planet uh I just tweaked like the sun position a little bit to make it look a bit

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    nicer and then you can see why it's blue we added like T of these crystals to pyro one um we've used crystals before on Wala um but I think we were a bit too um yeah we played it a bit too safe on Wala I think we only put like crystals as ground cover assets um but for pyro one we really wanted to push the shapes um so you can find like these really large crystals here Heisenberg would be really happy here okay then another interesting thing to highlight here plans over there so what's interesting about those is we made them like three or four years ago um they were supposed to be uh part of like a mission in uh on

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    a space station the mission was scrapped um unfortunately um and ever since then the this asset set has just been sitting in our like Vault uh it's a really cool plan set and I'm happy that we finally found uh a spot to use them so this is another spot I want to highlight um it's also important for us that we do add something memorable to each planet um in the case of pyro 1 it's this spiky rock set that looks really intimidating we tried to push the scale of the assets for the Pyro system we felt like by now we got like the the basic rocks and the scattering of the basic rocks to like a very good quality so now we can explore more crazy shapes I guess and this is

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    one of the sets that we made um it's not done yet it still needs a Polish pass but I wanted to show you guys what it feels like when you're in game walking around here now I want to show you my personal favorite biome of pyro one it's this biome here which has these really cool looking rock formations they are massive in scale like like if I jump in game here you get a good feeling for the scale of them yeah it's possible to land your spaceship on them um it's probably really fun to yeah race through here we can imagine that this is going to be like a nice combat space as well because they do provide nice nice cover

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    let's just jump to a couple different areas on pyro 1 before we move to pyro 2 so now we're on pyro 2 um in comparison to pyro 1 you can immediately see the planet is like way more colorful there's more variation in uh the use and values of the colors um we have like Browns and um like bone white spots some red uh and it's all contrasted by like a blue clear

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    ocean so pyro 2 doesn't have volumetric clouds yet but they will be there at release so now I jump to um one of the biomes of pyro 2 what I want to highlight here is the improvements that we made to how acid spawn on the side of mountains that was something think that was always quite challenging for us to do to have some natural transition from the terrain to the geometry and then also have like the rocks form in a natural way um now we can make nicer rock formations it's not quite there yet um there are still improvements planned for it but I think in comparison to what we had before um this is a big step forward also what you might see is the drawing distance of s IDs has been

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    greatly improved so everything you see here in the distance is actual geometry so if we were to fly all the way over there you would you will see that this is um yeah like Cliff formations I think it looks really cool like the the silhouette of the terrain yeah let's fly through the Canyons yeah I would do this in a spaceship but I'm horrible at flying so I'm just going to use uh the camera in editor so now I jumped ahead to a really cool biome on pyro 2 um it's simple but I think sometimes less is more uh in this case what sets this biome apart from the rest of the planet is that we added these calcified trees um and they spawn in very dense clusters um so you almost get like

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    little forests of them so it's supposed to look very dry and kind of dead but still uh in a pretty way okay if we look at it from this this angle what I really like about this biome is um the contrast that you have um here on the terrain it's pale it's dry but then in the background you have like the nice clear blue ocean so this is one of the red areas on pyro 2 um it's kind of like a sandy desert but we try to add like a lot of different um geology aets um different mixes of bushes and grasses uh so it's not like a a dead desert but it feels kind of lively um and you find like lots of foliage here we have like these cliffs in the background which are

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    pretty dark um and it's another nice contrast of this planet where you have like the saturated red terrain um and the dark Bedrock so jumping to this point here what I want to highlight is the improvements that we made to our ground textures so previously like 2 three years ago uh we had to rely a lot on uh ground cover assets to add um geometry and detail that the ground textures alone couldn't give us um but ever since we got terrain displacement we get like really nice uh shapes just from the textures alone and then if you if you combine it with ground cover aets yeah the result is really successful how things blend

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    together and the amount of detail that you see on the ground so now we're on pyro 3 you saw some of it during last year's keynote demo um but I want to use the opportunity to give you like an in-depth look at some of the biomes so last year you saw that like yellow is kind of the the accent color of pyro 3 um so from this distance you can see through the volumetric clouds like a lot of the yellow coming through we talked about what's making it look yellow which is the Moss and I want to like jump down to the planet surface and show you the amount of detail that you will see when uh going up close to the Moss so we're down at the surface now I'm just going

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    to jump in game a lot of time and effort was spent on making the Moss look just right so like the right level of fluffiness um and density so it looks really nice when it like covers these rocks um and then we also have like lots of smaller moss on the ground um we combine it with like yellow grass uh and it makes for like a really interesting biome so it was really important for us to make this biome look really dense um so we pushed the amount of acids that we're using so it's basically completely covered in foliage compared to hen for example which hon and Microtech which are probably our densest planets when it comes to foliage um this is way denser

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    um the good thing is that we don't have any trees here so all the budget we can use on ground cover on grass now we jump to a pyro Coast biome the improvements we got to the coast biomes is that we can now use a opr override for every single biome previously we could only use one Global override per Planet which as you can imagine is not enough when you have something like ston four where you have snowy regions and the spruce tree regions and one object preset just can't cover every Coast we added these Coral um this like Coral geology set um to have some of the yellow also along the coast um so you see here we always have like a little bit of yellow coming

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    through uh and eventually it transitions into the nice Mossy areas previously when we made Coast object presets we played it a bit safe and only used one or two acid sets um but due to the fact that we can now push the density along the coast as well you can find different kinds of coral um seaweed uh different Pebbles and rocks and other stuff now I jump to one of the volcanic regions on pyro 3 um you might not expect to find vegetation here um but we did add a little bit of veget ation to this region to make it a bit more interesting what I want to highlight here is the quality bar that we set for ourselves when it comes to improving the look of our vegetation so this is one of

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    my favorite new vegetation sets that we created you can see the amount of detail on display here we have like nice little flowers and these like knots or whatever like pots um and it's just like a really cool asset set so when flying over the volcanic regions you will find pockets of these uh scattered all around just to make the area like a little bit more lively before we move on let's jump around to a couple more places now we're on pyro 4 which is my personal favorite of the Pyro system

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    yeah just full disclosure you can probably tell that the clouds here are not done yet they do look a bit busted but yeah they will be they will look amazing once the planet comes out so let's focus on the terrain shapes we created some of these terrain shapes special for pyro 4 because it's Loosely inspired by like Scottish Highlands um so there's not a lot of like verticality uh not a lot of trees so everything is kind of coming from the terrain and from the smaller assets that we scatter on the terrain geometry so jumping in game and then you can see the amount of ground cover assets on display um the variation in color but it's all grounded by like the the color of the soil um and

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    it just looks like we have multiple new vegetation sets on display here so first of all we have this um Bush set here which is called um I think it's called a fire stock which yeah it's kind of like a modified version of the real world thing they add like a little bit of color to the area um and make things pop then we have these ones here I forgot the name of the asset set yeah they also look quite saturated um and interesting we also Tred to improve the quality of our tree sets if you if you compare like the trees that we have on huren to these ones um the geometry count is way higher the texture

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    resolution is a bit higher um and they just look more polished and nicer which means that eventually we have to go back to hen to Microtech and give the trees there like a little makeover so what was really important for us was to improve the the blending between different biomes so you see here these are two fairly simple biomes there's a clear distinction between them but the transition still feels very natural so if we go down here you have like the red grass and it kind of feathers out yeah it feels very organic and natural let's jump to the most experimental biome that we've made so far so for this biome here the concept art team gave us um some really interesting concept art because

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    this is easily some of the the biggest rock formations that we have in the game so far actually let me try to fly a ship so you can see the scale of them so they're massive in scale and what was the hardest part about getting these uh to look right is that they're supposed to look really good from a distance um because you would expect something this big um yeah to be visible almost from space um but then the tricky thing is also to make them look good um when you're standing up close to them let me jump in game so you see how big these rocks actually are so they are massive in scale um you can probably

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    lend your spaceship on them and walk on them and they make you feel like really small but I I think it's it's a really good visual that you have these like dark gray rocks against the the Crimson of the soil and the grass so here's a little happy accident where we have the volumetric clouds uh covering the terrain and because the the height map the the difference in height um is so large we actually get like shapes of the terrain poking out of the volumetric clouds yeah you can probably spot some of the tiling issues that we have here uh which is something that we still need to look at but like I said before uh this is still work in progress um so it's going to change a bit because I mentioned biome diversity along the

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    coasts before uh I just wanted to highlight what one of the coast biomes on pyro 4 looks like so this one is kind of this wet sand um we scattered some of the seaweed some of these um yeah lava plate and some of these Pebbles and then we also get like nice seaweed moving with the waves of the ocean one interesting thing on pyro 4 is that we have a massive crater region on other planets we have individual craters which are a whole height map or like three four smaller craters on one height map but this is actually multiple height Maps forming one large crater um and you can see it all the way out in space like this whole region is one big crater so

36. 00:28:31

    it's a mix of like the global displacement uh texture and then the height maps of the ecosystems um spawning on top plus the volumetric clouds uh make it look really epic here now we've flown down to the surface of the crater uh we wanted this to feel very yes spooky and grim and kind of dark so we have the um Dark Fantasy Forest looking trees uh yeah which look kind of creepy uh then we bring some of the red grass back from the previous um biome we go down to the surface of the crater you can see that we added this Dark Forest looking tree set some creepy

37. 00:29:21

    shapes um some moist looking ground cover aets and this whole area is supposed to make you feel a bit uneasy it's supposed to be hostile and it's not safe without your suit on so far we looked at four of the Pyro planets so let's switch it up and look at one of the moons this one is pyro 5c similar to pyro 4 you can see that it has a landmark that you can see from space in this case it's not a crater but it's like yeah like a long streak of um slick obsidian so let's fly down to the surface of the streak and have a look what it looks like from up

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    close again uh we start with like the global height map where um there's there's like a a little bit of a bump up and then it goes down to form um the crack and then we scatter um the ecosystem uh High maps on top to get the look that we want so if we go down here you can see we start with like flatland shapes some smaller craters and then uh it transitions into like these quite spiky looking uh rock form uh Mountain formations and then down here they feather into like these longer Ridges of Bedrock before it becomes smooth down

39. 00:31:00

    here and if we jump to this point which is a really cool spot because like the sun just hits the obsidian in the right way and everything looks like nice and shiny um you can see here that the ground looks quite different from other planets so instead of soil it's it's yeah it almost looks artificial in a way AET wise we're using one of our obsidian sets that you can also find on Stanton 4 for um this one got a bit of an update a bit of Polish uh so we improved the shapes uh different textures just to make it look extra cool like the way the sunlight uh hits um these surfaces to make this area a bit more interesting we

40. 00:31:48

    decided to add some of these white uh light gray shrubs just so the area doesn't feel too syy and it's always nice to have like the occasional pocket of vegetation to set the obsidian biome apart from the rest of the planet we went with the opposite route for these biomes here so instead of being uh shiny and Slick they are more dry um covered in dry sand um the vegetation is dry we added some of these spiky shapes to add some verticality to the scattering but yeah outside the obsidian crack this is what you will find on the planet most of the time so

41. 00:32:37

    this goto point I picked to show some of the subtle color that we added to pyro 5c so the obsidian crack is like kind of just dark gray black um the desert I just showed is also light gray so we felt this needed a bit uh a bit of a color breakup so we added some of these red use to uh the occasional biome it's very Rocky you also find the the red sand on the rocks from the biome accumulation and it looks really nice how how the red uh creeps up into the crevices of the height maps in the background we're going to end our

42. 00:33:24

    showcase today on pyro 6 pyro 6 has a very interesting color palette like I really like the yellows and the pale um beige tones of the terrain and then you have another blue ocean um as you can see the terrain is kind of uh ridden by craters and we get these really cool shapes where the ocean fills in those craters if we jump all the way down to the edge of one of those craters um so now we're at the edge of one of those craters I'm jumping in game right now just to show you what it feels like walking along here um you can see that we added some dramatic looking uh Coral shapes and

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    then eventually you walk down here towards one of those crators that's filled with water we have a couple of floating meshes here on the left um this is is still work in progress so uh one of us probably me has to go in and uh yeah adjust the settings of the spawning here and then we're right at the edge and I really like the the color of the water and how it looks against the the backdrop of the white chalky terrain then over here I want to introduce you to our human scale ref mesh uh his name is Ruda um and he's super helpful when we set up object presets because you can immediately see how the scale of assets

44. 00:35:07

    feel um when you have him in situation like he adds context to the to the scene he spawns every time that object preset spawns and yeah he helps us um find the right values uh when it comes to the scale of our assets in general this biome here is another good example of how our ground textures work together with the acids that we put on top so the transition is really nice from this ground texture to this one um and then we have like the same rock set on both of them uh and it makes for like a nice amount of detail on the ground then occasionally we spawn some of these spider looking um ground

45. 00:35:58

    cover measures so this spot here is really nice because you get like the particles um the monochromatic terrain the aets um and it's all against the backdrop of the Skybox of the pyros system which is red then we get like some really cool looking sunbeams coming through the uh the volumetric clouds here and and then if I turn the Sun and we make this uh dark and I jump in game you can see how drastically the the Skybox impacts the lighting um when you're on the dark side

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    of the planet and the Sky Box is just yeah it looks it looks really good so this is the sky box for the entire pyro system so you will see it um on every single pyro Planet it's just that pyro 6 has like a very thin atmosphere so you see it well here I'm happy to have had this opportunity to show you guys the work that we did in the last two years uh I'm super excited to see you guys explore the Pyro system for the first time to hear your feedback um there's still work that we have to do um but I hope that you are even more excited than before after seeing what I showed you today

47. 00:40:32

    MH yes he's a well he's a game developer a Founder a CEO he made his first game when he was like 15 anyway uh he was sitting in my chair and uh he's left he I don't know where he went but he should not be let back in the building yeah black shirt jeans yeah just keep him out of the building cuz he sat in my chair all right thanks when are we live hi welcome back to Citizen conon 2952 uh I'm your host Jared Huckaby and uh yeah welcome uh to the spaceship uh to the only constant uh we are joined here by uh by uh two cig luminaries uh VP of development Mr Brian

48. 00:41:23

    Chambers and uh uh Chief development officer Mr Aaron Robert how you doing guys not too bad you were looking at me and you thought I was going to forget it because I couldn't remember it that's right the thing I'm not good with titles I know I've had six of my own and my job hasn't changed I can't try so uh I I like your dig that's welcome to the spaceship guys how you doing absolutely good good like I like it we have been we have been talking about this dreaming about this and and and just imagining doing this since 2015 every time we talked about changing the things stuff stuff up and whatnot like what we what should we do it was always like we should build a spaceship you should build it's always like yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah someday but uh we did it it's cool it's way cool I'm sorry and you you're always shooting stuff you're

49. 00:42:11

    shooting material constantly so having a dedicated space that's dialed in that you're cool with right it's good um so we just watched planetary pyro that was the first of our journey to 4.0 presentations that we're showcasing here today during citizen con 295 2 um it's a a brief tour throughout some of the planetary locations you saw from the upcoming pyro system you two recently took kind of a whirlwind tour of of where did you guys go we we we basically went over to Asia because uh we really wanted to go and visit some of the community over there and so it was actually quite a lot of fun for us and and um and actually great experience in terms of learning a lot about uh you know um the community over there and what they would what they would like and all that kind of stuff and so it's actually one of the better trips I've

50. 00:42:58

    been on and really enjoyed it got to meet fantastic uh people uh in the the the events everywhere we went and so it just really good really educational for me actually yeah same we first went to Korea had a nice bar citizen out there hung out with people um great great food great fun stories um while we were in Korea we did a live stream into the China bar citizen that was happening at the same time so we had some tech technical difficulties uh streaming while we were there made more interesting yeah yeah they we couldn't hear them and so on so they were typing out questions and but the banter was great and then the next week we jumped over to Singapore and uh and hung out with those guys as well I was going to say we we haven't had any uh technical difficulties uh so far today uh uh I don't

51. 00:43:47

    know I was goingon to say nothing in here is actually wood so we're talking about the community actually gave us um some cool stuff so first this was given to us by the Korean community yeah we'll have you open this yes oh okay this was for you I I don't know the the full history behind it but it is a like a replica of an ancient scroll um but the characters are put together as as Star Citizen characters which is really cool oh yeah which is incredibly cool that guy that that guy's doing the Steve Bender so we each got one of those as well but they specifically wanted uh us to bring one back for you uh let me switch to Brian C let me see if I can move this over here and get a get it here Brian I'm going to hand this to you so I don't get up hold that and get get a little closer to the camera there there we go that's very nice I got

52. 00:44:37

    string in the way yeah incredibly cool all right now give it back cuz it's fun to me I'll mess it and then and then the and then from Singapore really cool then we jumped over to Singapore and while we were there this is one we'll also have to all the all the everybody at the event signed this awesome let me get this strong here you grab one side grab one side there we go way we did not plan this no we didn't bad but we got we got everybody signature so we're going to put this up in our new offices in Manchester oh very cool very cool so yeah these things but anyway and then there's there's other stuff in there you can pull some of out if you want all for you really cool little coins they made and and cards and so on and of course if you're not familiar with what a bar citizen is uh you can check out bar citizen. uh it is a completely Community backer run organization that helps

53. 00:45:26

    coordinate uh basically Gatherings of star citizens all around the world including most recently Singapore and uh uh China and South Korea I know I think there's one there was one in San Diego last night if I was not mistaken uh this says bar citizen Singapore and it's made by the community and it is a what is that oh it's a it's a bar citizen card yep it's like it's metal it's proper yeah nice okay well I'm going to leave that out and uh there's some other challenge coins and stuff we will go through this on our own time because people are probably like just get to the next thing exactly exactly I know who our viewers are um so before we do move on to the next thing Brian uh Aaron it is our 10th birthday our 10th anniversary uh 10 10 10 it's it's 10

54. 00:46:15

    something it was an internal debate whether this was the birthday or the anniversary because the anniversary is sometimes in it's November the birthday is in October uh whatever it is it's 10 you got any favorite memories something I don't know how long we're going to keep you here so I want to use you when I got you here on the spot here I've been here about eight years just about eight years right so a fair amount of the 10 um the first one that comes to my mind there's a lot but the most memorable one I would say would be 2016 at citizen Con in Los Angeles okay very first citizen con I'd ever been to really hadn't interacted face to face with the community that much um we know we put a lot of love and effort into what we were going to show um Chris is on stage he's about to show everything off I'm looking for a seat I couldn't

55. 00:47:04

    find a seat I went down basically middle floor in the theater and sat on the floor in between all the rows with all the backers and as I'm sitting there and the Demo's going I already know the demo and the pacing and then the sand worm blows out of the ground and everybody blows up and I'm kind of below everybody cuz at this point they're jumping up and just to be there and for the people have the reaction of the thing that you've been working on right that's something I'll never forget it was something you're you're at that level you feeling the love from them the excitement that they have of what they're and you're going wait hold on I'm used to working at companies where we hold our stuff for two three five years without showing anything so you have this opportunity to show this off and you get this feedback and it was it was my first basically interaction with community on a on a

56. 00:47:53

    face tof face basis it was really cool very cool I was there at that I'm pretty sure we were sitting on the floor together at one point or another probably Aaron I mean I think a lot of it's what Brian just said I mean U the thing I always love to do and like to do and and you know haven't been able to do in the last couple of years for obvious reasons is actually just um whenever the whenever the events going on I'm I I hate being backstage so I literally just go and find uh I like to go out amongst everybody and just sit there and watch the whole um watch the event and watch everybody's reactions to it uh which is always a lot of fun and um and uh and the other thing about it is just that I've made um so many actually good friends um you know with people in the community and so forth meeting people there's a lot of community members now who enjoy going to seeing again all this sort of you know all this time so the last two years have been kind of painful

57. 00:48:40

    because help meble to do that but the ability just to to be there with everybody and to see the reaction and have those conversations is is is the is the massive thing for me it' be too hard for me to pull you know one event I mean you know there's some things that have happened which I probably can't talk about which could be you know but I mean but you know but really terms of the general think it's really the ability to be amongst uh everybody and see that I even think of overall just the journey we've been on in making this project right when when I started in Frankfurt with a handful of other people in Germany you know um uh Hassan it in in the UK loaded up a van and I remember this van showed up with our PCS or monitors then they included like some pens and pencils and trash cans and a coat rack right and then we set everything up and it was like cool we were like all

58. 00:49:29

    right event after that where he basically was working so late he got locked in Cologne he couldn't leave he basically got locked in so he basically had to sleep sleep in sleep sleep sleep in the um in the station stff like that but no it's just like uh lots of um I mean ju I mean it is all that kind of stuff there's so many stories there's so many times we met people and just all the events it's been fantastic it's a followup to that Hassan story Hassan is one of my favorite people here all CG we were at at colog in 16 that was a that was a really hard uh event to to manage and sitting with them on that last day it just it's he and I everybody's off partying we've completed the thing and Hassan and I are breaking stuff down and it along with a bunch of other crew you just sits there and he goes dude I don't know if I can do this next year I'm like there's nobody else to do

59. 00:50:18

    it except us dude he goes I'm G to take PTO next year I'm like you are not going to take PTO next year and the next year he had two weeks like before and after games come blocked off and I'm like you took PT out I told you I'm like you're my hero you actually you you and again he set everything up he had all the backups done it was it went off flawlessly and everything it's but it's just yeah it's um there are a lot of there are a lot of stories I'm interested to see how Ian and Todd are going to answer this question later on um that's enough chitchat at this point let's get on to our next presentation uh design brief investigations uh one of the most common requests we get from uh the community is to is to talk about things at their early EST States tell us what what you're just thinking about not necessarily the next thing or the thing

60. 00:51:06

    after like share the earliest design stuff for for how a thing might work everything you're about to see can and will change dramatically from the point of today to the point where it makes the game but we wanted to open that curtain to the earliest points and we've got Luke Presley and Elliot Maltby who are going to discuss an entirely new kind of mission not a new Mission an entirely new scope and type and design of missions that move away from combat and transport and go more towards C cerebral deduction and investigation so uh here we are design brief investigations and we'll see you when you come back take care hi my name is Ellie mby I'm a

61. 00:51:57

    principal systems designer I work with Luke Presley on the mission feature team I'm here today to talk about one of the new Mission types we prototyping so this is an early look a new Mission type and uh usually we don't give you a look this early it's because we don't have uh very nice shiny visuals but people keep asking to see the design brief so we thought what the heck we'll let you see so so mission is built out of objective types um and the mission type really is just the most critical or um challenging objective in that mission currently we have a number of mission types in the game some of these are not built in that modular sense some of

62. 00:52:44

    these are very much uh bespok built to test out a feature at one time the original Pi wanted is one of those uh the current Mission types that do exist is we have deliveries which are essentially a form of collect and drop off we have uh eliminate missions which is just kill someone and eliminate ship missions which is go there and kill it you know destroy a ship that has a person inside of it and there's many more the way we see missions is they're comprised of little bits of gameplay so for example we have missions where you're sent to kill a singular person or pick up a box or kill a bunch of enemies so the way how we build our missions is we combine these together so we'll have missions where you have to pick up a box but will have enemies there that you have to kill as they're kind of like an obstacle uh for you to get around that

63. 00:53:32

    isn't to say that you can't build a mission out of a single objective um the assassination mission for instance has one objective assassinate a Target but even the most um like simplistic Mission like the delivery mission is actually built out of two objectives there's the collection of the item and the delivery of the item and if we made the collection of that item like even more difficult we refer to it as a collect Mission rather rather than a deliver Mission so our objective types uh for the time being have been pretty simple you know kill this person go here do this uh until now we're now looking at doing one of the most complex type of objective and gameplay things we we've tackled in mft with that said

64. 00:54:20

    we're working on a new Mission type and that's investigation currently in the game uh the player can feel like a a bounty hunter a mercenary a person who does deliveries you know a cargo hauler uh we want to make them feel like a detective as a new route you know the we're expanding constantly we're building mining Salvage and detective is going to be our focus in mft the experience we want to give players with investigation mission is that they feel like a detective that they feel like they're um collecting evidence that will ultimately answer the question that has been posed to them and that they're able to kind of search through the evidence and find the red herrings um and and like choose the the

65. 00:55:10

    right answer so what we want is we want to build a mission that um requires you to have to think requires you to have to look around search your environment in detail look at each individual clue and make sure you fully understand it before you make your decision as the detective and there'll also be uh red herrings thrown in there so evidence will really have to be like poured through poured over to be able to determine whether it's actually credible or not we also wanted to um create narratives around our locations that we haven't done before like really dig into like why has this der become a derel or why have all the ship's crew come to be dead or why has this cargo Gone Missing of the core of this Mission we're RAR asking the

66. 00:55:59

    player to use their brain rather than their gun or their ship so for this Mission type I don't want to bre from players along I want you to feel like a detective I will give you a story I will give you little bits of Clues and you have to make up this full sort of painting and decide exactly what has happened here and then the rest of the decision is on yours I might not tell you if it's wrong or right you might find out the idea is that you feel like a detective and you're so sure of your decision that you're going with that so the next stage in this whole process is building a pitch you know we have to come up with our ideas how we want it to work and then we have to present it to uh C Tony and Todd and

67. 00:56:48

    make sure they're all happy with it and all of our Visions are aligned so when we're building the pitch we start off by going over the ideal experience we want for the player we start off with the the most advanced things all the gameplay mechanics we could dream of to bring this sort of role to Life as a detective uh and then we have to start looking at stripping it back to see when we can release it what's the minimum and viable product for this uh experience and in the case of the investigation Mission we came up with two so the first pitch is extremely simple and it's um revolves around being able to find a definite answer like something that is Undisputed um for instance we came up with a mission where um there is a repair man that's gone missing and you can go to his office and you can find some

68. 00:57:36

    correspondence that will lead you to another place which will have there his um like work itinerary on there and they're all crossed off until one and if you're smart you'll go to that location and should you go to that location and do a little searching you'll find his body there and he's been like electrocuted fixing the the final thing on his list and there's your definitive ending whereas the second Pitch um it's more about allowing the player to choose when they're done like when they think they have solved the um the mystery and um the way we do this is um we scatter evidence around the the location and clues that lead you to that evidence um

69. 00:58:25

    and obviously they can can be um red herrings in there um you can get your like answer up to a credible state which might still be the wrong answer if you if you but you can you can um complete the mission then whereas if you'd have carried on digging a little more maybe found a few more clues and followed them you would perhaps find an indisputable um piece of evidence like you know I did it kind of thing um that would get you like the bonus for the mission and both pitches had their strengths and weaknesses um the the simple pitch um we could see like how easy it was to scale um and it involved less um less complex narrative work but we ultimately decided to go for the second because uh we likeed the idea of

70. 00:59:14

    giving the player the agency to um decide when they were done so we're in the Prototype phase with the investigation mission um which is more important than ever because it's such a complex Mission and we need to ensure that it's scalable and that other designers can make their own Mysteries with it with the pitures we can now prototype and sort of get that gameplay feel and see which one we we want to explore more uh for the players experience the some of the hardest points of this are going to be the scalability of it an investigation at its core is a story so the story should always be at the Forefront and the focus Focus so the first stage of prototyping was to prove that we could make it uh like a mystery happen in the most

71. 01:00:03

    restrictive location we have which was like a derel so this kind of inter interplay between the crew of it from there we're going to expand so that it takes into account more locations and uses all of the um like evidence retrieval interactions that we currently have for instance like you can kill a guy and get information off them you can find a corpse get information off it you can Loop uh box get information off it um and then we'll be protype in the newer ways of getting information like offer things we're looking into um using the med gun to find the name and cause of death of people and we're looking into being able to like find the mobile l in an inventory and download data from it one of the hardest things that we

72. 01:00:52

    have to figure out is the story the investigation will live die by its story so we work very closely with the writers to try and figure out what kind of story we want to tell what kind of Clues we want to give and then after that point we look at sort of what obstacles we want to put in your way you know keypad locked doors uh enemies uh like traversal puzzles things like that the main challenge for creating this mission is ensuring that the player has enough guidance to to complete it without putting Mission markers on everything like it is supposed to be about them searching figuring Clues out for themselves and and finding the answer themselves we want you to still feel like that detective but ensure that we're giving you enough information in

73. 01:01:41

    the ways that we can and we're working with the UI designer on the new mobile which should really help with this so this has been our video design brief on our investigation missions we're really excited to bring these to you we wanted to give you an early look to let you know what we're thinking and and see what you're thinking about these as well and we're really excited about it because it will allow us to inject a lot more story Into the persistent universe so with everything we do iteration is a key part of uh how we build things so by the time you see this and maybe by the time it comes out it might have changed drastically we don't know yet we're still working on it and figuring out the fine details but player experience and player agency is at the focus of what we're trying to achieve

74. 01:02:29

    we're really excited and hope you are too and I'm sure we'll be talking about this again in the future and that was design brief investigations joining us here and the only constant to follow up on that is Star Citizen live game director Mr Todd papy and star say a narrative director uh Mr Dave hack how you guys doing good good good these missions we've got combat missions we've got you know calling missions this is a whole new narratively driven kind of initiative for the pris universe uh what can you add to what's being said what uh is this how does this work daav what kind of missions are we talking about what kind of stories are we looking at here I mean it's you know again we're still trying to figure out it's a it's a really interesting technical challenge

75. 01:03:19

    because basically you know with a mystery it's tied into the story and so but because we need to populate the universe like it's presenting a really interesting challenge of how do we make these modular but yet still feel specific so it's it's a really unique uh challenge to try and navigate those Waters and tell something that's satisfying and again kind of a a new style of gameplay to engage people in a much more non-combat specific way that lets them kind of take advantage of all of our systems and just kind of explore and get to be these kind of you know detectives well and ideally it's it's something that you can't always you can't always notice or always be like okay it's you know kernel mustard with the with the um lead pipe with with the lead pipe or the Rope you know so we

76. 01:04:06

    want to make sure that it feels unique you know to the area and interesting so it's it like Dave said I think it is going to be a big challenge for us to to figure it out and the the fun thing about it too is is this is a type of mission where we don't just it's not just knocking out checkpoints on a on a list so the part of the fun with it was creating a system where the onuses on the players to feel like they have enough information to have solved the case but not flat out telling them right out the bat yes you have or no you haven't so it's it's it's definitely a fun thing that's that's presenting a lot of cool unique opportunities of you think it may be going one way but there might be a key piece of evidence that you've missed that completely blows the the the case open I know we often refer to the pron universe as the sandbox and I think I think a lot of people will

77. 01:04:55

    anxious be looking forward to more storytelling uh possibilities more narrative possibilities within the prisant universe like that so uh it is our 10th anniversary so I'm asking everybody who's joining us today for your favorite 10th anniversary uh stories uh Todd you're looking at me very intently like like what are you thinking right now like like I I can't get lost in your eyes not today well if if there was going to be any day it should be today um uh for at least for me it would have to be at least one of the sitc cons um I know Brian mentions like the the homestead demo but I think um even just getting three out the door like that that was such a arduous process and and um climbing up that hill was was a a

78. 01:05:44

    difficult one but to finally get that out and and uh you see people's reactions and do you do you remember in the 3.0 launch I I made this unfortunate bet with the community based on Chris Roberts's feedback that we were going to be out by June or what not that I wouldn't shave until 3.0 comes out it is December we are in the global go no go it it it to launch a big patch like this is very much like Mission Control everybody's checking in you know I'm good I'm good I'm good and we get to and and Aron is is is on this call he's leading this call he say goes well that seems like everybody I'm in a bathroom listening to it on a thing with a with a razor ready to go and Aaron I don't know if you remember this Aaron but you go all right that's everything are we ready to go and Chris goes well maybe we should check a few more things so Jarry doesn't have to shave and and I usually sit in these

79. 01:06:32

    meetings I'm I'm muted I'm not supposed to talking these me I unmuted I'm like you launched this and then it was Aaron who took pity on me he's like all right launch launch the patch do you do you recall that all yeah absolutely yeah uh and Dave we'll get your story before we move on to the next thing what's your favorite memory in the last 10 years uh I mean it's it's tough to lock it down I mean I have two kind of distinct areas there's the actually it was the the morning of the GDC announcement like I was in LA and woke up early to to watch the live stream uh so hearing Chris after you know at that point I'd been on it for a couple of months of finally pitching it out and seeing the reactions of people freaking out and crashing the website and all that good stuff was definitely you know the kind of the first indicator

80. 01:07:19

    of of what this could be that this was really tapping into something that people really wanted to see uh but for me one of the big ones was really actually was the the 2015 like the the pacap shoot uh just to be able to work with that that cast uh the crew was amazing everything about it was just like this real engaging I mean it was a three thre month shoot yeah I think it was three I yeah that's one that stands out for me huge as well was I mean the cast that was there and the how you dealt with them on a daily basis and the passion that they had into the script and it was it was so cool yeah and it was these sort of fun weird things of you know there the uh there was a song that can that came about during the production that I won't spoil anything I don't know if it's actually been released but uh that became sort of the

81. 01:08:08

    theme song of the entire shoot which was amazing so um Z's zyo's blowing up my phone saying we need to uh hurry it up so I I don't know what that means so much but just letting you know all right bring it back to me all right so thank you so much Todd and da Dave uh it's time to move on to our next journey to 4.0 presentation uh the new underground where uh we explore uh what you think you know about underground facilities and then explode them in a whole new way so check that out hello I'm mean leand I'm the art director for star sism uh and today we're going to talk talk about

82. 01:08:55

    underground facilities now this was a presentation that we gave Chris internally a little while back and what we're going to cover is um how we're going to take one of the uh locations we have in the game right now but actually really design it uh from the ground up to be the location archetype that we really wanted okay let's get started let's talk about the original underground facilities now the problem was we made these originally for the Sison presentation demo and the time we have had wasn't enough to kind of take the location where we wanted it to be now it kind of fits the current purpose it's fairly small in scale it gives a a

83. 01:09:45

    multi-room layout opportunity for FPS combat but we always knew we wanted it to be able to scale you know small medium large to accommodate maybe 60 Minutes of Gameplay at time per location so how do we go about designing a location archetype from the ground up so what we do is we split the location into the core areas we want to visually develop now for underground facilities the first thing we're looking at here is what we're calling Zone one so this is the presence on the landscape so what we're looking at here is a an example Ki shot of what a mediumsized underground facility could look like so dominant features that we see in here is a is a a

84. 01:10:34

    kind of a key Spire this is instantly where your player uh you should be able to navigate towards this could be like a a corporate Wing or an exe an executive landing pad on the top then moving down is very important to be able to get the landing pads or the landed hangers quite close to facility because we wanted that experience as the player lands they're not far off from the location they're actually quite close and you should be able to see um a little FPS area where the player lands also what we're seeing here is some visual justification at what might actually be going on so you're seeing you know um processing and tanks and supplies actually on the landscape there now what I was saying before about it being a um a kind of a a much braver visual presence on the landscape so we designed a silhouette

85. 01:11:23

    primarily so you'd be able to recognize these um as a location to aim for also what we're seeing here is we thought it' be cool to actually have surface entrances as well so we're actually thinking about primary secondary and tertiary ways for the player to get into um these locations depending on the mission scenario so like I said before you got like executive pads at the top you got the main hangers in the middle and surface entrances down there below now moving on to the inside so after the players landed uh through the hangers they'll be brought up into the main corporate reception now these are going to be quite interesting because we'll be able to Rebrand these depending on the manufacturer or the location that's where we'll uh get a lot of the variety but this is the the corporate presence before the play would go down into the

86. 01:12:10

    bowels of the facility and what we're seeing here is you know just an example of what a bearing reception uh could feel like now moving into zone two with it being an underground facility the physical active Going Underground that's cool right so we wanted zone two to be about the logistics of the play going up and down and how we can make that cool visually but also interes in from a player experience so this is the the transit the elevator Network so we played around with a few different ideas into this and one of the things that we thought could be quite interesting is the elevator itself could be a mini play Space so what we're looking at here is control room idea quite early uh what sort of scale Vehicles there could be now ultimately we didn't go

87. 01:12:59

    with this idea um it didn't really fit the art style that we wanted um but it had some pretty interesting ideas so what we landed on here is uh something that we felt quite comfortable with internally now it's worth noting we're designing these as a an archetype first in um a utilitarian art style uh in the future we'll uh expand out and do other art style variants so what we're seeing here is the control room overlooking the main uh Warehouse floor and then this elevator is should be big and clear enough for the plate on the stand like that's where Logistics will go up and down and for the elevator itself we wanted it to be its own place based so on the top level that's where containers will be shipped up and down maybe underneath it there could be little uh nooks and crannies if we wanted to

88. 01:13:48

    stealth into the location we'd be able to give opportunities for the player there and down below this is what the player would kind of see so now they're really starting to get into the balls of of the facility so echoing of that control room down um below but also this is what we'll present the player with an opportunity to choose the area they want to go maybe car goes to the left maybe processing to the right or maybe technicals up above part of that process of how we design is we look at things about from the play's point of view so what we're seeing here is pretty good indication about how the play would exfiltrate from the location so a lot of the lines are leading towards the elevator because we want navigation to be as intuitive as possible moving on to zone three so this

89. 01:14:39

    is the bowels of the facility so these are going to be spaces that we've never really explored before a lot of the locations in the game tend to be quite residential but here we're going for Something Completely industrial as a play you want to feel like uh an ant almost to the location the primary purpose is not for you to be walking around so we dedicated spaces towards Logistics and we put kind of personnel walkways almost as a secondary element so in this image you kind of see in where you know big trucks could kind of go but we've also got like little nooks and crannies for the play to kind of explore uh and go into now as it being a location dedicated towards the moving of Logistics we wanted to explore and have fun with vehicles right so here

90. 01:15:29

    we seeing the mule kind of coming ground on one of these walkways you know maybe there's elevators so on the right what we're seeing is an a a ladder so with all of these play spaces as we were do having fun and Visually exploring we always kept in mind of different ways for the player to Traverse through the scene also as part of that we wanted to think about verticality so not just a linear direction of traversal but also ways in which we could go vertically so maybe there's uh the concept of a cargo elevator within the the corridor so kind of similar to how you'd see on a character be a little control room looking at the uh Flight Deck here you could kind of see something very similar maybe this ties into gameplay puzzles about how you could bring Cargo in and

91. 01:16:18

    out you know maybe as a player you're trying to steal some cargo out there's tons of potential for how we could do puzzles in that regard so looking at this image we we took loads of inspiration from uh modern day aircraft carriers about how you see um pads on the flight deck go to the underbelly we thought this would already give tons of opportunity for uh not only uh cool visuals but also ways in which you can um reveal uh extra traversal opportunities so as that cargo deck goes down you'd see other ways to kind of Traverse through into the facility Okay so what we're looking at here is um kind of an example Corridor now corridors in our game are quite uh important to us but they don't necessarily have to be boring now what we're seeing here is an establishment of

92. 01:17:08

    a radial Motif now with this being Subterranean uh we wanted to always um imply that there's a weight kind of pushing down so this radial Motif is the best load bearing so uh as a design language instantly was feeling quite right so in this traversal cor what we're seeing is a few different things clearly there's a clear route for Logistics that's cool but also on top of that you've got these side routes which is where Personnel would go split hierarchy so it would be pretty cool for um FPS combat you know for opportunities there and then leading in underneath you kind of seeing a tertiary route now um part of this could be this maybe is stealth route or maybe this is um the upper area is blocked off so the play

93. 01:17:54

    has to go down below so even within something as a concept of a a corridor we want to design many different avenues for the player to Traverse okay so what we're looking at here is the underbelly of that concept we just showed so up above dedicated towards Logistics maybe containers going through shipping containers going through underneath here maybe this is just more towards the the processing of it maybe hydraulic cylinders for these elevators coming and going hierarchically it's a different mood so up above it's cleaner it's noiser but down below darker more steamy and again that presents other opportunities for gameplay now we can't have these corridors going on forever performance wise we'd never be able to

94. 01:18:42

    draw it and it wouldn't be uh the most entertaining for the player so we came up with the idea of introducing these bulkheads so these bulkheads are almost checkpoints so it enables us to break that draw distance but it also enables us to break the rhythm of traversal so from going from a corridor into a uh an Ops room or something like that that's a way in was to to kind of checkpoint the progress through the location so inside these bulkheads we could maybe array like opst rooms maybe these are scanning checkpoints um to kind of monitor um the movement of cargo to and from you know also inside here you know there could be t- rooms or break rooms or offices so again we're trying to break the rhythm

95. 01:19:30

    of traversal so the players going from a large space to a small space but also from one theme to another theme and what that will hopefully do is create a really good uh rhythm of play Space where the play is not getting um bored of uh traversing through the space so what we're seeing here is uh a side view to kind of explain how that process so on the left we've come in from the Corridor so on the top we're seeing the primary route through and we're seeing the bottom route coming in as well so this is how again we're going to try and keep verticality as a traversal Motif in mind now going from a large Corridor set to what we considering here medium or small so these are the tertiary networks that will link into the primary uh

96. 01:20:18

    traversal route so these again will be continuing the radial Motif that we've been seeing in and these would take the player and Connect into the main spaces now from traversal networks to theme rooms now as the players traversing through we wanted to chapter that experience with key theme rooms now what we're seeing here is an example of uh an industrial space maybe it's processing we didn't want to go too specific uh just so the in the early development process we wanted to explore motifs that could work so here we're see an example processing room but there's a few key things that's kind of cool so right from the bottom level there's a network of levels which uh will be dedicated towards processing you know pipes

97. 01:21:07

    Machinery all of that sort of good stuff and then as we get higher up we're seeing that very dominant kind of technical uh control Wing suspended over the play space as as an idea this creates a a plethora of uh interest in opportunities as a play Space uh to fight the way through or solve puzzles one of the things early on we wanted is cause and effect we wanted the player to be interacting solving puzzles but seeing that reflect into the space another theme room uh uh idea we came up with was processing so bringing in raw materials processing them through ready for manufacturing so we had a bit of fun with uh ways in which we could kind of create these quite interesting

98. 01:21:55

    set pieces so it's not all just industry uh in the under Bell of these underground facilities there's also going to be technical areas uh areas dedicated towards the uh control of the location so what we're seeing here is uh maybe it's the the main map room so this is where the control the networking of everything uh and also on here you've got the overseeing Executive Suite so it's not just technicians here but also uh executive with wings uh and also it's a bit of fun if the player does get access to these executive Wings then we're seeing another type of art style in here as well so we've seen industrial we've seen technical now we'll be seeing you know more like the um the corporate uh fo we saw up above so meeting rooms office spaces that sort of thing and

99. 01:22:45

    what we're seeing here is maybe there's the data processing of the location so as a quick idea we thought these data racks are actually submerged uh for cooling in uh a Bas of water we thought also it' be cool if there's a cause and effect so if the player solves a puzzle did go from it being below water to above water so again ways in which we can kind of spark ideas or conversations with design about uh interesting opportunities and then lastly zone four now it wouldn't be it be a missed opportunity if we didn't go into some sort of uh organic locations as part of the underground facility so this could be excavation zones or areas where it been abandoned this could leave into

100. 01:23:32

     cave networks this was something we had quite a bit of fun with so how do we actually take the player from being in this fairly wellestablished industrial location to a cave there needs to be some form of uh transition period so we came up with ideas about how we'd see excavation equipment or you know with the roads kind of Peter out and as part of the roads you know maybe we can uh do some pretty cool uh layouts for the player to drive through something that's a a little bit more invested than just a straight line now as part of that transition period between heavy industrial to expose cave the equipment needed um to create further ugf spaces you know maybe there's a large Boring

101. 01:24:21

     Machine still there again maybe that comes into some form of gameplay opportunity for the player to Traverse over interact that's kind of cool also as part of that another opportunity to introduce a new element uh to the space could be as we're transitioned towards more natural spaces we can not only introduce different types of geology but maybe we're introducing some form of liquid so depending on the location maybe it's on a certain Planet there could be like underground Rivers under ground Lakes maybe it's lava maybe it's acidic and also if we're describing uh these locations as maybe somewhere more abandoned we could start to Showcase how nature slowly started to take over this also would introduce some pral

102. 01:25:11

     opportunities so also another process we do during concept development is I like to start taking some of these ideas we're developing and get them in the engine as soon as possible and what this affords us is we can sit down with Todd and we can really evaluate how well an idea is working in terms of space size composition gameplay opportunities right from the early uh visual development process and what we're looking at here is very loose concept meeses brought into the engine quickly lit just for that uh exploration process that's an overview of what we're pushing for for the new uh underground facilities I'm quite excited about it and hopefully you are soon and we look

103. 01:25:59

     forward to showing you more in the future all right that was the new underground

104. 01:27:51

     starring our very own star say and art director Mr Ian Leland uh Ian why why are we redoing the uh the underground facilities um well kind of as we said in the in the segment we always wanted it to be a much bigger more special location in the game um so it was always on our to-do list and you've been here a while last 10 memory drink up to last 10 years what's your favorite memory oo favorite memory um it's kind of hard to pick one um but maybe a good one to start would be I remember going joining the company nearly 9 years ago and uh going on paternity and then realizing uh we're making Arena commander and we had about six or eight weeks to make it so that was that was a

105. 01:28:40

     good fun challenge that was not originally on your team and it was just kind of like here it is but it was good it was a bit like a baptism by fire and we we kind of pushed the engine to what it could do at the time and you know is super happy with it yeah so these new underground facilities it's not just going to be a big giant empty awesome looking you know playground with nothing to do correct what what are we going to be doing these things I I mean all of our mission verbs count it's basically they're it's we want them to be a Sandbox elements you know that that players can go and explore but you know whether it's sabotage or infiltrate or investigate or you know uh deliver boxes to like all these elements go

106. 01:29:28

     into all the design elements you know when we were thinking about this when we're testing out rooms like all the interaction aspects for it U puzzle elements so basically when the team's doing it uh we're building it but also implementing the different design elements into the room at the same time and all those different theme rooms that you were talking about you know open up all kinds of Storytelling possibilities with the different companies and the who knows what Misadventures are going on you know three levels underneath the surface of yila versus you know four levels underneath the surface of pyro 2 and stuff and these are coming to both the Stanton system and the Pyro system and wherever else afterwards corre I'm not saying because I like my job um all right so uh in addition to that we are we am I this one I'm this

107. 01:30:17

     one nope I'm this one I'm this one hi everybody we've got a number of promotions uh going on uh today uh everybody that's a member of the staren community you've got a registered account on the website is getting a free digital goodies pack it's available for all backers it's got Francis the the party animal plushy which I believe is is is a is it's a Finley with a fun hat isn't it there's nobody here to answer me uh a fon jumpsuit the shuin Edition uh which is really cool we don't have a lot of onesies in the clothing clothing wise for the pris universe and a grenade launcher because giving everybody uh in the universe of grenade launcher that's gonna be fun uh we' also got a Toby ey tracker contest going on uh jdf our partners at JD jdf are giving away Carrick

108. 01:31:05

     freelancer and Cyclone models and uh the Halloween promotion is already live and there's another Halloween contest where they given out some caterpillars and Buccaneers you can find out everything you need to know about that up on the robertsspaceindustries.com website and yes I saw the chat going I did comb my hair because well you know while while Brian was being messaged about one thing I got messaged by my mom who didn't like that I hadn't combed my hair hi Mom I cut my head good all right what's next everybody uh up next is uh well it's one of the segments that I'm looking forward to most uh it's our sleeper segment of of of of of the day as far as I'm concerned uh the need for multiple speeds with uh Rich Toler and Yogi and Jed and Johnny and Dave from the flight

109. 01:31:53

     experience fight comp feature team they they keep changing their names as much as I do um they're going to talk about one of star citizens oldest and most complex problems and the exciting new solution that they have for it so check that out and we'll be we'll meet you back here hi my name is Yogi clatt I'm a gameplay programmer in the vehicle feature team I'm here with Rich Toler David Coulson Jet tbot and Johnny Young and today we're going to talk to you about the upcoming changes to the flight systems and the combat systems uh which are don't specifically for sp42 but which will eventually find the way to the persistent

110. 01:32:47

     Universe we want to Define uh ship roles for the game because every role in itself and every ship can offer unique gameplay opportunities for individual players we want to provide a lot more variety to the gameplay and Star Citizen a lot more opportunity for different careers different responsibilities and different sort of perspectives and views on gameplay where people contribute different types of work and different types of jobs Star season is supposed to be a big expansive game with giving the players lots of chances to have a variety of different experiences it's not just about combat it's not just about an economy it's not just about piracy it's about all of those things happen at the same time so we need ships that can act and function in different ways to support all of those different goals in trying to figure out these

111. 01:33:34

     roles and Define what they are and make the game play for them we started very heavily leaning toward combat mostly because combat is a mechanic that is very widely applicable throughout the game and the principles behind it apply to various other roles in the game we've been working um a in the s42 branch um and this is real alloud us to isolate these ships so we're kind of broken it down into archetypes and it's real louded to kind of break down what these ships do you know and also it's to make sure that when we are defining these roles and balancing these roles that we're putting the ships in the right place because we don't want the ships to be like you play this ship it means you dominate this part of the game there's always got to be plus and minuses so the balance is right so there's still some crossover between the ship so just picking one type of ship just isn't you know isn't just a win we have already

112. 01:34:22

     defined several ship rolls and they're usually known as light medium and heavy Fighters light Fighters for us are Fighters which are very dominant in the area of One Versus one uh PVP combat but the come the downam side because obviously the light which means the materials CH on the ship are probably not the strongest so it's more about the attack it's more about trying thr out position and get in there and attack and get out of the situation heavy Fighters are kind of the opposite they're not supposed to be really good at one ver one versus one but they excel at uh n versus n engagement so when we have group battles medium Fighters for us internally we call multiroll Fighters because they have a lot of hard points so they have a lot of Loadout flexibility so a player can tune them to the role whatever they want but they will never reach the performance of dedicated ships a lot of the medium

113. 01:35:10

     Fighters sometimes come with a Turret as well so they' got that additional gameplay of the turret which is aimed to kind of counter the lack of maneuverability that their ships have and then additionally to that we have racing ships which are basically just really fast at changing the velocity uh vectors and um interceptors which we basically just want to go very fast in the forward area but never reaching really the performance envelope of dedicated dock Fighters interceptors are designed to kind of catch up to ships and disable them um so they come with kind of advanced kind of you know Hardware on these ships bombers on the other hand are um well they're just slobbing heavy ordinance at larger targets so you use them to take out bigger ships um but they're not really good at well killing small Fighters and then from smaller Ships coming to larger

114. 01:35:59

     ships like constellation and up we want to change the gam playay to be less about positional combat but more going into the naval style of combat where it's important to show the correct shield and fire arcs and timing your shots uh over long distances so the purpose of rolles is to really help players understand what ships should be used and when they should be used and it's really about delivering on those kind of games play performances that we've been talking about you know over the past you know kind of several years if every ship is the same it's not fun but if we have dedicated chips with dedicated pros and cons then we can create very exciting combat environments and the biggest challenge we see in order to get that gameplay we want is the current speed that we have in combat it's a subject we've talked about

115. 01:36:48

     many many times in the past and it's something we've tried many things with you know we've tried limit things at speed we've tried adjusting handling at speed we just we've tried so many things to kind of manage the negative impact of speed on combat when ships are going fast in combat they usually just end up very far apart which is not very interesting and it just devolves into jousting very quickly which is also not very interesting the second you create a longer distance between you and a Target your angular requirements to maneuver to that Target are just just extremely small and this is a very obvious math reason why high-speed combat is kind of the opposite of what we want to achieve meaning meaningful and effective position and maneuvering we want the combat to be closer and to be more turn

116. 01:37:38

     oriented so rotations should matter more than just flat speed having very high speeds that are pretty much the same between all ship classes negates a lot of the opportunity for smaller ships to flex different types of gameplay another big issue with the speeds in combat is it's very hard to keep players engaged in the combat because players can move so far so quickly in such a short space of time it's quite hard to keep a track on your opponent so you might think oh why don't we just make the ship slower and call it a day well we can't do that the main reason we can't just make everything slower is the size of the Star Citizen World we've got huge planets where we need to go from the planet surface up into space we need to transverse between different systems so essentially we can't have just low

117. 01:38:26

     speeds all of the time there's a massive Universe out there to explore there's planets to explore and the feelings we want to capture with the speed we still want element of danger that you can still go too fast in lots of situations we have tried an awful lot uh over the past few years with what would what are called Soft speed caps where there is no speed cap on ships but we encourage gameplay to occur at a lower speed but it doesn't really work because the advantages of flying fast in terms of defense is just better so since the last year the focus of vehicle feature team shifted very heavily towards s42 and nailing down the flight and space combat experience for it and I'm very proud to say that we finally found a really good

118. 01:39:15

     working solution that we're going to show today so the main idea is to simply not have combat and Long Range travel uh at the same time so we're splitting these gameplay experiences this will be done by a thing which is called Master modes a master mode is a thing that is globally applied to your ship um and we have two of them we have SCM which is now relabeled as uh standard control mode and qcm or qm for Quantum mode the idea is that between these two modes we can constrain the speeds in combat and also get all of the maneuvering like high speed maneuvering and traversal mechanics that we had before but in these distinct modes that are integrated with lore and integrated with the the

119. 01:40:02

     ship function such that there's costs and payoffs for being in each of the two modes so let's start with standard control mode um and what this means so this is the m that we intend to be the functional M of the ship whether it's combat or mining or any of these kind of core kind of things the ship does we want the player to do these things in this mode and what this does is is it reduces the the speed of the ship but it also enables The Shield to be turned on and obviously the intent behind this is this is where you do your combat it's where the guns are on the missiles can be armed and fired and all the kind of operational things the ship does operates within this mode the speeds that you can reach an SCM are somewhat limited somewhere between 2 and 300 m/ second tuning uh tuning pending um but this is basically the hard cap which you

120. 01:40:49

     cannot ex not really exceed you can slightly exceed this by using boost but you cannot maintain any velocity beyond that sem limit for a longer period of time so we're thinking of this as some kind of energy management system so you can go a little bit faster with a little bit more accelerations when you need to but you know that you it is a limited resource uh and you should use it carefully specifically the Boost space is interesting for for space combat because that boost spa space is not is not spheric as it was before you can boost the fastest if uh if you're going forward on a straight line and you have a lot of debuffs when you're trying to boost backwards that alone gets us a lot of interesting maneuvering space and variation in the day-to-day dock fight maneuvering so to speak importantly you

121. 01:41:37

     don't have your Quantum Drive available in this mode the idea is that Quantum is restrained to the quantum traversal mode the second mode is quantum control mode or qcm or qm what this mode does is it unlocks your maximum velocity that you your ship can reach so when you were limited before to 200 to 300 m/s now you can go to 1 1200 1400 m/s whatever your ship allows you during the development um of the quantum mode we realized we needed something that was a little bit more kind of about traveling large distances but not the distances that you need to you know SPO Quantum Drive and travel across the universe so we've created this feature called Quantum boost which is available in the console mode and you can access it at any point so at any point you want to kind of boost towards your location that you

122. 01:42:25

     know you can't looking at but it's just a two hour away and this boost is available for a limited amount of time and it's purely on a straight line just to give you like a a ballpark Quantum boost will allow you to go to a target fast if it's within let's say 50,000 kilometers whereas you will use quantum travel to do very long range jumps between with between planets so uh Quantum mode allows you to go very very fast with up to like 1200 1400 MERS per second when you want to zip really fast over a planet it also allows you to do Quantum boost to quickly go between points of interest which are rather close to you and it allows you to go to travel long distances between tra uh between planets and and large scale Stellar objects but it comes at a cost your capacitor systems are

123. 01:43:13

     non-functional because they interfere with the quantum bubble that is allowing you to go fast you won't have shields your Shields will will collapse right away when you when you uh when you swap into Quantum mode your weapons will stop working because anything that's firing outwards of your ship will disintegrate the quantum bubble your counter measures won't work and you will also not be able to use Thruster boost so basically all your capacitor and combat related systems are turned off instantly when you switch between modes there'll be a little period of time where everything has to spool up and change so you will lose your Shields during this you won't have your weapons during this but you also won't be going fast so there's a risk reward element when you need to switch modes so it's going to be a very kind of conscious choice of what mode you should be in at any particular point

124. 01:44:01

     so if you feeling the threat of another someone that's close by you're not quite sure what their intention is maybe switch to standard control mode and be safe or you can switch into Quantum mode and escape and this is going to kind of bring in an element of danger and element of risk because uh going into the two different modes is like a systemic thing within the ship's items um we actually have the opportunity now to Define ship roles that can block people from escaping either using devices that suppress the quantum bubble or devices that can effectively interfere with your ability to transfer between the modes for example specific ships like interceptors can be tuned such that they have a higher standard control mode speed so they're able to catch up with people or for example make the swap between the modes faster and

125. 01:44:50

     more efficiently so that they could catch catch up with you go into staring control mode and attack you more effectively as per the properties of their ship versus another ship which might not be as good at doing something like that it's something that's fundamentally changed the gameplay experience for us and this is working now um you know and we're playing it every day in the studio we're refining it we're tweaking bits here and there um but we're at that stage now where we're tweaking and balancing we've got the core features it's there in the game playable and the difference it's made on the game for us is it's basically night and aare because the speeds have been Limited in standard control mode suddenly fights are a lot closer the accelerations of ships similarly have been retuned a little bit and their afterburner strength has been retuned a

126. 01:45:38

     little bit to make it so that you can orbit around ships and have a lot more interesting maneuvering um and because the ranges are closer Maneuvers that would be performed by your ship have a much more significant impact because you're closer so if I like thrust up or down you'll immediately see the difference so similarly things like Capital ships uh effectively get a buff to their offensive capabilities with this change because suddenly you can't orbit a capital ship at high range and high speeds um you have to get a lot closer which will make the turrets much more effective at shooting you turrets become more important and working as a group to attack Capital ships is more important than it has been before this is a really exciting change because it allows us to keep the combat speeds relatively low where we know that

127. 01:46:26

     the gameplay is better for that while also keeping the point-to-point travel speeds as high as they should be for pu playing with Master mod and Squadron 42 has been a lot of fun simply because it's changed the entire combat experience before you'd find that you were fighting at a huge distance now you find that you're in really tight close combat with the other players I think the biggest part of this is going to be when we have the larger ships interacting with the smaller ships once we can have battles with big Capital ships and smaller ships will have brought something to the start citizen world that I don't think has been has come out before uh and I think it'll make a massive Improvement to the game having made these changes uh to implement Master modes and rebalancing all of the ship speeds uh we'll finally

128. 01:47:15

     be able to Define ship roles in the way that we've always wanted and to bring a lot more variety to the gaml that we haven't had before so it's been really long journey here obviously because you've been a part of this journey um you know we've tried many many different things over the time to try and really create the experience we want but you know the reality is from us it came down to you know what it always is in sism which is creating choice for the players it's about giving players the option and their choices have consequences you know so with Master MDS it really helps Define the player choice in the game so they're choosing to do combat they're choosing to travel from a to being Quantum they're choosing to QT boost somewhere just giving players that freedom within the universe we have is just like it's a really magical thing and we try many times to control that as you know as designer to try and get a

129. 01:48:04

     specific experience at some point but we always end up coming back to the fact let's just give the players the choice and let them make the key decisions and we'll design the balance around that we finally have it so we're we're now nailing down the space combat experience for Star Citizen specifically for Squad 42 we know from internal play test that the master mode stuff works we know that it works with our flight ret tunings and it's very exciting it will yet take a while to ship this to the Pu because the amount of ships you fly in Squadron 42 is rather limited whereas in Star Citizen we have about I don't know more than a 100 ship records at the moment but the whole hard problem of Designing this thing in the first place is over we just need to get the numbers in now and all the footage youve seen today is from Squadron um it's all currently playable

130. 01:48:52

     in the game that you know inally that you know we're playing this every day we're still making some tweaks but everything is there right now it's all about the foundational kind of tweaks that we're making um and we can't wait to get it in your hands so thanks a lot for listening to us today we're very very excited to get the changes to you as soon as possible and yeah we'll hope to see you fighting in the verse all right so I've got uh out of everything here I've got all the chicks on Nicks love my Lando fever of course what' you got Brian who is most likely to win in a dog fight okay an ortwin an ortwin shout out to ortwin it's been a long time hey

131. 01:49:39

     ortwin uh my one is my cargo hold is always full of Chris Roberts really show the camera there you go a right uh that's van Against Humanity a game created by one of the our own Star Citizen uh one of the original Star citizens uh Mr Ken Shadow uh we still got it it made the trip to UK and we are playing it in between the sessions so thank you again uh Ken Shadow John oh I dropped the cards this gone talk to me about this segment we just watched is this is this BS or do we actually have it uh I think we think we've got it um the team's been super hard at work for quite a long period of time on this uh we've gone through I don't know how many versions of this uh we sort of run out of interesting names

132. 01:50:27

     to call all the development bills we're on to fish names now um yeah it's it's been a lot of work put into this a lot of testing internally like across the company uh not just within our team getting them all on board getting them playing it feeding back and I know we don't generally do when questions but this is a pretty big change to the overall flight experience uh folks have been waiting for this fix for a while um we're not talking about tomorrow or next week or what what give give us why why isn't this just going to be put into the Pu tomorrow uh two factors uh we started doing this uh for squadron because naturally to have a great flight experience in Squadron you need a a it to all work together um so we we're focused on Squadron first for that and

133. 01:51:17

     Squadron has a much smaller subset of ships than the Pu has um it's lot easier to do a system like this get the broad Strokes in and then really dial it in for six or seven ships MH versus the hundreds in the Pu um so it's a it's a scale thing that stops IT going in the Pu straight away and then the other thing is lots of it ties in together with other systems um so it's not just flight mechanics it's UI HUD radar starm map Quantum uh changes and you have to get all of that together in one we can't really PE meal it you you just won't get a great experience if we go well here's here's one bit of it here's another bit later we want to drop it in one big uh deployment we're going to drip feed ships and Like This ship's done and then This ship's done or or do you you think

134. 01:52:04

     more together all at once we have what Brian said we have to do like a broad tuning across the board for everything uh day one for when this goes into the Pu um hopefully by then a lot of those will be really where we want them that as with game develop any constant change yeah uh there will will be ones that change over time my life oh you change the camera to my camera there'll be ones that keep going uh and obviously Community feedback is a a great thing um it's very hard to get things right out the gate there's only so much internal testing you can do we we need that feedback at that point and I do want to say to uh uh folks who watching wherever you're watching uh the six to seven ships in Squadron was not a confirmation that there are only six or seven ships in

135. 01:52:51

     Squadron uh we'll confirm that stuff much closer just if if you're already halfway through your Reddit post just delete a couple times and all right you ready to move on to the next thing absolutely all right so so we've been bouncing back and forth between you know you know really hot visuals with the planets of pyro and then and then gameplay stuff with investigations and back to the really hot visuals with the underground facility then back to the solid gameplay stuff with the flight experience up next is another really solid visuals uh thing uh lville lville meet me at camera one lville star Citizen's First Landing Zone uh we've learned a lot since it was first uh put in uh we've got we've we've built microt Tech new Babbage we built

136. 01:53:39

     oron on Crusader we even went back and redid Area 18 on AR Corp but lorville currently stands as the oldest standing Landing Zone in Star Citizen and with our new team at turbulent and ready to kick butt and I was going to say kick names and Take butt I almost messed that up and then I messed it up trying to explain that I didn't mess it up uh they're getting ready they're already underway uh building a brand new lorville Redux so we'll send it on over to Eric Gagnon and Maxim guidon I had it I had it I was so close they can tell you all about it oh and Ian Leland check it out hello my name my name is Ian leand and I'm the art director for star sism and today we're going to talk about an

137. 01:54:26

     internal initiative called lville 2.0 now with laville and specifically the lville cityscape it was probably the first major Landing Zone we' have ever had to do it was the first time we put a a landing Zone on a planet and we had the player fly there with minimal restrictions although it did have that really big uh no fly zone but when we did subsequent Landing zones we built up a bit more of a knowledge based and experience based about how we can effectively introduce cityscape so Area 18 new babit Orizon we all developed more techniques and we always wanted to go back internally and put that knowledge back into lville to start us off I'll throw it over to Eric our principal concept artist and he can show you some more hi my name is Eric yanel

138. 01:55:16

     I'm a principal concept artist for Star Citizen in turul in Montreal and I'm mayor for to talking about the lville 2.0 when I started to work on the concept uh initially what I did is to create a variety of sketches black and white sketches of a different approach of that City we create a a side panel of a silhouette of the building Main the reason we need to uh to work on that is for main gameplay issues because we would like to make a game play in the interior buildings and we need to create

139. 01:56:05

     uh a bigger city to let the player uh have a fun experience to flying through that yeah so after the sketching process uh and get some approval I need to know very well uh the footprint of that City we build the city from a human scale you know we have nothing in that City they build uh in a gray zone so everything is buil from that that unit and it's built from the unit of the CBD so this is the mainly the two main unit I used to to to build the city so we have a kind of a proportion in terms of length and distances uh to respect so this is why I used the 3D uh basis to to to working on that so I need to make sure that the

140. 01:56:53

     ratio of everything fits well to approach closely as possible so mainly the goal is not to dig right away on the details but it's to stay on a big picture and to see if the the skyline makes sense so this is a good challenge to play with that and I think I did a a nice job on that because at the end what the feeling we have it's like a real City so I use my uh my 2D background in concept artist to make uh the best as possible possible concept part uh with all the techniques inside of it uh 3D pent over sketching painting

141. 01:57:46

     and at the end I was needed to create a very uh speechless concept to sell the the mandate to the the people uh involved in that and they make sure they they believe on that project and they could saying well okay now we are a lville 2.0 and we're ready to moving on on that thanks Eric there's some beautiful image there and we had a lot of fun internally developing uh that cityscape now we're not just in concept development we've actually just passed our white box Milestone internally so we're going to jump over to Max and he's going to show you where we're at Max from this Concepts done was time to

142. 01:58:57

     start it an engine and uh we uh we've had to evaluate what was possible to do and to extend or to make it much bigger than the initial uh lville City up to something that matches the ambition for instance we are keeping at the l19 area we are keeping the CBD keep we're keeping um the Spaceport and we're building upon uh this and just extending the the the city we've done several tests with the the transit system the rails and uh we Tred to extend it out a bit we're keeping the same number of gates but we're moving uh moving them out and so throughout these tests we've

143. 01:59:45

     built the city uh as just placeholder uh white box very primitive to have this this layout this fast iteration of the whole city um done and then that we could see it and get feedback on it so it will feel more like a believable city um we hope it to be fun to fly around and uh like to actually do some races in it we're building uh arches uh Bridges and like underpasses and it makes it interesting to be able to fly around we see the community of players uh they're um they're doing like

144. 02:00:35

     emergent gameplay of races and that inspires us and then the way that we're building uh building this this city we are starting now the gray box we have like a um Montreal's tools teams now that are working on like Houdini tools and they are we we we're chatting with them see what we could uh could use from the library of tools there will be several areas of like a higher level of detail um especially around uh landing pads on rooftops and Lookout areas and uh these are the places where the players will be able to to land these will eventually connect uh to the interior uh spaces that will be built later and in that

145. 02:01:25

     sense Lille will be ready for those Interiors we started as a team of of two artists working on on lville and now we're we're five and uh we could even be like more as soon um each artist has their slightly different skill sets and we complete each other they bring ideas I let them bring ideas to the table on how to uh Advance uh what we're doing make it kickass that's really important so I I hope you'll like what you see and we can't wait to show you more I'm happy about the opportunity of working on on this mandate because it's it's it's going to make such a a huge difference thanks Max uh that's looking great and hopefully you

146. 02:02:13

     guys can kind of see even in a white box in format we're seeing really good scale read and understanding about how we can make the citycape of lville probably one of our best yet and we'll be showing more soon thanks for letting us showcase that for you today enjoy the rest of the so you've taken the one that had the

147. 02:03:42

     most egregious noly Zone and you're making it so we can just brace through the canyons and under the bridges and everything is I I want to ask you the same question I asked John crew is this BS or is this really what we're doing uh no this what we're doing and hopefully you can see in the b-roll that you can actually see it and um you know no fly zones you know they were there for a reason at the time but as we grow as we learn we find ways to have a better player experience with that regard and if you see it how we um got things working with new babage then we started thinking okay there is a slightly different way cuz ultimately that noly zone there is for a reason it's not because oh you know what would be really cool right it's like um you

148. 02:04:32

     know we want to keep the player experience and you know the maximum level so it's there but for lville as you've seen you know um we we want that experience to be as low as possible to get that feeling where you can weave in between the structures weave in in between the buildings and it was always something like as we progressed through the land zones it was always like one day one day we'll get back to Louisville so I'm super happy that we've seen this now and uh you know we we discussed the art pipeline for for years we do you know I I said we're here for celebrating our 10th anniversary this year we've been talking about how game games are developed and we've cut we've gone through the pipeline a number of times from white box to gray box to stuff like where would you say lville is obviously

149. 02:05:21

     what we were just seeing there is not finished final we're in the final art phase so basically um blockout white box is obviously uh self-explanatory um interestingly gray box phase I'm thinking more like first pass art you know so we're we're always trying to keep keep keep team on the toes but gray boxing is a terminology um that we've used on all art disciplines and it's kind of but when you're using kits um and you're using kits and you're in gr boxing you're not actually traditionally gr boxing so we'll probably just call it like first pass out but where lville is right now and we just passed the gry Box review gate um a few weeks back so it's final out now so we're on the the really interesting part where we're doing you know really good engine look Dev I mean

150. 02:06:09

     you're seeing hints at um the potential in engine um but there's still a few hurdles that we need to get over well that was a look at lville redex uh just another step on our journey to 4.0 I do want to clear up some of the misconceptions that we're seeing in the chat here uh our journey to 4.0 is more akin to a journey to 4.x uh the things that we're showing you today are not a list of this is what's in 4.0 some of this will be in some of this will be in 4.0 like the planets and moons of pyro and stuff like this other things will be in 4.1 4.2 4.3 and we'll know which as we get closer to development any it's followed have followed the pro the the project long enough knows that that's how this works

151. 02:06:56

     but everything you're seeing on today's show here is everything that's going to that's in the process in the pipeline being developed now for four 41 42 43 and so forth um and before we jump to the next one I want to shout out a couple of the uh the other promotions that are going on the digitals good the digital goodies pack uh is going out there you get a a Finley plushy it's not called Finley anymore it's called Francis I should look at that beforehand uh there's a new jumpsuit that's being given to everybody and grenade launchers with a cool new skin that's free to all backers uh just register your account and uh register account and and pick up any one of the Pledge packages and whatnot and that stuff's yours the Toby ey tracker contest is going on right now uh send us your in-game watch party screenshot for a chance to win I know there are a number of watch parties uh

152. 02:07:44

     going on right now uh shout out to the folks down in San Diego who I saw on on Twitter earlier uh the jdf contests are are are Partners at Jr design and Fabrication uh create a ship model using only ordinary and random household objects for a chance to win uh they make they make these these models that you see here uh uh the the the wonderful uh star Kitten a dragonfly uh swi switch to Ian's camera I'm GNA I'm put this in there like this look at that oh it's not focus hold on let me let me get closer to his face we're gonna do this we're going to do this no no look at my and dragonfly in Focus CU I'm holding it near Ian's face isn't that great uh did you just smell it what did it smell like I thought about tasting

153. 02:08:30

     it jrd Fabrications are the makers of these wonderful uh Star Citizen models they have an entire array you can check it out the website or you can enter the contest for your chance to win a Carrick a freelancer or a cyclone and then don't forget the Halloween promotion is going on right now uh with scary helmets and and and and pump pump and carbon contest that's all always my favorite uh I think every single winner we've ever had has been from Texas I don't know why that is but they take their pumpkin carving very seriously down there uh all right so we've rambled on enough let's throw it to the next presentation now I'm going to set this one up here I'm G to put this I'm G to make the audio guy I was Hing it in my hand because I got up I'm just going to put it there it's going to be safe Resource Management what did I want to say about

154. 02:09:18

     this okay when I backed the project back in 2013 2014 before I came here the thing that excited me most about Star Citizen was the potential for multi-crew gameplay uh that that that that uh positional experience of a captain and a navigator and an engineer and a comms person and and run down to the run down and put out a fire and something's exploding in the cargo hold you got to go and you fix the fuses and stuff like this uh that multi-crew experience has been the has been what Drew me to the project uh first as a backer until I came in uh to do this on a spaceship I mention I have a spaceship I have a spaceship uh and if you're like me on our 10year journey I've been I've been wondering when's going to be the day

155. 02:10:06

     where are we at with this stuff uh well Dan truffin and thorsten Lyman are here to talk about the actual working prototypes of the resource management system the thing that will make true multi-crew gameplay possible and the last big hurdle to getting those Capital ships into the game so buckle up eyes forward and take it away Dan and torson hi my name is Dan troughing I'm assistant director for pu content and with thoron linman here today we will be talking to you about something we think uh it will change the way Star Citizen functions and works and how the players will play the game uh in the future and

156. 02:10:55

     that is Resource Management resource management is the underlying system that allows uh items to produce consume and store uh resources in the game it is the digital representation of real life cables pipes uh tanks batteries or anything like this that you can imagine it's the foundation of the ships where you have certain resources like Fuel and energy powering certain items on the ship but it's also uh the system that will lie below any station or any vehicle anything that you can imagine in our universe that actually requires a certain type of

157. 02:11:44

     resource resource management is not just a system that helps ships function it is a thing that's integral to the functionality of the entire Universe it will be the way uh surface Outpost function underground facilities space stations Landing zones everything in Star Citizen will function using Resource Management so we will start with the smaller vehicles and it will the gameplay for those smaller Vehicles way more interesting than what we have right now and from that we can move on to like bigger ships and finally the capital ships will have a real purpose in the world and where it will have a real meaning that uh you have the multiple roles inside those ships it will drastically increase the time to kill for all vehicles in Star Citizen and it will encourage people to disable

158. 02:12:32

     ships rather than destroy them missions like Siege of horizon will uh increase in scope and scale up a lot more with the use of resource management as players will be able to uh resources change the way resources are distributed cut power cut certain Fuel and critical Parts in order to progress further in those missions we can suddenly scale a lot bigger than what we have right now and the reasons are that we have more control over the powers of certain platforms there and we can introduce some interesting gameplay that facilitates these functionalities resource management is going to open up uh the possibility of player structures player owned uh outposts on planet or stations in space where the player will have to manage resources bring in fuel do repairs and this will not be

159. 02:13:21

     something that only caters towards the engineer this will be something that is valuable for everyone in the world of Star Citizen resource management will finally allow players to build their own bases and their own homesteads and actually keep that that Loop engaging and fun and really this is the main thing that makes multi crew gameplay possible we envision the players taking on roles like engineer mechanic uh tactical officer and while you have your engineer trying to maintain all the resources functioning and flowing perfectly and all the items in good operation you will have mechanics running throughout the ship trying to change fuses repair various things that have broken down you will have tactical officers moving Shields from one side of the ship to another in order to counter

160. 02:14:09

     whatever incoming damage you have obviously the pilot is going to be doing his job trying to move the ship out of Harm's Way the Gunners are going to be taking out enemy incoming Fighters or other ships this this is how we envision this entire ecosystem just coming together and providing what we hope is true multi crew gaml and for all of you out there that are waiting for the Ides and javelins and want to use these ships this is the system that is going to make using those ships possible so all that said this is a really important system for Star Citizen but let's dig into the details and see what exactly this is Resource Management can be broken down into several U key elements power energy resources life support item maintenance

161. 02:15:01

     relay handling access control and gravity so let's start with power energy and resources the players can choose to overload items in order to get more efficiency out of them at the risk of burning them out they can also underload items to save some some resources if they don't need the full uh efficiency of an item the players will have to pay attention to the balance of resources power fuel coolant uh heat generated in order to maintain a well oiled and balanced ship and overall prioritizing certain items and their resource consumption life support is the most important thing you have to pay attention to in your ships now since atmosphere is finite in all the spaces

162. 02:15:52

     that you might uh discover and here the life support system is a key factor here the life support you have to maintain it meaning you have to make sure that the consumables inside the ice support generator are always there to make sure that it can generate breathable atmosphere for you or the temperature is actually increased to a human livable Factor so you don't freeze to death or you don't you you are not cooked as part of item maintenance the player uh will be able to uh control uh items throughout the ship turn them on turn them off they will be able to remove broken items and replace them with uh new items or sometimes dodgy items depends on depending on their income

163. 02:16:42

     they will be able to control which subitems are uh installed in those items either as fuses or subcomponents that give them various bonuses to uh to that specific item they will be able to run um repair gameplay and replace broken fuses when the item stops working or takes enough uh enough damage relay handling is the the actual management part that you as the engineer on the ship have has to do you have to do there it's um basically defining these circuits in the most effective way is especially for bigger ships so a relay is something that defines which items are connected to each other and what we

164. 02:17:30

     want to achieve here is allowing you to create the best possible outcome for your ship with Access Control we're introducing ship roles the captain will be able to assign certain roles to each of his crew mates and for example say one of the player becomes the engineers the engineer which gives them specific access to certain controls while the the person that is the pilot will not have access to those controls at the same time a a gunner will only have access to a specific gun or all the guns of the ship and finally gravity so gravity is a concept that you experienced already in every ship so there was always a ground

165. 02:18:18

     there was always there was always a down there was always up and we would like to give you some more control over that so because it requires some some energy and if you want to run your ship more energy efficient we want you to allow to switch off gravity or there might be other use cases where a zero gravity environment is more useful than another one so if it wasn't clear by now the scope of resource management touches pretty much every aspect of life in Star season so we're doing a lot of talking but I but what everyone would like to know is where are we with all of this right now currently we have working in-engine prototypes of the following uh systems power gravity life support and the relay network with a power system we can

166. 02:19:09

     overpower and underpower items we can set the priorities of uh item producers and consumers inside the ship and we can set the path uh of resources uh inside the ship through the resource relay Network and with a power system we already can distribute the base energy and base fuel throughout the ship so we can make sure that each item actually gets the resources they need creating your own resource path is uh basically defining the roots the or the most efficient rots that the ener or the resources uh have to take throughout your ship we can also demonstrate many aspects of

167. 02:20:07

     the life support system including making new players suffocate fire expulsion

168. 02:21:33

     change the temperature in each room making new player suffocate venting and filling rooms with

169. 02:22:30

     atmosphere and making players suffocate again a Target friendly

170. 02:24:35

     in the last year we've made tremendous progress with a resource management system but with a system that is this big and complex we do not want to rush it we want to just get it right and get it right from the beginning so let's talk about what's next for the resource management system as you can tell resource management is is a huge Endeavor for us so like everything else we'll probably not get everything in the initial release but this is what we're aiming for interactable and accessible items on ships relay gameplay uh changing fuses on the relays resource balancing defining control groups that will be accessible uh through the mfds allowing people to create prese resets for your uh Resource Network for each ship an engineering UI with at

171. 02:25:25

     least uh a list or schematic view of your ships external engineering screen for ships allowing Engineers to define the tuning parameters that can be accessed by the pilot with a press of a button like loading presets and creating presets and after the initial release everything else will fall into place with subsequent patches we started talking about Resource Management uh about two years ago it is pretty much the evolution of what used to be the old pipe system and uh this has been an interesting journey and finally we're starting to see the the fruits of our labor and we're starting to see all the possibilities of gameplay

172. 02:26:14

     that we can open up to the players in the future it's exciting to work on something that's so Central to the world of Star Citizen and that can impact the game playay in of so many people irrelevant of what they choose to do in the world of Star Citizen resource management is the most exciting feature that I've ever worked with it's such an groundbreaking feature that will change the entire game from its core I think we never had this opportunity to change the game into this direction that where we are heading right now where we will finally have all the tools in place to actually allow meaningful uh multic crew gameplay and meaningful decisions for all the players where every decision

173. 02:27:05

     counts this is the the stuff that that makes me makes me really proud of what what we are working on right now thank you for letting us share our progress with you and I we hope you're happy with all this progress and have a nice citizen G this bar citizen Singapore card is really cool I'm just they've just been staring at me playing with it for the last 18 minutes that was uh that was Dan truffin and torson Lyman talking about the resource management system and joining us to follow up on it is Todd papy John crew guys this has been a long time coming I know we still got a ways to go I'm not I don't make it sound like it's you know it's done but but I mean how exciting is this this is very like

174. 02:27:54

     this to me brings the interaction that we want in environments but also in ships you know so like like you said with with the the multic Cru stuff but like again it's it's not only going to be in ships where we're also putting in environments yeah this is what's necessary to to play have player homesteading you know one of the it's not the only thing yeah but it's it's it's it's about just bringing the interaction into the environment so so the AI will react the player reacts you know like it's it's having that interaction level that you don't normally get in games so that's that's what we're looking for being being able to make se you know imagine Siege of orison but being able to actually assault the platforms depower the platforms uh you know missions that can take place inside the landing zones where you can cut power to buildings and stuff like this I mean this is this is

175. 02:28:43

     what really opens the game yeah and John the the as they said in the segment the first place this is going to come is ships yeah so uh uh what what what's the what's the first version of this look like uh so first version is going to be uh a lot of what you saw in that video um so we're working through some of the ships now um hammerhead uh H Star Runner just to prove out a few things cuz naturally uh some ships were built a long time ago um ones in recent times were built with this sort of level of detail in mind um but yeah you you'll have all these components accessible you'll be able to get to the relays do all this management um something really cool in that uh video was all the the fire and gravity

176. 02:29:32

     and atmosphere stuff like you say it it goes from just being a ship you're on board to like an interactive piece of the puzzle that gives you that multi gameplay you're not just limited to be I'm a pilot I'm a turret Gunner that's about it now engineers and support roles are going to have a a huge huge part to play on ships because things will go wrong and if you don't get on top of it quickly it's going to be a very bad time for all involved yeah like I said before we set it up it's this is the this is the aspect of Star Citizen that first drew me you know in so it has been I feel like I've been very patient and and and waiting really wanting to see this go and and as I see uh uh everybody on euu and everybody that's contributing to this thing it's just super exciting to to see it uh a really beginning to

177. 02:30:20

     evolve and really beginning to to to to be used tangibly in our prototypes and stuff like that and I it's it's just I think people know I don't generally hype very of usually the guy is sitting here it's like don't hype you know manage your expectations stuff and you should you should still do that I'm not changing my tune I'm just this is the part of the thing that I've been waiting for personally so I'm excited all right so we've ping pong from from from from the visuals to the gameplay to the visuals to the gameplay to the visuals to the game play uh we've only got one more uh uh scheduled presentation left uh ship uh ship talk Talking ship the our annual uh celebration of vehicles new coming to the to to the pipeline vehicles coming straight to flyable things something in the middle uh that's going to start John

178. 02:31:08

     crew and Ben Curtis and Paul Jones and I'll let them uh take it away hi everyone my name is John crew I'm the vehicle director here at Cloud Imperium games uh this year I'm once again joined by Ben Curtis vehicle art director and Paul Jones concept art director and this is our yearly ship talk panel like previous years we'll be talking about something coming soon something being announced today something coming a bit later and then the fan favorite the p a ship or vehicle concept series to kick things off this year

179. 02:31:59

     we're going to be talking about our New Concept ship which is the Crusader spirit this is a series of ships from Crusader industries that is designed to take on a variety of other manufacturer ships at the twers uh crew level and does a wide variety of tasks depending on which variant you uh pick the two standup competitors to this ship are naturally the cutless and the obviously the cutless blue red steel and the freelancer series um those are all similar sized uh ships to this and they also cover similar sort of roles compared to the cutless and freelancer series The the spirit benefits from uh not only Crusade industry's sort of stylish uh physical appearance and also their renowned Speed and Agility uh over

180. 02:32:48

     those other variants we we have three variants of the Crusader Spirit we have the C1 which is the cargo hauler version we have the A1 which is the light to sort of medium bomber version and then we have the E1 which is the executive VIP transport version one of the really nice features of this the spirit series as a whole um is the the front half of the ship is kind of like this this shared area and it's the rear section that swaps out so the C1 is the cargo hauler version uh this comes with 48 of cargo capacity in the Central Area uh accessible like the other versions via the rear ramp it's wide enough to allow a variety of groundbased vehicles on board uh such as the Cyclone um you won't be fitting larger things in it like the tank however with the size of

181. 02:33:36

     the cargo bay on the C1 you can put a vehicle and still have some cargo capacity left over the A1 is the bomber version of the spirits which sort of splits the difference between the Hercules a2s bomb uh bomber version which has both size 10 and size three bomb options this comes with size five uh bombs uh they are arranged in two vertical uh gravity dropped uh formations down each side of the central area so you have a nice little walkway down the middle and then you'll have the two sort of lines of bombs each side of you and you'll be able to see them drop out of the the bottom of the ship it delivers a different role to what the starlifter does in terms of the bomber I think it's a a much kind of smaller faster ship so it's much more agile

182. 02:34:24

     you're going to be kind of getting in and out um and and you know doing your bombing run and then getting back out of the danger zone quite quickly so it feel quite familiar in that sense uh but it does deliver a unique kind of play style um compared to the the starter so you might be asking yourself which one's better and it really depends on what you want to wipe off the face of the planet that you're bobing obviously the A2 has both Heavy Hitters and what could be described as carpet bombing whereas this is sort of for when you don't want to completely annihilate everything on the ground and lastly we have the E1 variant which uh solely exists to give Jared hartburn over his Starliner so this is a sort of taste of what the Starliner will will get in the future but on a much smaller scale vip1 is um really interesting module it's basically split into two two levels um

183. 02:35:16

     and so you know we really wanted to sort of have that that VIP experience obviously you're you're coming into a sort of multi-roll ship but when you get into the module you've got lockers space you know space to put any sort of personal belongings potentially you go into two elevators left or right and take you up to the top deck um so it has that sort of first class feeling I think what really makes the E1 Stand Out compared to some more other ships is is the kind of the large panoramic glass roof um so when you're in this kind of shared VIP area you're going to have great views and be able to kind of like explore the burst um in in something that I think is going to be quite unique and we also have uh the mix master which is at the front of the um

184. 02:36:06

     front of the module which is basically where players can go and and choose whatever the drink it is so it's you know cocktails or coffee then players will also have super comfy seats they'll have the uh wides screen TV in the in the module I'm really excited to see when we start getting our players and our AIS into these ships and being able to kind of explore the verse and um you know experience that kind of luxury living that um well I've not yet to experience so between the three variants there are a number of shared areas the the sort of core of the ship changes with each variant but there are some aspects which don't need to change and starting from the front of the ship you naturally have the the cockpit or the bridge so like other Crusaders ships you have the side by side pilot to co-pilot Arrangement then you have behind them

185. 02:36:55

     their living quarters SL buunk area and component access and then you have the variant section which does change the sort of internal floor plan of the ships between them then at the rear of the ship you'd actually have the the ramp access area so that's the Crusader Spirit uh we hope you look forward to seeing this and seeing what it can do in the game in the future from something at the the very start of our vehicle production pipeline to something nearing the end of the pipeline let's talk about the Drake Corsair next the Drake Corsair is a important ship in their lineup because it fills that multi crew uh exploration Gap in their lineup we've seen a lot of Drake ships of various usage and roles uh such

186. 02:37:44

     as the buccaneer and cutless in this size class uh you naturally have the the constellations 600i is the competitors and what Drake brings is its usual uh rugged overwhelming amount of Firepower uh for its size sort of classification to that entry it's Drake's uh dedicated exploration ship um it's a kind of a medium you know deep space vessel effectively got crew for up to four or space r four crew uh it's got a sizable cargo hold um and it's kind of got everything that you need to really spend a decent amount of time away from civilization away from stations and just kind of being able to chart out uh those deep areas of space

187. 02:38:31

     it brings that sort of No Nonsense no FRS approach to to the ship and you know you know if something's going to go wrong it's going to be something that you more than likely can fix and it's not going to be something that you know have to cut back to a main dealer to get serviced and fixed it's something that you know hopefully you and your crew will be able to kind of repair and and get back on running or fix with some duct tape so fans when they see um the ship will immediately see the sort of Heritage the DNA that's running through um the spirit so you can you can kind of almost imagine how the ship is built you know it's got that military easy fix kind of feel it's loaded with guns loaded with turrets um it has some really interesting mechanisms uh inside it so I think players will really dig that I think

188. 02:39:19

     what quite unique to the cors air is is Wings the way they fold up um you know this isn't done purely for style you know being Drake is it's more there for function it allows you to get in and out of the hangers um much easier um we put quite a lot of effort into keeping that really iconic uh exterior kind of silhouette and and and vision that we we set um but still making it functional and and making sure it works at the moment we're just kind of finishing up on Final art um most of the exterior has had you know the majority of it its um core art time spent on it we've still got lighting to do we've still got kind of like final finishing do tweak some of the materials till we're kind of properly happy um but it's in a a good place so I'm really really excited to be able to show you so let's take a look

189. 02:40:06

     inside the ship and once again we'll go front to back on the inside of the ship we start right the front on the cockpit um the the corser has quite a unique feel to its cockpit in the the pilot is kind of sat right up front and then kind of classic kind of Drake stylings the the co-pilot gets in the seat behind them and actually sinks down into the floor that transition from the main cockpit area into that kind of co-pilot um kind of section uh it's it's you know you move right forward and you're sat pretty much underneath where the pilot is it gives great visibility for both the pilot and the co-pilot the other nice thing about this cockpit is again you've got these massive guns that that stuck out either side of you um so it should be should be a nice place to be in in the rear of the cockpit we've got the Captain's Quarters so the Captain's Quarters is actually pretty much identical to the rest of the quarters in

190. 02:40:54

     the ship in terms of its kind of size and it its uh amenities as As you move back through the ship there's a um I guess a small kind of Crossroads directly behind the bridge from here you can either progress backwards straight into habitation or to either side you've got the turret access so it's right really at the kind of like the neck of the ship effectively the side turrets have changed a little since the concept phase they now have a greater range of uh in sort of the y axis we're quite Limited at concept stage to about 45° uh each way you're you're now looking at 90° pretty much each way so it's a lot more effective especially forward firing which again the Corsair has so many guns pointing forwards having extra two turrets is very very Drake in habitation we've got you know

191. 02:41:42

     you've got the remaining three crew quarters that being Drake they are no FRS you've got a bed you've got somewhere to store your gear and that's pretty much it the main habitation area though is um if anything quite luxurious for a drake ship in that there's a decent Siz space uh you've got your bathroom which is no FRS it's got a shower it's got a toilet whatever you've got the um the kind of chow line for for all your food and everything you need to survive and then right in the heart of the the uh habitation area there's a large kind a sizable uh seating area and that's not just for the crew to you know have their meals it's for somewhere that you can plan operations plan your next move um and really you know decide where you're taking your your adventure as we

192. 02:42:31

     move back from habitation we start to get into like the rear half of the ship I think if if the habitation area is like the the heart of the crew in in the ship then the engineering area is the real heart of of the ship itself it's sort of this octagonal hexagonal space uh with a few little rooms coming off it to cram components in and off one of those you have the side airlock which again has suit lockers and weapon Lockers in there for uh before you go into Eva or docking or coming back out of before you're into the rest of the ship and then you've also got the lift and the lift not only goes down to ground level but it also takes you um up to the the roof of the ship so if you do want to go on a you know quick space walk or you need to go and repair something on the exterior then you've got kind of easy access straight up the lift and and out you go then finally at

193. 02:43:19

     the rear you have the main cargo hold which has space for a Ursa Rover or similar size vehicles and down along with a significant cargo capacity and you know being a drake ship there's a a huge ramp on the back of it all the mechanics are exposed you you can really see the workings of how the ship actually operates if you're a fan of Drake it it certainly ticks with those boxes so I think the corser is a particularly cool ship um I love the styling of it love the asymmetric uh Wing arrangement of it I think it's just going to be a great fun addition to the game giving those sort of players who enjoy that Drake experience their slice of the pie and you'll be able to experience that yourselves at IE this year and a vehicle coming later today a vehicle that's at the end of the pipeline we have the graycat STV racing is a cool and fun aspect of

194. 02:44:11

     Star Citizen and it's something that we've seen that backers really enjoy doing and organizing amongst themselves and something that we really want to help support uh from within cig so we wanted to bring a new vehicle to the verse which is where the STV came from so the STV is the graycat sports terrain vehicle um it builds on what they learned from the the PTV but it brings it um out of the the hangers off of the tarmac and onto you know much more rugged terrain it's a four-wheeler two person open topped sport styling everything you need to R around on the planet so the STV is actually part of a wider family of vehicles you may recognize a resemblance in the name to the graycat PTV which is also part of that family and we also have a third

195. 02:45:01

     vehicle lined up that we want to do in the future called the UTV which is the utility terrain vehicle and we've actually reconed the PTV and we have the concept for the UTV and when you see all three side by side you'll see that family resemblance the interior again is similar design language simple layout easy to clean that was a big thing for us even though we don't have like a cleaning mechanic uh all this sort of builds into the sort of visuals of the vehicle so you know the floors have got drill holes in them so it can easily let water through the seats are easily removable so you can actually you see the bolts where you can just quickly whip them out and so all of this thinking goes into those kind of vehicles the wheels were a big feature large rubber um mud guards um you know just there's lots of

196. 02:45:52

     subtleties um in terms of the the roll cage you know the sort of cross-section of all these things maybe you know people wouldn't notice but for us you know these are all um part of making a a manufacturer consistent so the STV um delivers that gameplay that is you know you and a buddy out exploring over our planets we we've got you know the these vast ships that you can explore deep space and and you know go off with with big multi Cruise but what this really allows you to do is get down on on you know one of our many many planets and go exploring on the ground it's not just a a vehicle for you and a friend it's also got kind of some cargo space in the back so if you are out there doing missions um rather than having to fly your ships directly to where the mission is it allows you to land you know slightly out there slightly in a safer area you still

197. 02:46:40

     got space to to load up with weapons load up with your um whatever Mission items you need and get in and out nice and quick compared to the Cyclone RC which is a sort of racing variant of a non-racing vehicle the STV was built from the ground up to be a good uh racing vehicle it has a good chassis it has better handling it has better top speed and that what makes it a a compelling racing Choice the best things about Star Citizen as a whole is it kind of brings uh a lot of gameplay and it's you know it's not all about combat it's not all about um you know flying these massive ships and I think one of the things that a lot us are excited internally about is is racing within our game a lot of us come from a racing background in terms of the games we've developed before um a lot of us are you

198. 02:47:27

     know petral heads at heart um so I think being able to build on that kind of game playay um in Star Citizen is is super exciting for us and if you stick around to the end of the broadcast you'll get your first chance at seeing the uh STV in action in a race organized by atmo Esports creators of the dayar rally where you'll see it taking on the terrain for the first time time you'll be able to pick one of these vehicles up today at the end of the broadcast and finally uh the most important aspect of these inaugural shows the P ship concept challenge thing for those of you that have seen previous years uh you will seen that we've thrown up some silhouettes of potential ship and vehicle options and asked for your feedback on which one we should actually

199. 02:48:16

     make and the wise you have probably realized that we end up making pretty much all of them anyway uh so instead of just doing that again and pretending that we're not going to do that we thought we do something slightly different this year and just have a single ship option uh and the choice is actually the manufacturer and the styling of that ship so we want to do a nice large civilian mining ship that Bridges the gap between the Argo mall and the RSI Orion because if you know those two ships there is quite a gulf of space in between them we wanted to fill that Gap with a an intermediary stepping stone before you jump into the big uh rsr Rion which the scale of its mining is nothing like any other mining ship in the game the mole is the current mining system just lots of it so with this larger ship we want to increase that and

200. 02:49:07

     also provide onboard space for our ground mining Vehicles such as The Rock and The Rock DS which allows you the flexibility of taking on any mining situation that you can come across so so with that we have three choices which are basically the manufacturers we have RSI the First Choice uh so obviously RSI do the Orion so this would be a smaller uh vehicle in that family we have Argo again we have the mall so naturally it could be a larger step up from that and then we have MK the third option obviously Mis do the prospector so again keeping it all within the same family as you can see from these images they each have their sort of own unique styling take on that uh pitch that I've just given you at the end of this ship talk panel Jared will come on and explain how you get to vote on these three options

201. 02:49:55

     and that's the end of talking ship so over to you Jared all right so the Crader spirit is available now as a concept promotion on the robertsspaceindustries.com website the STV is coming to the PT uh coming to the the the universe uh at the end of the broadcast uh just in time for the atmo Esports racing event that's happening after this and uh the Corsair will be making its way to you at this year's Intergalactic Aerospace Expo and to vote on this year's John John John Cruz pick a ship challenge thingy is I think he called it uh there is a Comm link on the Roberts space.com website where you can go and vote on the manufacturer for the next big mining

202. 02:50:43

     ship so John recently you you went through and just nuked all the speeds of all the ground vehicles and obviously you did that so that the STV could be the fastest that's that's certainly one take on on what happened um to talk about a bit more in depth uh it was actually planned for quite some time um as we know game development timelines go all over the place so we' actually done this for 318 iati which sadly did not come out before 3173 went live um so we did that because quite frankly a lot of those Vehicles were ludicrous speeds like uh 55 m a second is like over 120 mph off road Offroad that's off Offroad 120 M hour is

203. 02:51:31

     terrifying especially on like star citiz and plants with rocks that would just kill you so we wanted to bring the Cyclones down want to sort of rebalance everything not everything has gone as as intended like the the rocks and the ures are not quite where they should be so we will go back and do more changes but the the idea was people would get to see it in 318 so it wouldn't be such a surprise in 373 which unfortunately is how it turned out uh but as far as the new ships go The Crusade the spirit looks amazing yes like when you say I got to ask you you say this is a small taste of what players can expect for the the Starliner uh which anybody should know is my favorite ship uh that's still not uh out yet John

204. 02:52:20

     um his a little taste what when you say a little taste what does that mean I'm asking for me not not for these people I'm asking for me what does that mean um so obviously that the Starline is quite an old concept um we didn't really do a huge amount of interior look film so the time we spent on the spirit E1 the E1 spirit is really what we're going to build on for that so you're going to have um like that VIP first class pod enclosure Mix Master the most important feature of the Starliner I have no idea how it's going to work ask Tony it'll be fine um yeah that that sort of feel that that that luxury transport feel is something we haven't really shown in Star Citizen um every man in the donkey was pestering me for that Horizon shuttle concept and um we had planned to

205. 02:53:10

     do like a a crusader cutless competitor which was its like internal working name and I hated it because it got abbreviated like the three C's just called it the ship the 3 C's the entire time um and then there was that that sort of vocal Uprising about hey John CW give me that Horizon shule and that sort of the two things merch together and that's where it came from and then the grayc cat STV which will be our straight to drivable uh vehicle uh going live uh on the website and stuff at the end of this broadcast um that that's an exciting you know push in the gray cat the graycat arena it looks boy as heck yeah uh and it was neat to see a sneak peek of the UTV as well which I'm assuming is going to come sometime later on yeah uh it's not in active development right now but when we when

206. 02:53:58

     we decided to do the the STV we're like hey let's spend the time let's work out what gray cat as a a manufacturer looks like and feels like because we had the PTV people have seen the big spider Miner from back in the day they two very different things right there wasn't really like a a family lineage so we built that that family lineage around that I'm like here's the reworked PTV still looks how how everyone recognized it but it sort of works with the modern mechanics let's do a sporty version let's do a utility version and so we've got those three together now you can really see like the the family lineup and they each do slightly different things which is cool but yeah the STV is that beach buggy June buggy thing to just Raz around it's really cool I really like the styling of it so if you uh we've got one small thing left and

207. 02:54:48

     then one rather large surprise left so we'll do the small thing first and then uh buckle up because I'm not going to tell I'm not going to tell you I'll tell you I'll tell you in like five minutes uh but before we get there uh last year during last year's citizen con uh uh presentation we just we explored a lot of the outlaw lifestyle their their their outposts the space stations and stuff uh we thought we'd do a little Sizzle to follow up on how those things have evolved in the year sense so get ready we're going to show a quick SI Sizzle and when we get back uh they'll be something will be a neat surprise so stay tuned e

208. 02:55:51

     [Applause] oh

209. 02:58:51

     Outlaw lifestyle a glimpse at how the outposts and the space stations have evolved since we saw them at last year citizen gone 2951 uh now if you've been following our program uh today you might think this is it we're near the end but we've got one more special surprise in store joining us on the show today are two people who probably need no introduction but we're going to do it anyway founder and CEO Mr Chris Roberts hello everyone how you doing how you doing I'm doing good welcome to the spaceship welcome back to the spaceship you you open the show today and uh Squadron 42 game director uh Mr Richard tyer hello how's it going good this is your first time on the spaceship it is it is what you think I think it's very nice really I'm just gonna ask everybody how it thinks all day um so yeah so Chris Rich you're here are we are we

210. 02:59:42

     going to talk a little bit about Squadron 42 is that what we're doing right now uh well yes and no so U both me and Rich uh have been our heads down working really hard on Squadron as well as helping out on the Pu and uh one thing that we've thought um that would maybe better to reiterate is there's a huge amount of work that we're doing on Squadron that is going to make a massive difference to Star Citizen the Pu and uh we wanted maybe to talk about some of the things that we're doing because I know a lot of people say well everyone's working on Squadron no one's working on the Pu and that's not really true because a huge amount of the core gameplay that we're working on on Squadron is specifically being built not just for squadron but to benefit the Pu

211. 03:00:30

     and we're just doing it in sort of The Test Kitchen of Squadron to allow us to really uh you know polish and make sure the features work well without having to be caught up in the sort of quarterly release cycle that you have on the Pu uh because we were finding it was it was hard for us to really finish the features out you know we'd get a tier zero out and then it would just sort of sit around for a while because everyone was rushing on to the next set of features they wanted to do and and for squadron obviously we're you know it's shipping as a final polished AAA title so everything needs to be really put together working really well and playing great and so we're trying in the setup that we're doing now to do that for the features that we've identified that we need to make sure works really well for squadron but also we will play across

212. 03:01:18

     into the Pu and so we thought it' be really useful to come by and tell you all about some of the subtle things and the gameplay aspects that we're working on that maybe you haven't heard from Todd or Tony or everyone else that like in you know today and uh you know during the isc's because we sort of try to keep the Squadron stuff close to our Chester to really sort of surprise and impress people when we do it uh and so yeah we thought why don't we just come by and maybe just talk about little things maybe show you a sneak peek of something here and there not everything cuz you know we we're trying to keep uh it close to our Chester until it's really ready to let the baby out of the carriage and it's you know beautifully dressed and all the rest of it uh but um you know hopefully uh it'll give you guys some

213. 03:02:06

     insight to what's happening and also understand that a huge amount of the development resources even if you think they're working on Squadron are ultimately working on stuff that will be in the persistent universe yeah let's talk a little bit more about that before we jump into the actual features this this co-development has been part of the process since the since the project was first introduced uh 10 years ago congratulations on 10 years by the way um uh Rich talk to me a little bit about this code development you you you started with the Pu and then you've now gone over to Squadron 42 so you've worked in both you've worked in both environments you know the the struggle of t0 uh features and the quarterly releases for the pu and now you're getting to kind of your experience is different on Squadron talk to me about how that's changed and how it's still

214. 03:02:54

     work for one still benefits the other or will ultimately well when I worked on the Pu it wasn't really the Pu or Squadron it was always we were working on features that pushed for both projects so the focus when we were on the Pu or when we were more pu focused was that we would make sure that we were getting features up and running you know developed to the specifications that we needed them to work in a multiplayer environment and then getting them out into the audience's hands you know on quar of the releases but the biggest issue I think you know if you've been you know if you've seen me doing talks on SE live over the years or even in some of our retrospectives is that we'd get features and the way that that you know cig set up is we have feature teams and we have content teams so what would happen is we'd develop a feature and then we push it to the live audience to get feedback around that feature but

215. 03:03:42

     there would almost be a lag with the importance of that feature and turning that from a singular thing into an experience a gameplay experience that you'd go and enjoy and play as a part of a fun game so we always have this lag where content teams were then trying to get on top and then use the feature and we were trying to change the feature so I think this kind of pulled it back a bit allowed us to really focus on both the content and the feature at the same time because it allowed us to bring it as under one umbrella which is Squadron 42 so we were able to get that feature in the in the game not as a t-zo but as a a fully whole capable gameplay experience that you know myself Chris we can play and enjoy it and go is this right do we need to make it better how does it feel and also prove that out with the content that we want so once we've then developed that and honed it

216. 03:04:29

     and you know almost cast it in that iron in the in The Crucible kind of thing we can then move it into the Pu and ultimately it's not that they're going to get features later because they would have had them probably earlier but just not not ready or you know you can I can pick a few features right now you think well there's not really a huge purpose for them mounted guns is a good example there's not really a huge purpose for them in the Pu right now but we're making sure that any feature that we work on has that purpose so when it does go into the Pu you know into the game people can use it and experience it how we wanted it to be designed and how we wanted it to be you know because we we struggle a few times say for example actor status as a good example we have this vision of how it it sits across this broad spectrum of the game but we're having to PE smal it in

217. 03:05:18

     and that never really gives you the true intentions of where we want to go and I think this allows us to do that in Squadron really hone it down and then give it to the Pu audience and I think they'll you know fundamentally it's better for the development of the features and it's better for the gameplay experience that will both players have experience in both products yeah and and I think I mean I think that's a really good point is that the you know it's before we were developing the sort of features in isolation and then they sort of went into try to get used in Squadron and try to get used in the Pu but they weren't really developed iteratively with content and so that's the reason why we sort of pulled back some of the stuff and are working on on Squadron is because then we can iterate it with actual gameplay content which is what rich is talking about to make sure it feels well and right with the time to to bake it in without having to feel

218. 03:06:06

     like oh okay we got a quarterly release Out and because you know there's a lot that goes on with the quarterly release in terms of not it's not just that one feature there's all these other things that go into it and there's a whole process of publishing and splitting off the streams and so there's a huge amount of effort and work every time you do one of these releases that sort of eats into your development time in terms of doing the the feature and so pulling it out out out of that sort of Loop and saying okay we're going to work with it in Squadron to really make it polished so it's yeah like not a t0 version we've really got it down it feels good we like playing it this is fun this is challenging um it it feels it feels good uh is is the benefit I think that's happening with us on Squad we're seeing it on our side I know it can be a bit frustrating for everyone on the other

219. 03:06:52

     side because we s telling you oh yeah it's going to be much better uh you've got right now but we are very aware of a lot of say usability issues um uh you know user experience issues uh that uh we are addressing right now in Squadron specifically for both Squadron and the Pu that's going to and we'll show you a couple little things that'll help with that today but essentially if you think of core gameplay in terms of you know we have some core areas what we call the you know the sort of the actor system which is would be the FPS the uh you know players moving around on foot uh you know interacting with things uh the vehicle stuff which you know like John crew heads up but the ve you know the whole Vehicle Systems and and you know you've already seen uh some presentations today on things that are

220. 03:07:40

     very specific to vehicles uh you know like the sort of Need for multiple speeds and uh also the Resource Network which is going to first roll out in vehicles but it's going to be Universal um uh you know all those are sort of core gameplay systems that we have and so what's happening now is that we're taking some of these systems and really just making them work well for squadron and then bam they're going to come across into the Pu uh you know another good example which hasn't been talked today very much by the the on the you know the vehicle side of the Need for Speed but you probably saw you know in the different modes there needs to be more stuff on the hood and you know we've got a whole redesign that's happening on the HUD and the mfds uh that's going to be very

221. 03:08:28

     different than what you have now first of all it's using Universal building blocks instead of you know what some of the Legacy stuff has in Flash but it's going to be much more uh minimalist depending on what your context is uh it's going to be you know depending on what equipment you have you may be able to cast some of stuff to your visor maybe not uh and we're building this system to work well in all the ships used in in Squadron and then it will get rolled out to the Pu which has obviously much wider range of ships but as we're designing it we're building it with both Squadron and the Pu in mind and so these there's a lot of things you know people have talked about the star map forever or uh you know so that has definitely been a major I mean there's right now I think three Engineers you know uh uh a couple of visualist on it that were

222. 03:09:16

     really sort of working to make you know the new star map which people haven't had it's been in inment yet we're not quite ready to show you today but um that is going to be a much improved experience but all of it so navigation uh traversal you know combat the whole feel of it all things that we're really focusing on here to bring across into the Pu after um you know we've got it working really well in in Squadron and so I think uh ultimately it's going to be good for the the the Pu and a lot of things are going to sort of together over the next couple of years uh and um yeah we're pretty excited so we wanted to yeah visit you and talk a little bit about it I think there is two common themes that I think you'll see throughout the entirety of this talk as well one is the fact that it's it's how we develop the features that

223. 03:10:05

     everybody looks at individual features it's got the microscope of that specific feature but it's how they all interact together to create the game so it's it's about bringing them all together to create that gameplay experience and number two is that none of these are like like oh we're going to get to this and in however time and you know we're going to work on that all of the stuff that we'll talk about today is stuff that we're actively working on and not in the Inception but you know we have in our hands we can play it we can see it we're feedbacking on it so it's something that you know we're fairly Advanced along and so you know hopefully we'll be able to pull back the curtain a little bit yeah that that said some of the things that we're going to talk about and I think we're about ready to get start getting into it here uh some of the things will have aspects to show some of things won't have aspects to show uh like the star map like Chris just said and whatnot uh some of the

224. 03:10:52

     things uh will be presented in test Maps because we don't want to give away any start Squadron 42 specific locations and stuff like that that said I think we can maybe show some stuff in aato because people already we already showed that one location so so uh so yeah you guys ready to to list enough Preamble let's go let's let's start with uh Rich you're you were you were the AFT guy you're the whole Squadron game guy but let's start with something uh that affects everybody this is a firsters universe after all uh let's talk about the F FPS radar and uh the player interaction system stuff what can you what can you tell us about how this is evolved it's interesting because we we obviously I think I've given a talk on FPS radiar and scanning in the past and I think the biggest thing that when we look at what what start setting

225. 03:11:40

     is now what's the first thing that you do you know you and your bed how do you interact with the game how do you interact with the environment that's around you doors getting into your ship how do you interact with kiosks and and a lot of the thing that we realized is that you know and it's not something new it's just something we've always wanted to get to uh is how does the player interface with the game how do they how do they translate their controls and what they want them to do you know ultimately in in the in the universe that they're playing and how does that then translate in the computer game so that it does what you expected to do and I think one of the biggest things was the player interaction experience where we kind of used this terminology to understand like that's like interact Mode Personal inner thought you know the player interaction system all of these umbrella systems that kind of sit underneath this uh main kind of like

226. 03:12:27

     Saga shall we say and I think that's one of the things that we really want to improve and make better because I think it's lacking right now if you go and walk around the universe you know generally having to go into interact mode having to use the cursor having to select things you know we spent a lot of time trying to make the world physical and and feel right and immersed that you're immersed in it well you can you can interact with things like the props are interactable you can do things you can push things around you can move them I mean the whole goal is to make it a sort of physically living universe exactly that you can interact with to a level that in most FPS games you don't right because most FPS games you run around you shoot things maybe you pick up a gun that gets dropped but you generally most everything's static and so our goal for definitely for the Pu is one of the reasons why we're doing the persistent uh you know the whole idea of

227. 03:13:14

     persistent streaming and and and later on on the server meshing is to have this fully persistent universe that yeah you can push the chairs around or that that cup I could take off your desk and take to my my spaceship instead of your spaceship Jared and it will it will be there and it'll persist so so obviously interacting with things is a huge deal um in Squadron we have a huge amount of physical puzzles interactions um in a level that you I haven't seen in a lot of FPS games so it's almost like a sort of Story game and a puzzle game and a traversal game and a combat game and a stealth game and a flight game all rolled into one um and so so we need systems that are easy to use and you know currently what we have

228. 03:14:02

     ideas were good but it's pretty clunky so we've been really focusing on it because also we want you to be able yeah okay keyboard mouse what if you joystick what if you have a game pad you we need to make sure all that stuff works well so we don't want to have 400 key presses you have to remember to do stuff and we don't want it take forever to interact and do stuff and so uh We've really been thinking about it those are and those are by the way have been number of bit large complaints on the Pu just getting in new person getting into the game like how do I get out of bed how do I do some basic stuff how do I understand you know right now it's sort of trial by fire I mean I think you know there's a lot of people it's almost like you know I don't know whether it's a from software thing where it's like oh I managed to beat the challenge of Star Citizen and I actually got to my ship um but um you know we need to make that better and so so that is actually one of one of the big things

229. 03:14:49

     we've been focusing on and the the player interaction system and by the way these have been plans that been around for quite a while and uh you know Rich back when he was in charge of sort of the core gameplay Group which was the AFT and the the weapon um teams and the actor Tech Team and stuff um that was on the list of things to do it just you know because of what we talked about the release Cadence and in Star Citizen um on the alpha it just you know didn't get to it yet well we're getting to it now and and uh you know we're working on it so I I mean I mean part of it is basically removing the barrier so removing the the clunkiness as Chris said to how to you interact with the in you know with the environment so what we've kind of gone to we've gone to kind of this weighted system so is if you're walking over to a trolley you know you shouldn't have to like look exactly at

230. 03:15:37

     the handle to be able to go oh I want to use the trolley you just want to be able to go over there and the game you go I want to interact with the trolley just press F and the game should know yeah they want to interrup the trolley so if I'm looking at your desk for example you've got quite a lot of things that I could pick up and take and taking do whatever I want but you want to be able to just walk over there and not have to go into a mouse cursor mode to be able to then select it you should just be able to go I want to look at the green ship I'm going to pick up the green ship I want to look at you know your little mini mini ship over there or the book or your coffee cup or whatever and it's you just want to be able to go and look at those things press F and and and you you need confidence that when you're looking at something and you know we have the the user interface to tell you that yes this is the thing that you're going to pick up and you don't want to have to go into this separate mode to be able to do

231. 03:16:25

     that so I think that's one of the fundamental things on the play interaction experience and that that's such a pervasive system across the entirety because it's the same when you're in a cockpit you're in a cockpit or you're walking around or you're in Eva or you're crouched or you're prone or all the different environments that you're in you need to be able to just effortlessly interact with the game world and you want it to just be feel natural and immersed because you want to get involved in what you're doing in the game play not have to fight the controls and then on the other side of things which is FPS radi on scanning it's actually kind of being split into kind of a twofold the first area is kind of what we're calling uh kind of like a quick scan this is something that again if you think of the star syst in Universe it's very detailed you know that's one of our

232. 03:17:11

     strengths that we would detail at scale and so you want to be able to go in and understand all the indiv idual pieces that you can go and and go I want to move that thing or I want to go and get in a giant ship but sometimes it's quite difficult to realize okay what is what is environment or what is interactive or which bits are relevant to me you know for example if you look at Uncharted they have you know painted areas to show you where you need to go and where you need to navigate but you know that's not star syiem star system is built on realism and the reality of the world so what we want to do is have kind of like the radio and scanning system where you can do this kind of like quick ping or quick scam wave single button and that is kind of just for your local environment and everything will then be tagged as you look at it so kind of think you know I look at the camera it'll come out and it'll have a little box info box and it'll say okay this is

233. 03:17:59

     the model of the camera this is the information and it's almost like you've done a little mini mini scan on the camera but it's happening for everything around you and you can just quickly look around be like oh there's a cutable surface there because I want to be able to use my multitool cutter oh there's a vent there that I can get access to oh there's a terminal there that I can hack and I'm getting that information it's almost like that Blade Runner esque of like I go into a space and I can go okay what are the ingredients that I have to play with as a player for me to be able to progress to the next area and then we've got the other side of things which is r and scanning which is what we're calling like a charge scan wave where it's the same system you're holding down the scan button and that's pinging out across wider areas and that's where you're looking at you know individuals you're getting you know you're getting okay there's two guys over there what's their details oh there's you know there's an NPC over there okay I can

234. 03:18:47

     an objective that I need to complete and that's bit more because that's so that's more gameplay pervasive that's something that's going to be more of a risk award so that's like okay I'm giving my location away but they're also so they may or may not you know know that they've been scanned if it's a player they absolutely will be and that's all underpinned off the signature system that we do for radio scanning of the ships as it FPS it's all systemic it's not we have to go in and there go oh it's this custom setup so we have this kind of usability aspect for radio and scanning for people to be able to go in and understand you know I think there's been plenty Ric posts over the years people go oh wish scanning you know r on scanner would do this and show me little info boxes and yeah we we have that up and running so there's the that aspect of it to which kind of ties in with the player interaction experience of how you

235. 03:19:34

     play the game and how do you understand what you need to do and then there's the other side of things which is then it's a more of a proactive tool of you looking through the environment and finding what you want we have a couple of videos should we show videos of those we have we have two videos uh uh what's this first one we're going to look at so the first one is more kind of um showing what I described with r on scanning that first aspect so you're going into a space you're doing a quick scam wave and then it's quickly showing you up the little bits that you can interact with all right let's uh let's take a look at FPS radar and Pi 1 so you can see here this is in asado which we've already showcased uh this is obviously going in and utilizing some of our new building BLX UI for the doors and then here's a scam wave you can see that that I'm looking at that data pad

236. 03:20:21

     and then you can move around and it's giving me that information so right now it's just giving you the basic high level information in terms of the names and things uh but you will also have more detailed information depending on you know contextually what the item is and what you're seeing here is part of the player interaction system so you can just even though that's kind of of a complex area there's lots of little things that you can interact with but you're getting confidence of oh cool I can I can grab that or I can use the dat data pad and you you're not having to go into interact mode you're not having to be driven by the cursor you can go in and just press F or interact with it and you know you've probably seen this in plenty of AAA games but they don't have the detail and scale that we do so we wanted to make sure that that system is really robust but hopefully it it gives you kind of an idea of and I and I'd also say that like part of the idea is that

237. 03:21:10

     that you know there's the you know there's the default action which in this case is what you see when you're on it when it says grab or uh or you know I think there's a few other ones that you can beuse in default action but the icon the the if you just had a single uh disc with uh with that wasn't broken then that would mean there's only one thing you can do with it in a lot of those cases There Was You Could See there was a broken disc in four pieces which was basically saying that's a multi-action so as you look at it if for instance in that case if you hit F does a default action if you held f it would bring up uh the modular wheel that would show you the other action so you could maybe equip it versus grab it or whatever you would do and so the idea is just like you can doing like uh you know Rich was talking about a lot of other uh sort of

238. 03:21:58

     AAA even console games you walk around you look around oh look I can ex to do something with it right uh so there's a bit of that that's happening here so you can just look around and I can interact to direct without having to hold f move your mouse around and all the rest of stuff I mean we'll still have the overall interact mode that you can go into if you want but the idea is I just play around if I'm used to playing games a certain way so there is a certain um language of I think FPS or even third person games that exist right now and we don't want to like do something totally different to it because you know people are used to playing games a certain way it's like why in an FPS game you run around with WD and use the mouse because so many people are used to it and so we're we're leaning a little bit onto that but trying to make it much more usable and work with inside a much more powerful system than you typically get

239. 03:22:45

     in games and so even there you saw there's a lot of Interac BS you look at them you can move them around do all these different things with it uh and hopefully it'll be much more intuitive uh for players uh in Squadron or or Star Citizen and that default item actually is a good is a good point because that's also something we've gone to we're changing in the fact that we want everything to have a default action that essentially you go over you press f it always does that default action but let's say you're harvesting harvestables and you want you know the default action is that it picks it up and puts it into your hand but you want it to be always be to store into your backpack you'll actually be able to go in there you know right click on the item you know when you're in interact mod bring up the wheel or like Chris says hold F and just it will bring up the wheel and that will replace that list that we have currently right now and you'll actually be able to remap that in the game like three clicks

240. 03:23:35

     and you go I don't want it to be uh pick up into my hand I want it to go straight into my backpack because that's what you're doing right there so then you can go and have it you know it allows us to give the interaction system how we want it to be by default but then it puts the Theus on the play if they want it to go you know they want a weapon to always go to their backpack because they're happy with the weapons they already got and they're going looting they just want it all to be store they can do that out of the gate so it doesn't always go into their hands and they you know they have that customizability to be able to you know interact with the environment and the objects that they're looking at before we move on we have a second video yeah I actually I haven't seen this one uh you want to set it up or you want to just go into playing it should play it when I mean I mean the second one essentially what we're about to see is kind of what I talked about this the second half of radi on scanning so this is where

241. 03:24:24

     they're still getting the environmental information like whether you got a vent or a terminal or a hacking area um but you're also now getting information about the enemies and the AI and what's out there so it's a wider and broader yeah I mean this is where you basically it's almost like whether it's x-ray vision or you can hear it through the wall but you could track someone on the other side of a of a wall but you're doing the charge scan which is much more risky because it's noisy and if people go oh someone's scanning maybe there's someone over there and they can track you down but it' be useful in a like when you're stealthing around it's like you're going to go around a corner you don't know if there's some enemies around the corner and you want to find out you you know you use this um it's very useful having played lots of levels defin definitely because you know in Squadron you know we we're trying to

242. 03:25:13

     have a certain amount of realism so you're not just going to go and gun down 400 people so we want you when you're in situations you're outnumbered and you have to you know it's it's more of a stealth game in the FPS than it is a straight out run and gun shooter bring you to the point of realism then bring it back to the point of fun as you said well you know there's a lot of fun stuff all right so I want to see this clip I haven't seen it yet let's let's roll fps2 so what you're seeing here is that he's going to do a scam wave in a moment essentially what you'll see is that it's now penetrating through the walls and now you can start to see uh the slavers that are in this environment now these slavers don't necessarily have a rad on scanner so they're not able to pick you up so what will happen is when you do a scam wave or a charge scam wave your

243. 03:26:01

     signatures will basically um Skyrocket so that's what will give you away to other people so in the PVP environment you're only getting you know it's it's a big risk if you want to do it but you're giving away your location so if you know if you're willing to do that then so be it but in a more of a PVE environment what we're going to do is we're going to have tailored some some enemies will have radar and scanning and some won't so if they do then they'll be like hey I've just been pinged and they'll get your location and then they'll go and investigate so what you're seeing here you know on that video is kind of a more wider broader area and seeing through the walls whereas the first one is kind of a more limited scope and you can you know it's up to the player to choose which one they want to do the first one is really more about just you know we want to encourage the player to go into an environment and go okay cool I'm in this room what what things do I have to interact with and then the second one is more of a

244. 03:26:48

     wide Escape like uhis said you know when we're playing our stealth levels you know you need to have kind of a good understanding of where they are and it's only temporary and you you will have a cool down on that on that charge scam wave so you're not just be able to spam it there forever it's like you get a temporary picture and you go cool I've got a good snapshot now I'm going to you know make my move and go forward so while we're still here on the first person experience the player experience let's let's stick to a couple more topics that are related just to the player before we move into ships and bigger stuff um Ledges and ladders uh you know everybody knows the the struggles of uh elevators in the persistent universe but that's not the only way to you know Traverse the universe to get around and stuff uh I understand that you guys have made a number of improvements to mantling over

245. 03:27:36

     Ledges and how to use ladders I mean Ledges and ladders is kind of uh best game I ever played game yeah absolutely it's kind of a two features that we're focusing on but I mean as Chris said in terms of Squadron development we're looking at improving the entirety of the traversal experience how does the Player move and you know just from General Locomotion and how that feels and then in terms of you know the traversal move so vaulting mantling ladders and so on and so forth so one of the two areas that we've identified that we wanted to push for was a for Ledges which is we wanted you to be able to oh I've just I've slightly misjudged my jump because I'm in first person you know I can't see my feet and and it's you know it's kind of frustrating and like oh it's just right there if this was real life i' I'd just put my hands out and grab it right so that's the first part that we can

246. 03:28:23

     actually grab onto Ledges now that you're falling past so that you can actually then pull yourself up uh which adds just it it's to be honest it's huge like we we've built traversal levels now and it's it's the difference is night and day because when you're in a first person it's very difficult to judge like right on the edge so we can add a bit more challenge to the traversal so that you're actually moving around with Ledges and grabbing and pulling St up and then the other side of things which doesn't necessarily sound that interesting in terms of oh it's improved ladders but again is if you play the star system right now you get onto a ladder you you're looking bolt straight forward at the wall you're locked you can't look around you have no spatial awareness it's just that's it you're locked in you can't get off halfway you can't jump off it's you're kind of very locked so what we done can't jump on halfway to no no exactly so what we did

247. 03:29:11

     is we kind of leveraged how we did body dragging and that you know even though you're attached to this thing you want to be able to look around so you can attach to the ladder you can jump onto a ladder directly you can attach you can run and jump onto a ladder you can look around full 360° you can look around 90° as you're going up you know and it's just a lot more fluid and a lot more you know it doesn't feel like oh I've just now I'm locked in it just feels like you're more of a human being on the ladder and you can look around and then obviously if you can look behind you on a ladder that opens up environment you know opens up scope to jumping from that on to something else so yeah cuz you can jump off the lad halfway up it or wherever EXA so there's a there's a huge amount of I mean with in Squadron we're putting a lot of traversal gameplay in uh which will make its way into the Pu

248. 03:29:59

     when all these sort of systems settle and I think you'll see a lot more I mean you already see a little bit where you know you could use a tractor gun to put a crate over or push something to get up and look at stuff in derix right now for instance in the Pu but imagine whole level above that which is kind of what's in Squadron I mean even even that in the derx was really inspired by some of the early work we were doing in Squadron but there's a lot of uh like physical and traversal gameplay and puzzles in Squadron and we're building the systems to also work well with that and then again with a systemic world like we have in Star Citizen where you can move things around and they can persist there should be multiple ways to solve um the problem you're trying to deal with which is how we've approached the Squadron design is like in most of the areas that

249. 03:30:47

     you go through there's more than one way to get to the end to solve the problem to you know do you you know stealth around do you just take it on head on and start shooting or um is's a way that you can you know do it without seeing anyone because you've just you know taken this difficult traversal path so those are all things that are important and and so it's little little things like this and and I would say I mean we've got a video to show but we're still you know like some of the Finesse of the the animation detail is still to come so this a lot of it is yeah this is a lot the block out but you know we you we we have this beautiful motion capture stage here that we will show you guys uh some point when the Manchester good yards in this stage are fully finished

250. 03:31:35

     and then Jared will do a wonderful we'll do a a updated version of the 2013 tour that I did with Ain uh but it will be in a much uh bigger environment anyway uh so uh but I I I would say definitely that um I mean we could show up but the the we got details to come like for instance if you jump and you just make it you know you're going to you know catch your balance and do that sort of stuff so that's not in here but that's sort of the details the finesse that we're adding to really have that sense of you in first person feeling your body and your inertia when you're going up and and and and and and down I mean if you cut out to the third person when you see some of the stuff you sort of see some of it even in the blockout animations but there'll be much more in the the final version but we probably

251. 03:32:24

     should run the video if we can all right uh ladders so obviously this as you can see this is final art absolutely this is taken directly from Squad obviously test map but you can see here that as Chris said the the you know the level of inertia is is still blockout phase but you can see that we're actually starting to get that you can grab on you can go straight into a mantle or a vault you can go straight into the pull-ups and the thing is that what you're seeing here is you know while this is just an intest map a lot of these are providing design ethos to then feed into the Pu so if we've got derix and we've got environments that we want the player to go and do missions in we don't just necessarily just have to lie on you've only got jump or you only can do Vol mle and right there we did a we did a jump onto halfway onto a ladder and here

252. 03:33:12

     we're looking around to the left to the right you can off the ladder any you can slide down it you can do all sorts of things wow we got a bit bit of a sneak peek at end yeah so we going to fight an elevator the B the true boss and we jump across to get on the ladder there and again these are all the blockout animations uh and uh oh wonder what that is someone accidentally put that in there yeah any anyway but the other thing as well back to our spaceship yeah I mean the other thing to say about about the traversal is while we're highlighting uh ladders and the ledge grabs and things here the other thing is that we're also you know

253. 03:33:59

     we've taken Deep dive on things like the control input so for example we've got action queuing coming up so you know for example if you're sprinting and you were you were shooting just before you're sprinting you might be holding down shift and left Mouse button and then now what happens now if you then release shift you've stopped shooting but sometimes you want you want it to continue shooting because I'm still holding the the input that I want to do and what we're kind of terminology in terms of this action queuing and that's something that we've we've got a whole Matrix of all the different controls all the different methods from chrome to pouch the transitions you know weapon swapping and so that just you again using the controls is a lot more fluid a lot more uh intuitive so it's something that we're really really putting a really magnifying glass on to making sure that you're not fighting the

254. 03:34:47

     controls the controls are working for you it's doing what you want it to do so if you are Using a Gamepad or you are using a joystic or you are using mouse and keyboard it's it's easy to use and easy to interact with the world so that you can immerse yourself in the environments and the missions and the game play so it's something that we're really really pushing forward to to make on all aspects right because you know prone one of the things that were're um you know set to be working on here right the you know the crouching the V the various transitions between all the stuff so some of the stuff right now in the pu's clunkier than it should be uh and so we've really taken a deep dive on all of it yeah and uh to make everything a lot more fluid you know looking around on the lad is a good example um but also you know like on a bigger level right we've done a complete rework on um like

255. 03:35:36

     you know Eva what we call sort of push and pull uh there's you know physical interaction uh I mean we should probably talk a little bit about that we have a video to show of that but it's a complete redo of the current Eva system uh and it's has a lot more of the what you would expect when you're in in space in vacuum pushing yourself off you know for instance you have momentum now so if you push off in a direction you will just keep moving in a direction uh the use of it far more easy handling weapons and looking around and some of the tech that we've developed for the push pull is the same stuff that will'll be that we're going to be using for prone and a bunch of other stuff and and really the looking around on the ladders is kind of based on some of yeah I mean to be honest a lot of those systems are and when say Chris says Push Pull he means

256. 03:36:24

     zero g Push Pull not trolly Push Pull umth we'll talk about that too yes we will but when we talk about uh eva2 and Zer G the biggest thing again it's just be in Eva right now in the star system and just look left it you don't have a stability of of you know if you're a human being you look left you Ron doesn't change because you move your head and it's the same our our camera like tilts and moves and then you get into a scenario where you're like you can't really understand the perspective of where you were in it's like oh I'm now upside down so ev2 which again you'll be able to see a clip of it working it it's it's night and day it is a fund we we basically threw the old one away and this is a fundamental change in terms of how we work in Eva first off you're not upright you're in more what

257. 03:37:14

     we call the Iron Man pose so so you're leaning forward we still retain the upright pose for certain circumstances but it means that you've got a better sense of your actual volume when you're traversing forward you not got these legs that you know are beneath you uh but you can totally look around 360° your camera is stable as you can you you get a good orientation when you look back you you know you see your body it's fully decoupled so you're not just pushing forward and you're flying like a spaceship you push forward and that gives you an initial inertia in that direction and you will keep going in that direction until you change but then when you want to change you just need to look at another direction and you push that way and the way we've implemented it it's almost like your suits kind similar to um the ifcs on the ships that it kind of like counters the forces and then allows you to go in that way we

258. 03:38:01

     actually originally tried it where you would drift and you know actually do the curve but it just made traversing more intricate spaces which is what we want to do you know eventually we want to be able to turn gravity off in ships and that you can take those down and well is definitely I mean that's part of the plan I mean we you know in the Resource Network um uh segment that's one of the things so all all of those tight intricate areas that we've built over the last seven eight well 10 years now I suppose um you know that you can go into those tight areas you need it to be stable you need it to be in a position where you can turn on a dime that you can look upside down that you you get a good sense of what you know your orientation and I think that's something that we've really pushed ahead on evat to and and to be honest the engineering team have done a really fantastic job I I find it a lot of fun flying around in Eva and then and then I'd also say the

259. 03:38:51

     other thing that that we should point out in the longer term for the Pu not so much in Squadron because you're you're in a sort of pilot suit that has Eva as part of its setup is you not every not every space shoot is Eva cable so we're going to separate it where you have to have like basically an Eva pack a rocket pack for you to sort of propel around if you don't have one then you know it's the physical Push Pull so you can move along surfaces you can push off against them you come close to something you can grab it um if you're in close things and those hand holds you can grab them and move them around so we have this physicalized interaction that happens and you don't actually need to have your you know Eva pack or jet pack uh and then the Eva jetp pack is if you go out an open space that's how obviously you can stop or change your direction and do

260. 03:39:39

     the rest and that will be more limited on fuel so I think longterm in the Pu there's going to be some pretty interesting game play um so if you you know if you do I don't know a boarding action or something maybe you need a you know a space suit that has the Eva pack or you're doing repairs out in space in your space an Eva pack yes you will not be able to repair the ship in that in that outfit right now Jared um but but I I think it gives a it gives a really good um it's just going to give more options more context because like longer term what we want to do in the in the Pu is is what you wear is important right so right now everybody just runs around in a big suit of armor a big space it does and we haven't really turned on some of the features we've actually put in there that says you know for instance

261. 03:40:27

     you shouldn't be able to sit in a in in a seat of a space fighter in heavy armor you just you shouldn't be there with your gun on the back you should have to be have a flight suit on or uh you know you come into a city you shouldn't be wandering around in heavy armor because that's antisocial maybe they don't let you go in there so we want people to have reasons to wear different things have storage that's the whole point of the physical uh inventory system and as we're starting to roll out more of it's coming in in Squadron and then in the Pu that's definitely coming online uh and you know things that we're doing like that with the you know the physicalized cargo and everything else and if you look at all the new ships there's always locker and storage there there's you know we have a whole system for um

262. 03:41:15

     outfits now that we was first going to be in Squadron but then come to the Pu it's designed so there'll be a nice sort of lock almost like a wardrobe system that you can go in and and hang up your outfit and switch quickly into another outfit or switch into this armor everything yeah so we want we want it to you know be your virtual second life and and we want to make it as easy as possible for you to manage all these different things that you can wear for different roles uh and you know Eva is one of the a parts of that where like I said you you either have an Eva suit with a pack or not but you still will be able to move around and we should probably run the video good job bringing it back around to Eva at the end like that let's take a look at the Eva video uh see what we're looking at here well and as Chris says in terms of you know we go the Eva this is what you're seeing

263. 03:42:04

     here is that you'll probably see some of the in the third person the thrusters are not um firing because yeah it's the old VFX U it's also the old VFX code so we haven't part but this is the a current pu suit versus what we'll have is a new one with the proper like pack that has the thrusters in the right position and when you go forward the Thruster is going from the back so what you're actually seeing here is you've you've actually connected to this surface so now it's almost like you're in a prone situation but this is going to be what what more our new prone will be again you've got full 360° you can just move your mouse and you look all the way behind you or all the way in front and right now we're moving along here not because we're thrusting because we're abusing our hands exactly to move ourselves Al line and we're looking around as we're doing that if we went out to the third person here you would sort of see us moving our

264. 03:42:53

     hands around I think we'll see it a little later on there we go here we go so we're just sort of pulling ourselves along and if we wanted to at this point we could stop and we could push off against it and then we would just go floating out into space so that's the sort of idea of what we call push push pull um and so what you're see now he just yeah he just pushed himself off so what you're seeing here that's actually um kind of you're just floating alongside the actual um this fin of this asada station and this is actually keeping you in this orbit and then if you did and that's just you just push forward and go where you can actually jump off into space but then this becomes one of the if you look at physical traversal where you've got jumping and mantling and vating this is where we have zerog G Push Pull we have

265. 03:43:40

     the tractor beam that kind of pulls you around an Eva and then we have your Eva pack which is limited by your resource of Eva fuel so this allows you to kind of manipulate and and go in Eva and allows us as developers to build evh reveral spaces both wide ranging and both small scale so yeah here's here's I mean we were be for in first person looking around but here's just cutting out the third person to actually show you what your your character and body is doing and so there's a lot of I mean and these are still blockout animations actually but so there'll be a lot more like Nuance Fidelity to it but yeah you have you have a lot more um control uh you know directional sense uh ability to look around ability to stop yourself uh so I think you know in this one we're going to come up close to the

266. 03:44:28

     glass above it yes and you're actually going to see is like if you fly into something you sort of arrest just again block out animation but you're going to as we get down close to it I think we're going to come down you'll see uh as uh our character comes down here player comes down here yep uh put our hands out to brace ourselves to stop ourselves on the glass here uh so all of that's like systemic it's that's not that's not marked up or anything it's all Ray casting seeing of things you brace yourself when you come up against hold on arrest your thing you can push off against things so we've spent a fair amount of time and Engineering on all this but it it's not just for squadron it's going to be you know it's obviously useful in some of the environment Squadron this is one of them obviously the acid patient who came to look down on the slavers that you saw in the

267. 03:45:16

     earlier scan uh but you know the use of this in the you know the Pu is going to be massive and also the big thing that Chris said there is it's systemic there's no markup if you want to go and climb all over a ship you can do if you want to climb over a space station you can do if you want to climb over anything that's in Eva has a surface you can and you can put your hands on it it's got a big enough space to put your hands on it it will work so there's not there's no there's no like oh it only works in this scenario or it only works in this scenario it's it is what you see here and then as what what we've not been able to show today which is we have do have working or partially working is that when you go into very tight environments if there are handholds you will be able to grab onto that handhold or whether it's a terminal or whether it's you know hatched to get into a ship

268. 03:46:03

     you'll grab onto the handhold and then you know instead of putting your hands out and Landing you'll grab on and then you go cool I can use the terminal or I can look around and again you're not locked in you can look all 360° you'll switch hands as you look around and you can get a sense of okay where do I want to go next I want to go over there cool or I want to go through this door and it and it works in tight environments widescale environments and fundamentally it's a lot lot nicer to play than our current version which is just it's no I mean it's it's massive for the game so I'm you know I think there'll be a lot more sort of Eva external action uh the combat's better it's more much more stable I think you know we'll see a lot of puzzles and traversal in the Pu that can be built from that because we don't

269. 03:46:51

     really we have a lot of stuff down on planets but it would also be nice to have more like exploring a you know more the sort of derelict asteroid bases kind of things and Eva I think you know we all love science fiction obviously making these kind of games um that you know that's that's sort of a lot of classic Sci-fi that you see so we we spent you know that's that that is that's an example of of us being able to spend the time to really think about how we want the system to work how best it's going to work uh and beted it in and Squadron and then it'll be something because we did two or three iterations we did you know we did two or three iterations of how we wanted to do did we want to have this Iron Man POS do we want to have it upright did it blend between them and we were playing it and playing it it's like it doesn't feel right and now you can just you know it when you get it right because you can

270. 03:47:39

     just go and you're like oh this feels really nice and you just end up flying around the level and connecting things so yeah it this unlocks content for the oh absolutely I mean I I purposely didn't watch the videos I wanted to be able to react as honestly while we're recording these as possible and I know you said those were blockout animations but as somebody who's been with Steve Bender on a Friday night at the a house like that looks just like Steve Bender yeah Bender sorry sorry Steve uh but no it looks great and I think everybody who saw that now is going to see the potential that they absolute gameplay potential for all kinds of zero zg gameplay possibilities that is really really that's great I mean this this there's other I mean there's some smaller things like we have one other thing here we have a video for which is

271. 03:48:27

     you know it's not as big as a system as like say the Eva replacement but like the hover trolley that we've got I know that I saw I really like the hover trolley yeah I I like I saw the Reddit thread say why does someone do a hover trolley well actually that was something we've been working on for quite a while uh but the thing I will we can we can show you here in a few minutes but the thing that's really good about this because you know obviously the physical trolleys the wheels get caught I mean just like in the real world right uh and you've got problems of going upstairs and all the rest of stuff just like you would in the real world uh is that it sort of opens up the potential and this really plays into the PE we use it in Squadron for certain things like you'll you'll see in what we show here but for the Pu it's actually much more interesting because you know now you

272. 03:49:16

     have the ability we always had this design for our like bigger um cargo containers right ones you can't just pick up yourself we originally had this design where there was sort of a grav L system where yeah you you stuck in this thing and the grav L it would come up and then you know now you could push around you know a huge container and we're moving for physicalized cargo uh it's going to be in 318 um I think Tony's trying to squeeze a few things in we'll see if he manages to get everything in but um this isn't necessarily going to be in 318 but it will come in probably you know not too far in the in the near future but this allows you to not you know just have your little tractor beam and pick up something and move it around but you know okay let's have a bigger container and what happens if you okay turn it on up it goes and then you just push it

273. 03:50:05

     into your cargo hold turn it off Locks into the cargo grid and now that cargo container imagine a bigger one well you know what happens you know like right now in the inventory system you can put things in your you know local inventory of your ship or um you know other various inventories well imagine your container say one of these bigger like maybe a 16 SCU one or whatever that's sitting there and now I can place I don't know large vehicle um items in it I can place all sorts of stuff in it so I could load up this container I could push it into my ship then I could fly it off to some remote planet and put it next to you know where I'm camping out or longer term where you say maybe a player base or some group of players with persistent decide to take over a deric or something and I can like basically load up a bunch of supplies in a in a container like bigger supplies or

274. 03:50:55

     weapons or armor suits or whatever and put it in there just by doing this so so it I think you know the underlying sort of hover tech for the trolley stuff is really good because it it will really play into the the cargo and the logistics that are going to come with that because longer term with persistence and what we're doing I think there's going to be a whole bunch of gameplay that will be revolved around the logistics of of living right like how do I how do I have my food how do I have my drinks how do I have my raw materials how do I have my weapons you know if two ORS are fighting a war over a patch of land someone's got to show up with extra you know ammo and missiles and you know all that kind of stuff and or weapon replacement especially as we get repairing and the salvaging and stuff you know okay well rather than have to fly it to a place that can do

275. 03:51:43

     your repair maybe there's an on field repair that's happening right there and someone's changing out a broken weapon for another weapon because you've loaded up and stored it in in uh your container so I there there's the possibilities in the Pu is huge and this is an example of just like little bits of tech that were putting into Squadron that we're planning on bringing it across into the Pu but in the Pu they just have a lot more potential like like the Eva yeah I mean the biggest thing about trolleys is when we approach trollies with the physical trolleys was that we wanted them serve two purposes one we wanted them to serve a purpose that is more traditional games which is you know I can move things around and that allows me to create you know traversal opportunities for me if I'm blocked I can move a box over here and oh I can get up higher now which is kind of what the more physical trolleys are kind of

276. 03:52:32

     better suited for uh and this is another example where we kind of put trollies into the Pu but there wasn't really a a use case or best use case so that at the moment they're just used as enemies or I've seen people fly them as missile out of ships and but they they're not really utilized for what we want them to use and then you've got the other side of trolleys which is we want them to be used for cargo loading now again we've got a lot of ships we've got a lot of different ramps the scales of those ramps is larger and with hover trolley what you know when you see the video you can push them downstairs you push them up any ramp you know the the the weight that you're having to physically push a physical trolley which is taken into account hover trolleys you don't have to worry about that because you know let's play the video see the video we've hyped this up now hover trailers are the most amazing thing in the world here we go so

277. 03:53:20

     you can see here this is actually a um a slaver pod so it closes down it's on the floor we're going to activate it levitates up now grab LS on you get a hold of it bam and by the way our new the new interaction system's not working in in this demo here just a separate build but where you know as you can see it's getting pushed over bulkheads bulkheads but this is essentially a really big Improvement for us because we want you know we want physical cargo and we want physical cargo to be a really a big deal in the Pu that you have to move that car you have to make decisions on how long it's going to take you to load it up not just buy it from a kiosk and it appear in your ship so this gives us the ability to do that and like Chris says move much larger things than what you'd normally be able to push as a human

278. 03:54:09

     being yeah I mean this happens to be just a a slaver pum but you obviously you can be pushing you know as long as it's gravel ever equipped and has the sort of hover device then uh you you know like I said you could have large uh shipping containers and stuff like that and this is all underpinned by our grle technology so the same you know if as a dragonfly or eventually you'll be hopefully to be able to move much larger ships if you need to rearrange them or you know when you're moving things around uh on your homestead or what whatever we do eventually and I've actually we've actually had this working on a planet so you can just push this over Planet terrain you don't let go you stay stable uh CU it it doesn't actually undulate uh unless there's unless there's something actually physically touching it so it

279. 03:54:56

     allows it to be much more stable and what we want to do for your uh cargo loading is that we'll use a system similar to the cargo grid that you'll be able to snap things on top of it so when if you have a flat platform you'll be able to snap cargo boxes onto it so they won't fall off then you able to you know reliably move them without frustration ation and again you can see some of our design e thoughts coming through is that we're trying to remove the barrier to entry we're trying to remove the the control mechanism the things that frustrate you as you play the game and kind of make that a lot simpler I see this and all I can think about is Spock in the photon torpedo tube that's true all right cool so yeah so we've talked about a number of things now that are related to the player to the first person and stuff like this and we got a couple more we're going to come back to later but let's move up into spaceships

280. 03:55:44

     because spaceships are a big part of the experience we just had a earlier in the day we had our flight experience segment where they talked about master modes and Quantum boots and stuff like this um but at a higher level and stuff let's talk about how the flight experience is changing a bit through the work in Squadron 42 and anything you want to share with us on that I think the biggest thing for me and I think it's what we've Chris and I have talked about is the difficulty of developing a game over a period of time when it's a live product is that you're developing things in isolation and you're putting them out so you're going okay this is our t0 you know this is mfds and okay and now we want to do the flight HUD and we put the flight HUD and now we want to do this section and what happens is maybe it's a different designer over the years or

281. 03:56:31

     maybe it's someone else or maybe they they've learned from what's happened or gone out previously and lots of things come together but they don't necessarily feel right because they've not been approached where you've gone we're going to do it all at once because you can never do it all at once if you've got to hit quarterly releases right so with Squadron development what's it allowed us to do is allowed us to look at the the HUD and the mfds and everything together and go well actually we don't need all that information on the HUD if we've got it on the nfds or we don't need all the information here if we've got physical switches and it's allowed us to approach the design of the cockpit experience holistically so that we can go okay let's pull all this noise away that because we've tried to fit everything onto the Hut we've tried to put everything on there you know you need to know your g-forces and your heading Direction and and you know I need to know my ammo and and you know

282. 03:57:20

     Master modes is a good way of going down that road is kind of going okay we want to have traversal and we want to have combat so if you gotm combat if you're in qcm you're in Quantum mode so that's traversal on flight and then we've taken that approach and gone okay well do you always need an altimeter well no maybe not if you're if you're in space maybe you're only an alimer when you go down to to atmosphere you know your mfds if you're in SCM what do you really care about will you care about your health your weapons your Target's Health how they're doing but as a default experience we're only giving you the information that is needed to you at that point in time and what we actually saw is that you're flying around we've got gorgeous space environments I want to be able to look at them I don't want you want to see the ship your you're

283. 03:58:08

     fighting you want to see the environment you're flying around it I mean I I mean I mean one of the big things that were the big initiative on the the vehicle side for squadron is the sort of complete redo of uh the HUD and the MFD systems and basically the display where we're first of all we we have to refactor it to move away from some of the old flash that's been around forever which is what the MFD displays um and uh on the HUD we sort of took a look at where we were going and felt like like rich said it's just too much stuff's there all the time want we want to we want to be more contextual so yeah and we're doing this in a overall holistic way that would be probably almost impossible if you were trying to fit into quarterly releases in in the Pu so you know most of the vehicle team is

284. 03:58:58

     working on this as as a sort of group uh you know in the need for multiple speeds that we saw earlier you sort of saw some aspects of it which is the the different modes you can be in depending on what you're trying to do uh but uh you know a lot of that's also reflected on the HUD and the information of what you're targeting and whether you can you know whether you want to be able to cast up say your target uh status or your ship status to your visor now that won't be the case for everything uh every suit like for instance if you have a more combat oriented ship or suit that you would wear you know like a you know I don't know a Gladius or a a hornet and you've got the appropriate equipment then you should be able to cast if you're just flying a an old buet like an aurora what was the Drake ship we saw

285. 03:59:46

     the other day when we were looking at it saying all the HUD was on there we like well it's kind of the equivalent of a lorry oh yeah yeah know it's the caterpillar yeah yeah yeah so yeah the you wouldn't have the caterpillar you know you wouldn't cast it up to your visor like you would as a fighter pilot it would be sitting down on the on the mfds but in the cases that you have the ability to cast it and do stuff in all the ships are also building in the ability like there's a not just a game config screen in your ship you go in have your like settings screen and the settings will be remembered on a per ship basis and you can set up what you know okay I want this display to be this or this display this I want this to cast here and so so it's all been built about building blocks and being um in a very sort of topown one system clean approach uh so we're pretty excited about that

286. 04:00:35

     we're not ready to show it uh yet because we're still in the the sort of early you know we foundational stage yeah we there's it's a little further before it's all fully polished already show but it's going to be I think a pretty CA change in terms of how it feels as you're flying around besides the different uh modes of of of you know combat and traversal and all the rest of stuff it's it's how you get the information and and how it's related to you is is going to be much more contextual much better and I think it's huge in combat big it's huge in combat because in combat right now you're either you know we're obviously trying to bring the combat closer which obviously what the yogi and the guys and Dave talked about in their talk um but you don't want to be you don't want to have those clutter on there and you want to have that spatial awareness of okay

287. 04:01:23

     who who's my Target and the other aspect is that on that level of you know again a holistic approach is your player uh information is only on there if it's relevant and also the targeting we've talked about redoing in terms of right now if you go into the Pu or you play Squadron level 100 players in you just billions of markers and it's like uh it's just massive information overload you know in some it was definitely a problem in Squadron we have quite a few areas of the game where there's massive amounts of shits yeah and and you know some players can deal with it but you know it's just so much information it's just it's it's unnecessary so what we've done is that we've G we want to strip back the targeting so that again you're only targeting the things that are important to you so you know we're relying Less on all these markers and we want to put more of a focus on your your

288. 04:02:11

     radar in the cockpit because you have a radar in the cockpit you know fighter pilots in real life have a radar they don't have in world AR markers oh there's 20 guys coming over there you know we we want to make sure that you've got the information that you need but also we want to B basically make sure that you're using the tools that we provide because what's what's happening right now is that everybody's just relyant on the HUD because the HUD has everything on there but you've got mfds you've got a cockpit radar you know we want they're there for a reason so what's happened over the years is that we've tried to put we've redone them at separate times times and you know the mfds are still in Flash and they've done the building blocks so we've kind of got into this cycle of trying to oh no this is it this is where the player should be and what we want to do is we go go back to kind of what Chris's original Vision in ter well there's an in cockpit radar you should use that there's in cockpit

289. 04:03:01

     mfds you should use those okay now I'm in this specific combat mode okay that that they cast so I can see that information but the radar doesn't become redundant that should be the that should be what the noise is on that's where that all the information should be okay I should be able to go in there and select targets get that information should be clean and delivered to me but out in the world I want to look what's there I want to look at my target I want to look what I'm saying oh there's a space station oh there's another guy coming in so we want to have less Reliance on just a markers for everything and only Reliance on marking the things that are important to you or you've directly marked yourself and I think when you when you fight combat experiences where you're fighting 15 20 ships uh it's just a lot it's a lot more fun because you're not having to deal with all the extra noise you can just

290. 04:03:48

     focus on being the best pilot you can be and I think it's it's really important and I and I would say that definitely you know we're we're putting a bunch of work in to the radar which is really radar star map so like what you've never had in the Pu to the the original design was that the that radar that you would see would also scale up or you scale out basically to be your nav M your your star map right your nav map and what happened when we were getting the first iteration of the Pu out the baby puu we're like we we didn't get that working yet so we just said well we'll use your mobiglass version and we're still using the mobiglass version all these years later and it's still mostly the the code that was done all those years ago and that's when I mentioned at the top of our talk that you know the star map well the star Maps really starm map and radar

291. 04:04:37

     cuz you can zoom in and zoom out and you can zoom all the way to the radar level or Zoom all the way out to the star map and we've put a huge amount of work into making that much more fluid much more usable much visually better uh and also having the information there and the intera ability so like you can be zoomed in and you can be looking at your radar and you can Mouse over contacts and you can get the information from it you can click them and then that will now select it as your Target and do a lot of things that um you know haven't really been there so so I think a lot of players because we haven't delivered and this is sort of at the top of the the talk that rich was talking about was because we haven't delivered all the things we've just delivered some of the things sometimes people just are focusing on certain things and if they could do things like select their targets easily from the radar they may not be wanting

292. 04:05:27

     to see 400 Mark AR markers when they're flying around and so those are all that's that's example on the the vehicle side where we're sort of really trying to bring that all in as well as you know there's other things that we're doing that will come across the Pu in terms of physical buttons like when you activate something your your you know we just that's in process right now but yeah you'll click a button you'll see your character you know click you know here's for the landing gear or here's to turn the lights on or here's to activate my Quantum Drive uh just to make it sort of feel physical but we're going to give you modes and ease of use so that information's presenting to you well and you can you know have fun being lost in the world which is the most important thing certain level of customization as

293. 04:06:15

     we're talking about because you know some ships have better mfds and more usable places than others and stuff like that so well the other aspect as well in terms of just the radar and scanning which is it's a really good example of a feature that we've put on to the Pu into Star Citizen that isn't hit the what we envisaged it to be because right now you're kind of limited to 20 kilm now really you know I think you've seen Quantum boost in some of the earlier videos um the premise that we want you to is you know we've got this vast universe so we want radio and scanning we actually you know we have this smaller radio and scanning of on the FPS you have the smaller one that's giving you information in the room and then the larger charged one that's giving you information about maybe the floor that you're on and it's the same principles in the ship side is that we want a smaller one that is fairly instantaneous

294. 04:07:04

     and that's kind of giving you information about the people you're fighting or you know your local environment and when I say smaller I'm talking say sub 100 km you know that's just giving me information around this area but then we've got the charge scam wave and that should be giving you information about things that are 10 15 20,000 km away and then that's why where Q boost comes in in the fact that you're Q boosting to these locations you're not having to go okay there's a Quantum travel marker there that's a million kilometers away that's like okay I'm making a conscious decision to go there but for Q boost it's like okay I am there I want to boost around the environment but I want to have things spread around so that you know we're not just cramped in because radar and scanning is fundamentally it has two purposes one purpose is to give you information about the things in your environment and the second purpose is to

295. 04:07:51

     help you explore it's to help you find things that are not necessarily apparent because space is a big dark place so we need that we want to be able to take advantage of that so when you have this ability to detect things that are much further away all of a sudden you start to feel like you are that pilot you got to fly to them to to investigate them and so I mean I think that's like that's a good example of something on Squadron that you know we were also looking at like how do we solve the problem of your you know patrolling an area right and it's not very much fun if you Patrol an area and then it's like I you know space is big I go to this area and then I look around and I my radar covers 10 kilometers in front of me and that's it that doesn't feel like I was patrolling you know a large area of space and so we we sort of we're thinking about well how

296. 04:08:40

     you know really if we think about it there's like short range which is you know what you would call the standard control mode like slower exploration I come up to a you know a derel or there's a cluster of asteroids that I'm going to fly around to see what's happening and then there's the medium range which hasn't really existed in both the Pu uh and it's something that we really wanted to have in Squadron and we really should be in the Pu which is well you know what's that over there that's 10,000 km away the the equivalent of being on a planet and going there's a mountain over there I can see it I don't know what's on it but I'm going to drive over there or walk over to that mountain uh and so the idea with sort of the the scanning is like the wave goes out and yeah you'll pick up things 10 20 30,000

297. 04:09:30

     kilometers away so you definitely won't be able to understand what's there but you'll say there's something point of Interest get there's a point of interest and so you'll be able to map things and then we need to get there but you know the quantum travel spooling up spooling down or and we and so this is the whole Quantum the idea of quantum boost is your sort of uh midlevel traversal speed where it allows you it's probably about tenth the speed of the full Quantum travel uh sort of you know not using all the quantum juice if you want to think of it that way uh but it allows you to sort of get there pretty quickly and you know also appreciate the environment you're going through uh and you know get over there oh I go up to the mountain okay no I can see what's oh there's trees here oh that's really cool and that opens up a whole bunch of gameplay I mean definitely helps out in in in Squadron but in the Pu it's massive

298. 04:10:20

     because in the Pu when this rolls into the Pu now you can have exploration gameplay in space so for instance you could be never had yeah we've never had so so you could be in you know a big nebula gas cloud and you scan and you oh I got a contact 20K away okay I'm going to boost over to see what oh I come up oh look it's a you know it's a derel or there's there's a abandoned mining station is this group of rocks over here or I go over here and and we can even in the Pu be in a case where you can sort of almost sort of R you know precisely generate some points of interest when you start to scan that you can go and and and visit so I think you know the whole idea of sort of these three Mo these three sort of levels of traversal one it's your sort of you know regular you know non-quantum one where you're just using your regular thrusters which

299. 04:11:06

     is much more sort of limited and you know works for you know combat and stuff like that then there's the quantum boost which is sort of to you know fast fast run over to a place and then there's the the quantum travel which is the really long okay I'm going to go to this planet that's 500,000 kilometers away and I'm going to be in Quantum for 5 minutes to get there uh and I think that's going to open up a huge amount in the Pu uh I mean it definitely makes a big difference in the game playay I mean makes the exploring in Squadron in space feel feel much bigger because that was the thing we were trying to follow and I think it's a problem in the Pu right now is when you're in space it's sort of like you know most of it is point it's empty for you right it's like you spend

300. 04:11:55

     your time around the space stations or uh you know some asteroids here around the planet but we want to open it up a bit more and have that idea of oh I can I can detect something I want to investigate it so the whole sort of exploration um investigative gameplay that can happen in space now because of these different modes of travel and this scanning is going to be uh a huge huge deal uh so I know we have a clip for this uh for folks who maybe joined the program late and didn't see the flight experience segment earlier or if you're watching this separately on YouTube and you don't know what this looks like uh let's take a look at the quantum boost clip that we have uh so we can see it one more time here so just to call out that's going to be the old HUD yeah that is the old HUD that's too busy that's the next old HUD earlier we were showing the old old old HUD so we've done a scan here those are

301. 04:12:43

     that's also the old point of interest cuz the point of interest will be just points yeah but basically we've done a scan we've got some points of interest that are uh you know multiple 10ks away and you can see the distance there it says 13,000 km on the right hand side so this is obviously just placeholder UI for the quantum boost again you can just boost over there and it obviously has this interactive gameplay which obviously went into uh yeah and this by the way is that that's all program our work in progress from Yogi uh on uh the Quantum boost um mechanism because you're going to have to stay in the zone to keep in boost otherwise you'll fall out of boost uh but we've gone over to the the the planet here so what it's allowing you to do is sort of have that mid-level traversal and investigate things uh without having to uh you know

302. 04:13:31

     spend forever 12200 m/ second or Quantum traveling over it and it's over too quickly so so just to clarify again for folks if you watch the flight experience segment earlier in the day that's the old old UI which is probably closer to what you're familiar with in the Pu today what we just showed now is the new old UI the one that was intermediate now but we're now moving away from and the basically it's the same as it's the styled uh Squadron UI that was from the UI you have in the Pu right so what you have in the Pu is the these generic version that Zayn did this was the one that we had the style that we did for the AIA Style but it was still based on the idea of all this information being and we've decided that we wanted to really scale

303. 04:14:19

     that back to be more contextual to switch between modes so that's one of the reasons why we're not really showing all the her and the MFD stuff now is because we're in the process of the change so it's you know a lot of programmer art and you even you even saw it in the the Need for Speed segment whereas a lot of that like the mode stuff and everything they've just sort of hacked in the modes to the current um uh HUD stuff but when when the new one comes online it should be much cleaner and and easier to go and I I don't know if it was too clear on the video that we were seeing but on the video we say we were in originally in SC mode standard control mode and then um we switched to Quantum mode so the spoolup wasn't really the spool up for the quantum boost the spool up was just there's a spool up as you go into Quantum mode your Shields power down so you so you you know there is some risk when you're

304. 04:15:07

     in the fast raval mode uh and the Quantum Drive Powers up but once you're once it's spooled up and you look at a place you can boost towards it and it's just you press shift and it's instant yeah and and so so for people that want to you know go oh what's that over there you know people have been wanting to I just want to like free Quantum right you know there's people who want to do that for quite a while B Quantum boost is you know second start of the right and straight on till morning um so yeah so we we've been talking about these these these flight experience stuff the ship rated stuff the new UI stuff the contextual changes and everything uh we obviously show those as we get close closer to being ready to show those we talked a little bit about the the star map um again not quite ready to show today stuff uh as far as those mapping things and getting around stuff uh

305. 04:15:55

     there's also the mini map there's also the mini map which is always been this promise of being able to find your way through either a really large ship or a space station or stuff like that uh what can you tell us about the work on the mini map so radar as as we call it is essentially it encapsulates the St St map it encapsulates what's in your cockpit and it also encapsulates when you're in fps you have an FPS radar and scanner uh and the mini map is essentially a way for you to be able to and you can access it both from your mobile or it'll be on your HUD a way for you to get the spatial awareness in you know when you're in a 3D environment in fps so I think the what we have in terms of the mini map it gives you that 3D isometric view that you can move around and all the information in there is underpinned by

306. 04:16:43

     uh the FPS radar on scanner so the information that you you're you're scanning in the environment is the information that you'll see on the mini map so if you go into say a known location so let's say you go uh to Microtech uh you know that Landing Zone essentially that that will be pushed to your mobiglass so you'll be able to then load up the mini map and go okay how do I how do I get out I mean I've seen so many different new players play Star Citizen they're like where do I go so you in you know it'd be nice for us to be able to go here's here's the space port here's where you go and buy food and drink here's where you go and buy weapons and you can just go cool I open up my map and it's like oh that's where I am oh that's where I can go and it it gives you a map at your fingertips but then when you're at an environment that

307. 04:17:32

     is not say let's say you go to a der Outpost you'll be mapping that environment as you go or you may be able to find a terminal that has the map on there that you can download and then you have it to you so it it really allows us again Star Citizen one of its strengths is that it's scale but that's a challenge for us as developers to be able to give it to players and for them to be able to understand and navigate where they need to go because the first thing is how do I play the game where do I need to go what do I need to do so you know how do you play the game is about making the barrier to entry the controls smooth and intuitive what you understand you know and then it's like where do I need to go okay well this allows you we have a mini app here and this allows you to go oh cool there's the Spaceport there's the the shuttle or there's the train or this is how I get to this area and we can provide you know missions

308. 04:18:21

     that allow people to then navigate to those places so that then they understand okay this is how I get to a certain place because everybody you know if somebody says to me tomorrow you know come around to my house or go here just give them a postcode and you put it in GPS everybody so put you put in Google Maps exactly you know you need that you need the the street level uh version of it uh and you know so we've long wanted this I mean it's very critical for uh Squadron but it's also um you I think important for the Pu and you know the concept is that some of the maps are sort of readily available you just walk into a a city and you know the terminal Auto connects to your your your Mobi or whatever and you get the map downloaded and some of them you may have to explore something and then as you explore it you map it um just like a sort of more

309. 04:19:09

     traditional uh mapping technique and there'll be some cases like you know we have some stuff in Squadron which I think would play perfectly well in the Pu where like you don't have the map initially but if you hack in or you can download it into a system like Asado is an example of we've been showing it because we showed it a while back as a location it's just one of the very you know it's a minor location in terms of Squadron but you know since we showed it we thought okay that's a good it's just a good backdrop a good backdrop rather than just you know U gray boxes um but you know that would be an example you don't load the layout of that place but you would have to go and H hook into their system download the map and then now you would have it in your mini map so what we have is we have some footage here which is showing how they visuals the mini map in terms of

310. 04:19:58

     sort of an isometric render inine in the engine in the UI that uh will essentially become your mini map but you'll have a a more sort of you know reduced version with you in the middle as you're moving around but if we run it you'll you'll see kind of what the the tech is so first this is in the editor um uh but it's essentially what it does is it's taking our existing um layouts levels ships so we don't have to build this custom but it's a way of applying certain shaders and marking up certain objects to be displayed like the floor gets displayed but the walls don't uh so we can just take the existing geometry you already have streamed in that you're walking around already uh and then use it to be rendered for our mini map so this is this is essentially in the

311. 04:20:46

     engine using the Idris uh ship itself and the various parts of of its interior to create the mini map without any special this you know this doesn't have any specific custom like UI for it other than some of the like level things that say you know uh you know ground level or whatever it's it's one of the advantage of having high detail chips the environment's already you know already in a good St to show Straight Out The Gate and so the idea of this being systemic is that you know when it's this the feature and the is ready to go ready for prime time it we can just apply it to space station yeah because a lot of traditional gain development you have to make custom minim maps so you look at environment and you go we have to make a custom environment mini map so you if we want to support Lots tens hundreds and

312. 04:21:36

     thousands of locations especially for the Pu and absolutely for the Pu it's just it's just not viable so we wanted to come up with a solution that we can use you know with minimal effort on the side of uh content creation but gives us all the information that we want and this mini map is not just uh oh that's where I am it can show you objectives it can show you other people it can show you information about those things and again it's all underpinned by the radar and scanner so when we call it the mini map it's just this is just a a kind of how you view your radar information in fps and your radar and scanner gives you so much more information than just oh that's the name of the door it tells you what's the state does it have power can I hack it you know if it's a person what's their active status that they injured so if you're coming into here and going I'm trying to do a medical

313. 04:22:25

     Mission and I've got a marker I can go cool I can get scan of the local lie of the area and go right this person's injured oh his body's injured too oh he's got a tier one injury I'm going to go and help him before he bleeds out because I can see his health and you'll be able to see that via this information you it allows you to detect sabur or Intruders but then you using like the relay Network and whatever the sabur and Intruders can start pulling fuses and start hiding themselves from this will also underpin Resource Network yeah so exactly that the the same visuals and Tech is planed to drop into the so the resource so if you're looking at like your schematic for the ship to where your relays are going to be or security reasons which doors are open or closed um basically it will pull up your you

314. 04:23:13

     know your holographic view of your ship like that using the same Tech so that the idea is those two things um you know work well together all right so we've been talking about uh the FPS stuff the stuff that affects the player specifically and we're going to touch a few more of those things uh before we leave today uh we've moved up into space and talked about our flight experience and the scanning and the mini map and stuff um now from ourselves and our ships let's talk about our enemies our opponents the PE the the the entities we're going to encounter and talk some uh talk about some of the AI improvements uh that have been coming because of work on Squadron what can you tell us so the AI systems that we have we basically threw them away so we we found out we wanted to we wanted to understand where we wanted to

315. 04:24:04

     go what we wanted to achieve and and you know over the years as I've worked in games and I think probably Chris would attest to as well is that the best AI are kind of some of the AI that you have a really good solid foundation then you build on top of it and I think our AI over the period of time that has been there I think it's kind of had lots of different iterations and it kind of lost its way a little bit and then you yeah it's kind of lost so what we've we've done and we they've also they also no one's the the AI That's in the Pu has never really had tuning time no exactly the focus and you know it it it it was a basic implementation at the beginning and then it's been rolled out and there's so many other things going on that they really haven't had time to focus on it because you know you're playing and with the servers running at

316. 04:24:51

     six frames a second there's a whole bunch of problems that come with this that doesn't help the AI out at all uh so this is one this is actually a really good example of where Squadron really helps because we're saying okay don't worry about that I mean yeah I'm sorry that the AI is kind of brain dead a lot of the times in the the Pu it's combination of the you know it's old logic and behaviors haven't been well developed but also it's because of proor performance of the servers and what's going to happen with server meshing is going to make a big difference for that and there's other things that are happening in the background that will will also make it better um but the advantage of taking it to in onto the Squadron side is that we can really just focus on the AI the behaviors iterating on it um adding sort of interest and

317. 04:25:40

     complexity and making them feel like real humans uh fighting you uh or in the case of fandal real aliens fighting you and not or creatures or creatures yeah yeah well hey be quiet about that um but not get tied up in some other problems that come with multiplayer come with online servers and make that work really good as a single player having fun feeling challenged feeling like it's it you know I'm not just shooting dummies that jump up and I can easily blast and when that all works then comes across into the Pu uh especially when some of the latest stuff's going to trigger in the Pu I think it'll be a whole different experience and and it's I won't argue it's been like a long hard

318. 04:26:29

     slug on the AI side uh partly because we wanted to become really systemic and we have a massive especially in the Pu a massive world that can have all these different situations so it's not you know like if you're doing a standard FPS game Call of Duty um like the narrative parts of it you know exactly where everyone's going to be and you can sort of script actions for the AI to make them seem intelligent but really they're kind of following scripts whereas with us you know all the different planets all the different can you be you know locations on the planets are up in a spaceship or all these different situations that AI could be in there's no way you could script it all so you need to make it systemic it needs to understand the environment it needs to to have perception of what's happening around it and uh be able to communicate

319. 04:27:17

     with the other AI it's fighting alongside to seem like they're working as a team and so that takes time to work uh you know the AI team is uh been working on it for a long time led by FR chesco Ruchi who's been doing a great job and I you know we absolutely have turned the corner this year uh because i' you know you know both me and actually we we were playing it when some of the blast systems came in and you know it was challenging to say the least yes uh and and challenging in a good way in like the fact that we were like okay we want to we want to clear everyone out like we were running asato as a test level okay let's see if we can just run and Gun and take all the slavers out no and uh I mean rich is much better fps

320. 04:28:06

     player than me I think I'm kind of okay but rich is much better but no we weren't all managed to get it but I was like I was like I'm going home I downloaded the build and and home I'm like damn it I'm going to finish this level like I almost managed to do it I mean it it it was you know was getting it was like Elden ring from software like I want to do it one more time and it was and it wasn't just that you were getting like a head shot or anything where it was like okay the AI is just Supernatural and they can instantly shoot you it was like they were moving around they were anticipating where you were do they trying to flank your areas and they were behaving intelligently and those are all uh behaviors and systems that we've been working on in terms of like realistic perception like they can you know they can hear a sound around a corner but if you were three four doors away or whatever maybe they wouldn't

321. 04:28:55

     hear you if you dropped something uh and you know see where you were and see you in the peripheral vision or they'd have different uh ways of approaching searching for you or fighting you you know whether they're more aggressive and they're pushing up towards you or they're defensive and they're staying hand cover or they're trying to flank you uh so there's there's there's a whole bunch of work that's done and so on the AI side I'm I'm actually feeling like it's going be some pretty great stuff uh and so that is going to be stuff that will ultimately be coming to the Pu and it'll be really cool uh but I don't know if you know rich wants to add a bit to it well I I need I need to ask something because I've spent more than a single day on the internet before when you say we've thrown everything away well actually I was about to come back to that so that's going to be the title

322. 04:29:43

     of the Kotaku article it's interesting cuz what we what we talked about is we we identified everything that was there so when I came on I wanted to understand where you know we're talking years now so we okay what what is there how do we want to change it and how do we want to mulate it so we're not throwing away the the more technical underpinnings of the of the AI subsumption still there no subsumption or like how the um you know how they they navigate and pathfind around the world it's more about the bits that you go and you tune and B tweak and we we call them behaviors like AI behaviors so what we did is we pulled all the AI back and stripped it back to essentially three base behaviors essentially Defender so I want to stay back in cover and defend a location a strafer who kind of wants to get you know sees you and wants to go behind you

323. 04:30:29

     and then pushes that kind of want to put pressure onto you so we wanted to create these three core behaviors that the AI can choose to go you know they can choose combat behaviors this is so once you've engaged in combat they can then select one of these behaviors to engage you so that you get a a mixture of combat when you're fighting them and obviously you might get three Defenders or you might get one straf and two pushers and we've got a video to show some of the uh some of the behaviors but then what we have is we have a trait system that sits on top of that and that's where designers can go in and go okay I want this Defender to be um to always defend he can never reroll as another uh Behavior or I want him to be um like a turret so he never moves from cover to cover or I want pushing to be you know I want always to be a pusher I want them to you know be aggressive I want them to be Reckless I want them to

324. 04:31:17

     have friendly fire so we can go in and entally we've got three based behaviors that just by themselves play well you can play that and go okay to these three is that a fun experience then you can start adding in all the other things on top you go okay I want this this trait and this trait so you're crafting combat experiences so in a pu Mission if you've got a ship coming in bringing air reinforcements we can say okay we can wait the Behavior so you're not getting the same thing every time but you can go okay you you get these guys who push and they're quite aggressive because that's their faction whether it's Nils or these guys are quite defensive they you know they're more military and what we have is these traits that multiply the behavior so now we've got multiple different things and then you add different um weapons in there so you've got sniper rifles so the different engagement ranges and all of a sudden

325. 04:32:05

     you have this Matrix of individual behaviors that is Multiplied into the hundreds that allows us to have a real strong combat experience that is not the same it's not you know starts a game that you're going to be playing for hundred thousands of hours um you you know you don't want to just be having the same combat experience over and over again vice versa in Squadron we want you to be able to ramp up the combat we want to have factions play differently we want you to have different experiences you play throughout the game and when we looked at the AI combat Behavior that's something we identified but then we also looked at perception and and basically um tweaked that and readed that in a way that allows us that you know you come around the corner it's not just instant head shot because to be honest AI it's very easy to make AI that are amazing because they're just computer they know where you are they know exactly they

326. 04:32:52

     don't have to Mouse aim it's just instant head shot it's very easy to make them too hard what what it what it's not human no exactly what we want to do is we want to make it challenging but fair and that is you know when when we were Chris was talking about playing through aado even though it was very challenging it when we died it was because ah we made a mistake it was like okay I didn't check my left when I came out here and I'm like oh I got taken out and we've also looked at accuracy so we've looked at accuracy is that you know even a human you know even a soldier they don't immediately have a bead on a Target and they pull the trigger they take a time to adjust to it so you know as soon as you pop out of cover they're like oh someone's there it's not instantly on you they've got a bit of time and then what we wanted to do is that we don't want AI to be 100% accurate you know but

327. 04:33:40

     we want them you still feel pressure so we have a silhouette based accuracy model now so that if they do miss kind you're getting that sense of like you know it's kind of going past your head and you're like okay I'm under pressure and we want the AI to pressure you but pressure you in a way that you feel like oh what how did he he shot me through a box like oh you know Oh's he's pushing that way and you're hearing him you're like okay I need oh they're coming this way and I'm being pincered and I think that's where we want to we've put a real focus on terms of how they perceive you in the environment when they're socially active how do they perceive you in in combat and then we we have pretty much 90% of what I've talked about there is in the game we've had balanced passes we've played it it's a lot of fun um and then what we have on top of that is future things that we're going to be adding even more so you know we've we've got versions of them going doing medic

328. 04:34:29

     behavior and Reviving allies and ammo management and all the other Advanced combat behaviors that we can pull on top which we're already working on but they they're underpinned by an absolute solid foundation so if you strip all of it back just to those three base behaviors the defender pushes straight for is it fun because if it's not fun there it's not going to be fun here you can't just keep relying on putting stuff on top and going oh it's going to get fun when we do this it's going to get fun when we do this so we we pulled it back so that a you have a challenge that you feel like you're being pushed that you feel like you're under pressure cuz especially in Squadron you know you're not a Commando you're a fighter pilot you know fighter pilots don't go in and you know they're not John Rambo and again in the Pu you could be a you could be aage uh trucker

329. 04:35:17

     or you could be you you might want to do something else you might want to be doing just a homesteads or you want to do trading and so when you get into FPS we need to have the the um the AI reflect the level of difficulty that we want to push and into persistent Universe yeah and and I mean I I mean you know throwing away is was you know Behavior disingenuous basically that but it's but you game development is iteration right so you have V1 then you have V2 and then V3 and you know V1 was the very first basic combat behavior and it was it wasn't you know it's it was the beginning and there's a lot more systems now underpin it that's why we threw the base one away because we have more ones that are underpinned by you know a lot more of the things we talked about like perception the accuracy and

330. 04:36:05

     all this other stuff that happens and within the context you were speaking specifically of the FPS combat Behavior correct like those seven segments I did about the bartenders those are all still accurate no no social so I mean social Ai and combat behaviors there's there is we redone the CH line yet again uh social more mes more mes yeah the mle will never end but we'll also be using some of these um tenants and Ethos to push into the flight AI so the flight AI which I think you know was talked about in the earlier talk in terms of the jousting and how we want to have more close combat things like accuracy and the behaviors and how they can roll different um traits and how that that's something that we'll have holistically across AI across stst as a whole you

331. 04:36:56

     know we're showing it as the FPS but it's very similar so it's something that I mean we've got we can show the clip of we got Esports guys waiting to do their race so let's let's start let's look at some videos yeah so what I'd suggest I think we probably show investigation first because the other things is outside of you just talked about combat yeah there's a whole bunch of other behavior in terms of because you know like I said stealth game plays a lot yes so you know Squadron is the test bed for that so investigation so like someone Hears A noise what's that let's go check it out they radio their you know back to base or their buddy hey I heard something here or they get in a gunfight they could actually call back hey I need reinforcements and they'll come in that's all behaviors that's in working right now in Squadron and then on top of

332. 04:37:43

     that you know you're making the joke about the the bartender and all the rest of stuff but really uh the main uh cooking bed for what we call social AI I non-combat AI is Squadron there's a lot more stuff happening in in in Squadron that will come into the Pu so it's not just the bartender or you know even people eating at the chow line it's you know it's you know Engineers going about their daily business or uh a janitor you know cleaning up messes that people leave systemically or for instance flight attendance or hanger Personnel yeah the hanger PE that you know basically operating on the hanger and then when they're not fixing something they're having a conversation on the side for instance a whole dynamic conversation system uh that Franchesco has been working on that allows the ri say our board the Stanton which is the

333. 04:38:33

     address that you're based in good it's huge conversation when you're playing through a level and you can hear them talking to each other and reacting to what's happening it all of a sudden brings that space to life so yeah but the dynamic conversation system allows it so we have some that are sort of more story scripted conversations like if you Eaves drop on some people patrolling and it we've got some stuff we want to let you hear so you know where to go and stuff like that but also there's Dynamic conversation so people can just sort of you know whether it's in a mess or they sit down and they just start up a conversation talking about the most recent vid show they saw or uh you know talking about what they think the best and I don't know ship Thruster is uh and there's a system in for that and we're creating a recording but that's also a system that's going to come into the Pu that's going to create a huge amount of

334. 04:39:21

     life so when you go into a bar in the Pu or you're wandering around the you know the big point of interest of cities people will be having conversations gossiping talking about oh well I heard there was something went on the Ninetails attacked someone AR R and and but it will be systemic and dynamic which is really cool because so much it just adds so much so let's look at some of this in action uh we don't have the conversation system stuff to show today but the let's look at some of the investigation stuff and then we'll look at some of the combat stuff you're talking about afterwards so we've actually got it as two videos so the investigation in the test map and what you're seeing here in some respects you might think that this is scripted that this is something that we just put on a track this is purely systemic so if we we captured this 20 different times it

335. 04:40:09

     would be 20 it would play out 20 different way so the one those individual there is going to is going away to hide behind that RNG boxy whatever we want to call that color so that's the player this is essentially a standard for the player the other two AI are searching for him at the moment uh the white spheres you see are basically hiding a cover spots and so as AI this is a sort of debug mode as the AI goes around and they search the the Spheres go away indicating that okay they've checked that place so no one actually there hiding out on cover so and they they're both kind of working together so their their logic is they need to clear these rooms first and then once the rooms are cleared they can sort of go on so they share this information so as they're clearing the cover points and

336. 04:40:55

     the cover points are basically all the nooks and cran is in the room they're clearing the cover points and they're sharing together so you'd see here that they're going okay this guy's coming in go okay there's an open vent again this is systemic he's just coming to investigate this event but he's not cleared this entire room yet so he's not going to progress and he's just going to go and check the rest of the room alongside his body and once theyve then cleared it they'll then progress but again here would be you know you'd hear them talking to each other have not found him yet where is he and again if that we've got vents in here he's checking another vent there yeah so we don't we also have other usables so it might be you know something you can hide in or he they're going through systemically checking the usables checking the cover points you can see there's only a few balls left now the ones at bottom right and then the ones at the back that he's clearing and then the one of these enemies will

337. 04:41:43

     then go okay we've checked everything in here I'm now going to progress to the next space because that's where you know they're not in here I think they're going to go this way so they've come back there's only one set of uh ones left he's going to check it he's going to come through here cleared those so now he's coming around here and fire away and what you're seeing here with the bar which starts off is something with the we've added for the perception so they start off in green and then it goes to Yellow then Amber then red so once it goes to Red that's into full combat but the previous states are kind of levels of um they go up based on levels of different perception so a green might they just might have seen you that's the equivalent of Going H you know did I see something no by the way in the game you don't see that that's our that's our

338. 04:42:31

     that's just indicating uh the level and the level in the game would be but we'll have audio and visual representation for those levels so the the initial green one would just be like like a head turn maybe a verbal CU then you're getting into the yellow and Amber that's where they like they're turning to face the noise and going I think I'm going to go check it out and then you know maybe they'll walk over there to investigate or if there's two of them one of them would go hey you go check it out and then he goes and checks it out and then we have obviously the red where it's like there's a definite threat here and once they've been threatened like in most games what happens is if you wait a long enough time they will then deescalate to the green and it's like their minds have been you know like MIB The Flash through memory it's gone in our game what they do is they go to a threatened State and in that threatened State they'll still

339. 04:43:19

     do their social activities and their functions but they're more they're more perceptive so as soon as they see they're like he's there again they'll get into it so it makes a difference that if you've gone loud at the start and then tried to hide you can't just go oh no they'll forget about me it it it has memory and that would be the case in the Pu as it is in Squadron so so that was on a test map we do have an example of it working y let's take a look at the the real deal so here is in asard in the decommissioned area you can see the two AI in the in the distance catch you and then this is kind of just a representation of of it doing the same thing in a real environment but obviously we wanted to show you the kind of the the thing behind the curtain what are they actually doing they're checking

340. 04:44:07

     cover points they're checking the usables that there and then you know in some a lot of the cases when we actually captured this video uh if we actually failed because they pincered the player and they actually found you before we were able to show you you know what was happening so it's uh it it's really good to see how this transition from social into combat so that you can actually play through the game better check that out so here he's checking a a usable which we've set up where he's just kind of like looking and checking okay is there anything there nothing there and again he's sharing that information with his body so if you've got two three four AI that are searching then obviously they're sharing and talking to each other and letting them know that nobody's found you like you you may not be able to see

341. 04:45:00

     them but you're going to know they're out there looking for you and if you if you stay in the same place for too long they will find you yeah so you can see the the one in the background is actually looking over one of the vents one of the railings should I say and then I think the uh Ross who did all captured all these videos I think he takes a bit of Revenge and again not scripted it's systemic they understand all the hiding places they this is their station they understand the hiding places they understand where to look and they just go through yes you can drop these enemies in any environment and it will they will play out like this but obviously what they the choices that they make at runtime will be different ah and this is where you know we have to make sure that the AI that we're working on even though we're working on it in

342. 04:45:47

     Squadron it has to work for the entirety of Star Citizen in all the different environments in all the different scenarios that you're put in so it's uh it's a it's a major Improvement so that's hiding from the AI but let's look at some of the combat tactics now so uh let's do combat tactics one so again what you're seeing here is in a test map we wanted to kind of show you a bird's eye view view so we've just turned god mode on so you can see it and you can see the labels here so we've got the Defenders that kind of push the cover points then we've got the The Pusher who's kind of pushing towards you and then we've got the strafer who is kind of like taking more of a wider Angle now there are some similarities between all the behaviors it but it depends on what happens so whether they go to cover you know a pusher for example can still go from cover to cover

343. 04:46:35

     a Defender can still go to cover to cover so it's not like you've got these binary choices it's about waiting the different choices throughout the behavior so that the AI provides something different but also applies pressure to you as a player so that you're having to react to the AI you know right now our current AI you basically get the jump on them and you can just take them all out but in reality what we want is we want you to react to the air because they're pushing you and challenging you and we want you know we want that challenge to be fair so that you feel like you've made the mistake when you eventually or if you do get taken out I want to get some of that God mode yeah uh and then we have one more video showing the tactics situation let's take a look at that so this is just a short version where we but again it's the same uh AI uh that have been dropped in and and

344. 04:47:24

     the roll the dice for they don't always become Defenders or always become pushers or strifers uh it can be random every time so the combat experience is different so you and you might all be pushers and they might all be Defenders but the way it works is if one of them rolls a Defender then the waight for them to roll another another Defender is lower so essentially here you can see here that uh he's getting tagged a lot just because we want to show you the behavior themselves rather than you know get taken out so he's being a bit more aggressive than you probably would be able to that's going to make a uh the eventual eventual speed runs a lot harder because they're not just Goombas that do the same thing every time you can't memorize the patterns and the other thing you might have noticed as well is that we're starting to have traversal opportunities for the AI so they're not always just on on the base over you know you in fact I'm not sure

345. 04:48:13

     if we Crouch mtle climb ladders they can jump over railings and and and push you or they can climb up onto things and shoot down on you uh they can use ladders they can do all sorts of stuff um so we we're putting a fair amount of work into AI traversal so they they sort of understand the environment and how to Traverse over it other than just flat um and of course you know on some of that I think you saw some of that he didn't get hit right away some of the early shots missed and then they hit him that's kind of what Rich was talking about earlier um cuz you know it's like Rich says it's very easy to make you know AI aim perfectly all the time because they know exactly where you are yeah they've got all the numbers um but that's not any fun so the fun is making

346. 04:49:01

     him feel real like that's you're playing against another real uh player or a human all right well we are just about out of time I think we got two more talking points points we want to cover before we let you go um let's start with one that might be surprising to some most people maybe not they won't know about it we haven't done a lot of talking about in the past skills there there there's what can you tell us about skills in in Squadron 42 so skills it's not just 42 it will be Star Citizen as well so we've split them up into kind of two um areas one is physical attributes so we have four physical attributes such as strength uh agility endurance and fitness and then we have uh techniques which is kind of like uh whether it's takedowns or traversal so if you look at

347. 04:49:50

     the physical attributes what we have essentially we're going to have a skill system that you can go and the way that you play the game will dictate how you level up these particular skills so if you're constantly carrying boxes you know you may get stronger so you can actually lift stronger things but getting stronger doesn't just allow you to lift up your boxes but it also means that your equip load that you can carrying your inventory is is higher that that weight doesn't affect you as much so you're not you can you can Sprint further because it's not affecting your stammer as much you know your Force reactions you're more resistant to that because you're stronger in yourself agility in terms of like weapon swapping or um going to ads uh we have endurance so that's for example like how resistant you are to the environment if you look at say Navy SEAL training or SCS training in in

348. 04:50:39

     Britain essentially you know they have cold weather training uh they have you know you you can survive in harsher climates you can go longer without uh sustenance uh and then that's what essentially endurance gives you and and also for example like GeForce and red out so that you you know Pilots train for that so they can actually modulate their breathing so they're actually able to sustain higher GS than a normal person would be and then you have Fitness so Fitness for example you can have a higher stamina so when we have swimming you can swim longer you can you can hold your breath longer you can Sprint longer so we have these physical attributes and we have multiple different ways for how you um improve them and those physical attributes will will denote how effective you are at certain things in the game so and that will come to obviously for flying as

349. 04:51:27

     well as um um in fps but we're not going to be removing any of the skill elements so there's nothing that we're going in there going oh you've got 10% more damage or you know we're going to make you can fly the plane better it's like no that that's always Rel on your skill this is the things that you you can't necessarily improve so you know like I said how far how fast you can Sprint or how far you can Sprint all all of those different things that are tying to physical attributes well it's like real life right you've got to spend some time if you want to increase your strength you I mean yes you could naturally be born strong but if you go to the gym and you start lifting weights you know okay I can do whatever I can like bench press 100 pounds now I can do 120 now I can do 140 now I can do 160 60 now I can do 180 right well you couldn't do 180 right from the beginning you had to you had to

350. 04:52:15

     work at same if you're like running you know you work your way up to a marathon and so that's kind of the idea is there are things that you do during the game play that uh you know your game play can add you it but if you want to take some time and go to the gym and do some squats you you know you you can get some strength up and uh I again that's part of like making that that the the the Living World so if you want to invest in your character that way in a sort of more realistic way the way the world Wills because like Rich says we still want all the skill in terms of being able to you know aim and shoot and do all the rest of the stuff um then you can do that if that's something that makes sense for what your character is going to be I mean in you know Squadron is one thing but in the Pu you know yeah

351. 04:53:03

     I'm a I'm a cargo Haller I probably don't really need to be all buff and everything because I'm sitting there in the C my caterpillar hauling a bunch of cargo but if I want to be a bounty hunter maybe I want to invest some time so if I'm in a foot race trying to put take someone down I can outrun them you know yeah cuz if you're wearing the same if you're wearing heavy armor and they're wearing heavy armor and and you've put effort into you know Skilling up your character because you're you know that's the dedicated area of focus that you want you know you can run further than them you can carry carry things you know that are heavier than than they can you can equip things onto you and it doesn't affect you as much so all of those different physical attributes it allows you to progress your character in those ways and then we have the technique side of things so

352. 04:53:51

     we're going to have multiple different techniques for lots of different skills across the St system but a good one to a good one to how to explain it is it's almost like the 10,000 hours you know if you do 10,000 hours kind of thing you're better at something so takedowns is a good example so the first time you do a takedown you know that's going to be quite sloppy it's it's going to take quite a long time you know you might struggle and okay eventually you you take them down and it's like oh okay the guy over there heard me it's not very good and after a certain amount of time that you you know you practice at them yeah more takedowns you do the better you get you'll get better so then they'll change different animations so now you'll unlock a different animation where it's it's smoother Bender is very looking forward to do all the versions of taked down from sloppy to Super Killer Pro yeah and at the end ones it'd be like you know straight in straight

353. 04:54:39

     out you lower him down onto the floor it takes you know it's much faster but you've put in the effort to level that skill to a level that you want to achieve and I think that's what skills is about it's about giving players goals that they want to do we'll have the same for like uh you know melee like fish fighting knife fighting um longer term we want to sort of this is more pu not Squadron but introduce say more moves you could do in fights say martial arts or whatever you have to go somewhere or traversal as well and learn them from someone and then do it a bit more and then you would get better so these are all things you could gain and that's kind of the like you said the you know the idea of sort of you know the skills and techniques uh that we want to introduce because uh again it's you know this is going to be

354. 04:55:26

     a really huge deep world and it's sort of up to you how you want to essentially build your character if you look at fighter pilots nowadays or Formula 1 card races you know they're absolutely extreme athletes they're not just they don't just go get in the car and like the car does everything it's not the it's not the 70s exactly you know you don't they don't they have a p of beer before they they they go to you know try to race a Formula One or they play a football match absolutely so that's that's what it gives you it gives us that ability for you to specialize your character and areas that if you really enjoy FPS then you can push it that if you all if all you care about is flying ships because you want to be a fighter pilot then you can be like okay I want to level up agility or I want to level up endurance because endurance allows me to um hold more G so you know if that gu was going to black out I'm not going to black out because I'm going to be able

355. 04:56:14

     to do it and it's those slight 1% differences that allow you to put some effort into do and and that you should be you will be able to level them as you just play the game organically so you're not going to have to go out and level them um you know you know like Chris said squats if you if you do squats like that's the equivalent of us going from Crouch to stand essentially it's like we will allow you to do things like that if you want to go and kind of like level them yourself but you'll also just be able to level them by naturally playing what you like in the game that Poes area in microt Tech yeah we we all the the all the you and then the other thing that we're going to do which will tie into the last thing you're going to talk about is you know the way that you'll sort of track this is the same way as you know I've got an Apple Watch on here and I can have my health app that will tell me kind of you know how unfit I am right

356. 04:57:04

     well how fit I am unfortunately at the moment it's mostly unfit um but uh you know that will be essentially one of the apps in the movi glass and then one of the last uh you know things that we were going to talk about as far as some of the stuff we doing Squadron uh is you know there's a complete redo of the Mobi glass uh and the first iteration is in Squadron there's a sort of cut down set of apps in Squadron because it's the military M Glass and you you know don't need all the cargo trading and all that kind of stuff that you would want in the Pu uh but it's a framework that we're building almost like a you know our own uh and it's all in building blocks so all the all flash stuff's gone away it's been built to be extensible um there's been uh some tech

357. 04:57:54

     and thought into how it looks and rendered which is much nicer and transitions much better before uh between uh the modes and uh you know in Squadron it's where you'll sort of be able to see oh you know this is who I I am this how I'm doing in terms of like my health and stats but also like okay here's my personal uh log of what's been going on in the LI in my life which is basically sort of what I've been playing the game you know here's my mission assignments uh you know here's the the ship chat channel uh and the ship WhatsApp yeah the ship WhatsApp basically uh and um you know obviously the the your nav map star map and all that will be in there gedia the galactopus you can look up and then in the Pu it's going to just get expanded

358. 04:58:43

     and maybe uh potentially have a slight uh UI difference to be not the military version but be the civilian version but it's it will all go in the same framework using the same basework so one of the things that we've been really trying you know not just on the movi but on the Huds and the mfds is they're all using like a common building block framework and we're trying to share the same base code stuff so it's easier to support and maintain cu one of the problems right now in the Pu is because there's a hodg podge of the old system which is the old sort of flash scale form system and the new building blocks it's really hard to extend stuff right now and so one of the big obstacles to doing features is actually the UI and so squadron's one of the ways that we're really going to sort of just you know

359. 04:59:32

     clean the house and make it easier so then in the Pu extending things will be uh easier and and simpler uh so uh yeah I don't know if you want to see anything more on the mob glass well well I'd roll the clip that we have and we can let's roll the mob glass let's take a look so the first page that you'll see that's coming up right now it's kind of like the overview so you know it's the overview of your player it's the overview of your ship and then it's like your primary objective so and and all of these uh widgets that we call them are kind of shortcuts to the kind of the main focus areas alerts as you go to the other yeah page so so you can see here we've got your messages so this is kind of like the email client and then on the right we've got kind of like the ship chat that's coming in with you know General chip chat from the AI which

360. 05:00:21

     again it's kind of just making it believe that you're in this you know believable environment or a real life environment rather than just you alone so responsive compared to the old one yeah and it's just a lot it's a lot cleaner and you know the information it's something that we've tried to be consistent ACR the hard and the Mobi is that we want to make sure that we're giving you clean information you can see like the alert so the alerts now cleared from the the messaging app because we've SE read the messages so it's gone but there was an alert down on our mission side here but now we've gone and looked at it it's cleared so that's the system it's a framework so like inside the you know you'll get you know notifications or let oh look I got a new message over here I'll click over to it now we're back and the biggest thing as well is when you it's like in everyday life you everybody pretty much interfacing with

361. 05:01:09

     computers they're interfacing with emails and you know Google Chrome or you know search engines and everybody does it every day so when we come to things like the mobiglass you know we have to have a level of familiarity that people understand like okay this is intuitive to use and it comes back to really the original message that we started this talk with we want to make sure that the game that you're playing will removing the barrier to the entry removing the complexity so that you can enjoy the stuff that you want to do enjoy that you want to go and do you want to go and do missions you want to go and you know get equipment or find rare loot or join up with your friends and I think a lot of the things when we look at this where we go from player interaction experience to improve traversal to improve HUD star map Mobi is a combination of that is

362. 05:01:58

     where we want to provide all this different information but we want to provide it in a way that you're familiar with that you can go and go we don't need to reinvent how you read emails you know or we don't need to reinvent how you understand a mission or you know and you want to have the information at your on your Mobi like okay tell me what am I about to is my environment outside is it breathable do I need a helmet is it hot is it cold you know you need you know if you look at an Apple Watch or my wife has an Apple Watch so she's got a Fitbit and it's like okay this is your heart rate and this is your oxygen you know you need to have that information at your fingertips so you can go okay I can now plan for what I'm about to do and coming back to what Chris said earlier in terms of you know you're not just going to be all wearing heavy armor going into the ships and you might not have an Eva pack and you've got to you know you've got to

363. 05:02:46

     decide what you need to take out with you on specific missions it comes back to bringing all these things together as a unified experience playing the game and then you start to understand like why we've got an eating and drinking system or act of status or injuries or red outs and you know inventory and Har trolleys and the physicalized nature of the world and when you put or startop putting it all together which is kind of we're seeing that Glimpse in Squadron 42 because we're able to focus on that experience not just individual features you know we're starting to not just see it we we're playing it and I think that's what's really exciting to to look at to show you the the progress that we're showing here today is that nothing we've talked about is like oh we're going to start this in six months oh

364. 05:03:33

     we're going to do this in two years or we're going to do this it's we a lot of it we've already done and we're just we we're in the position where we can go in there and play it and understand it and go okay let's tweak this let's tweak this and let's start building on top of it of systems that were really you know confident in technically and from a design point of view so that we can build on top and we've got a very clear idea how they can scale in Star Citizen because we've got the mini environment of Squadron like the test bed of proving it out and I think it's it's going to be a real benefit to the PE for when we push these features over because also for the Developers who are just specifically pu content they've got an example of how to use these systems and they understand how how you know they've other developers have already gone through the mix of

365. 05:04:21

     putting it into the game and now they go cool there's documentation I know how to go to yeah I mean I think that's a a big thing because you know as building the feature with the content means that okay you're doing the you know some of the traversal stuff we talked about well here's where you're using it in Squadron and here's how we use these different physical elements to make an interesting uh game experience and that means that the Pu team that's now going oh we want to do 10 of those or 100 of those has good examples of how to use it rather than his a feature you figure it out because again that was a lot of things that went in with that you know it's like trolley as we use an example or um the mounted guns are just features that didn't really have uh gameplay or or use associated with them so uh you know I

366. 05:05:09

     mean there's a lot more going on uh in in Squadron than just this but we thought this is just a SN be very it would be very good to talk about some of the core gameplay things that we're working on because we know that people saying hey we'd like these to be better or this to be easier to use or smoother or more responsive and and that's absolutely we know and we're working on and and the plan is it's uh it's definitely going to be in the Pu as well as Squadron and Squadron is working on the Pu too everybody all right so that was our version of a short conversation about Squadron 42 and the benefits to the persistent Universe uh before we let you go and get on to wrapping up our full day of activities uh Chris any final words you want to share with the Star Citizen Community about Squadron 42 it's the

367. 05:05:57

     co-development of two projects how it'll affect our citizen what do you got uh well I mean I would say that uh it's incredibly challenging trying to have uh develop two games side by side also while you're building the tech as well um and it's also incredibly rewarding I have to say that the feedback especially on the Pu side that we see all the time really helps uh inform as developers what we're doing all the time and so and it invol informs what we do on the Squadron 42 side too in terms of some of the base mechanics of the areas that we go okay well you know we want to work on this thing and improve it it's all the stuff we've really talked about uh this time

368. 05:06:46

     but you know for me it's an incredible privilege to be building something of the level of ambition that we're doing on both Squadron but also Star Citizen because you know ultimately I think that Star Citizen itself in terms of an experience in terms of how you can seamlessly go from sitting inside your ship looking at your interior here look at this constellation Phoenix uh and walking outside uh onto a planet and looking at the foilage and the trees and seeing them out in the distance and walking over and being able to actually go there rather than it just be a background um that you can never reach uh the the you know the scope and scale the sense of being able to go anywhere do anything uh that is something that most game engines

369. 05:07:38

     and games generally just can't do and and don't do you know they're limited to more limited spaces and you know we utili we're utilizing in Squadron to give you a sort of single player experience that sort of feels like you're you know in a huge play environment and system that you Traverse around I we talked about you know the various types of quantum travel you're using and all the different you know down to the detail mechanics of picking up something off a desk and moving it over and and and being able to build a system that can do that for the detail and Fidelity that we're telling a really rich story in Squadron but also a huge universe that you can exist in as a Sandbox for everyone and a player is a complete I mean from a developer standpoint uh it's a dream I mean it's a

370. 05:08:27

     dream I've had you know my whole life uh being able to do it because we're supported by the community out there is a you know something I'm always internally grateful for for and you know it's the best job in the world so as much as it can be difficult sometimes as much as it can be frustrating when you see everyone bitching about something or something's not working or you know what kind of idiot did this or which you know doesn't this person know how to run a project and all the rest of the stuff um it's still the best job in the world so you read the feedback well of course we all read the feedback oh everyone every developer reads everything but you know you need a you need a thick skin I mean at the end of the day you have a a vision in your in your mind and we're lucky enough to be able to really

371. 05:09:17

     fulfill that I mean it you know it's a bit of a Pandora's Box that got opened when we realized we had the level of support to really go all the way because it's a completely different scope of game now than 10 years ago when I got on stage and I was pitching a much more limited you know sort of privateer freelancer online and a you know next Generation Wing Commander uh what would building now is a a completely different experience in terms of a lot more um just Fidelity and scope and possibility and the idea that you can do and be anything in it and if you can think it or imagine it or see it you can you can go there do it do all those things that is you know like I said I I think there's almost nobody out there in the industry that has got the opportunity to

372. 05:10:05

     do that we're getting to do that here at cags thanks to everyone uh that's supporting the project uh you know and um so like I said it's hard work you know there's you know no no one no one slacks off we're working really hard we all wish we were doing stuff quicker and faster uh than we end up doing it but it's it's not because we're just sitting here you know eating bon bons we are working really hard uh and it's exciting I mean for me I you know I look at things we have in development and how far we've come uh you know how far the game itself even Star Citizen I mean you know this year there's more people playing it there's more uh you know spending more time in the game than there was last year than the year before I mean we're accelerating I think that's partly a testimony to the game itself

373. 05:10:54

     over the last few years has become more stable it's become more performant there's been more features and content added so even though we still have a lot of things to go and we talked about a lot of things we want to improve um it's more of a you know yes it's rough around the edges but there is something there that keeps people coming back uh despite the frustrations right and I think it's that sense of you being able to go and do anything and be anything in in the universe and we're really committed to making that finishing that off and making that a really great experience that's frictionless so you know while it is challenging doing these two games together um it's also a hell of a lot of fun and I'm you know looking forward uh uh you know over the next few years

374. 05:11:41

     because we got a whole bunch of really cool stuff coming down the the pike uh uh beyond what we already have here uh the you know it's it's a good time to be making games it is it is a lot of fun it it's it's I think I think video games strangely people video games get this reputation of of because it's hard work because it's so difficult it's it's like it's job and it's a pain and whatever but but no video games are are fun they're creative they're they're expansive they they they're collaborative uh they're definitely iterative um uh it's and there's nothing else like it no no no other industry in the world would would have a weekly behind the scenes documentary series that I now get to do from a spaceship

375. 05:12:29

     landed on one of Pyro's planets uh Rich you want to try to follow that so the only one thing I would say is that even though we are focused on Squadron 42 we still read all of the feedback in you know in Spectrum online the comments or Reddit so a lot of that feedback that's been come to the game over the years you know we we've taken that on board and it's we're starting to execute on that feedback with some of the systems that are not as Forefront in people's minds such as like the interaction system and how you interface with the game and controls and the action queuing and traversal and I think the biggest takeaway for me when I when we start to look at all these features is that it's don't think think of it as Feature Feature it's we're making the game the biggest thing is that we're starting to put that game together and we can sit

376. 05:13:16

     down and play it and while St citizen you know there already is a game there uh this is about you know making what's there even better and and making sure that all the things that new players and existing players have had frustrations with that we're smoothing those o smoothing them over and removing the friction and so and then about injecting that new features on top that's going to just enhance it even further so I think it's you know in the next few years it's going to be really exciting times as Chris said there's lots of things in the pipe and I think some of the things that come online will be real game changers to not necessarily what you do because that going to be delivered by the content and the features and ships but how you do it and how you interface with the game and I think that's going to be a huge Improvement and I think that will you know I think if you're a developer

377. 05:14:05

     it's something that's really important because you've got to make sure that your game is if they're not talking about that aspect of the game then you've done it right and I think that's where we are we're getting close on on at least on Squadron 4 you to so that we can then map that over to the and then of course the only thing I want to add is that everything you've seen here today is work in progress uh We've removed some of the locations and aspects where youve seen them to protect for spoilers and and and story elements of the game uh but all this stuff is coming to the pr and universe at one point uh the stuff we've been able to show you the stuff we hav haven't been able to show you uh today and if you were surprised by the skills part in particular like we just kind of snuck that in there before the Mobi glass rest assured we will be following up on the skills conversation uh with visuals and a more in-depth discussion of how

378. 05:14:52

     that'll work and how you'll interact with that and stuff as we get closer to being able to do so so uh if you've already gone to Spectrum or Reddit or your YouTube thumbnail and added little red laser eyes to Richard tyer that last part's okay but everything else we just asked that you hang tight and and and give us the benefit of the doubt it's a it'll be fine so yeah so thank you Chris thank you Rich for taking the time to talk a little bit of Squadron 42 with us and how it'll affect the Pu uh we are just about to wrap up our entire citizen gone day here uh but before we do I want to throw it back to a video that we opened Today's Show with uh was a bunch of our developers and staff at our five studios around the world uh talking about their favorite things of the staron community so we'd like to play that for you one more time and when we come back we'll uh put this whole B to bed so take a

379. 05:15:41

     look tell you what my favorite thing about the community is what am I going to say it's going to sound cliche but they believe as much as we do I love them because they continue to support us so the only thing that's kept me going I've seen a lot of games and I've seen a lot of invested players but they're right there with us throughout the whole new players come every day and I find that they're always happy to show people the ropes I found it very unbelievable there effort they put into

380. 05:16:37

     simulator inside of an entire RV or the shemas I love watching them on my lunch break I enjoy watching the videos on the content there was one recently on Twitter where it was like the 100 players entering the atmosphere that just looks really Grand I love all the memes some of the incredible fan art and passionate drive that you see come out of them is fantastic how they come up with crazy ideas each and every day and surprise me I really like all the crazy Shenanigans I get up to in the Pu I can't cuss can I the new and exciting ways they F to break that's why I think it's cool when they thing about the community community run

381. 05:17:28

     events going to Bar citizen it's always fun to meet some of the backers theyve all been lovely to me in person even if they're like really frustrated you can tell it's just they have so much love for it I really like it when the community is very detail oriented about our work to see how excited they are about our progress how much inspiration we get from them from their ideas I love the genuine enthusiasm the quick turnaround on feedback I love that and how they're always interested in what's coming up I especially appreciate the people who are able to keep track of dates they you know call us out it really um impacts uh our decision- making process for uh you know what what did we do right what did we do wrong it is the most rewarding thing in in the entire development process we're not

382. 05:18:15

     making the game alone we're making it with the community still keep facing us they really do make all this you had to I I'd probably just turn to and the community is at the heart of everything that star C and is so we've got one final uh addition before we wrap this up the community Hub was first introduced way back when in 2015 2016 I I thought I had it but I realizing I don't remember uh it's needed some some love some TLC uh some extra handling for some time and finally we're about to roll out Community Hub 2.0 uh so I'll

383. 05:19:04

     throw it to Tyler and our friends at turbulent to tell you more hi everyone my name is Tyler wikin and I'm the director of community at Cloud Imperium games each and every day we're taken aback by the tremendous amount of creative Community content coming from all of you from a small 3D printed MSR that fits in the palm of your hand to a fullsize replica sand castle of a 300i no joke someone actually did that in fact maybe they can pop it up right here wow on the community side we've always felt that if our developers were going to push the boundaries of what's

384. 05:19:52

     possible with technology that we needed to match that level of ambition with the engagement and tools that we provide to help the community Thrive with the incredible amount of creative content flowing from our community it was a no-brainer that we needed to find a better way to support that so we've teamed up with our good friends at turbulent to completely rebuild the community Hub and we're very excited to show it to you today the team has been hard at work and focused on building out a completely new platform that will make both sharing and browsing content easier than ever before to build this community up we really try to keep the star Seas an identity see what was good for the community and what they would like this is where um most people will go when they when they want to uh search for new

385. 05:20:41

     content or discover new people who play Star Citizen and make posts in new community of so it's a very good place to engage with others we want the community of Star Citizen to have this space that they deserve outside of the game to keep talking and creating about the game share and comment with each others now I know I'm a little biased but for these reasons and for many others I believe that the Star Citizen Community is the best and the most creative community in all of gaming in fact if you agree go ahead and drop an 07 in chat go ahead by the way this bit is pre-recorded so I'm going to assume that you are spamming chat like crazy right now thank you don't let me down when creating a new post you'll be able to choose between three post option so that would be an audio a video and an image

386. 05:21:30

     type of post inside of them you'll be able to obviously put a title and the description in there but also to pick and choose from a variety of different categories your post relates to and that comes and play into the Discover page on the Discover page you can browse over all the content you can also filter content with your preferences for example if I want to see only video that are about Cosplay I can now filter that and find only videos about Cosplay and I can also sort them by popularity or by date when you first arrive on the community Hub you arrive on the homepage which features uh top trending content as well as uh posts from people you follow because yes you can now follow people on the new

387. 05:22:18

     community Hub you have a live stream section which you can see the top players uh who play Star Citizen right now you have a tutorial section also on the front page and there's also the sidebar and it's not just all about screenshots videos and crafts it's also about the human connection we make with like-minded space faires that we've met along the way it's about friendship personally for me I've made countless meaningful connections with so many people that I otherwise never would have met outside of this community and many of those connections I know I will cherish and carry with me for the rest of my life and I'm confident that many of you have similar stories which is exactly why it was vital to us to find better ways to keep you all connected with one another the commit Hub is a place of uh creativity and exchange

388. 05:23:08

     between all the Star Citizen players the team has put a lot of work in it we're working on it since quite a long time we really put a lot of love and care in this and we're really hope the community will enjoy as much as us so you can head over to our website dive in check out all the new features break the new features it's okay it's part of the process and as always we want to hear your thoughts so make sure to head over to our dedicated feedback thread on spectrum and let us know what you think and this is just the beginning we've got so many cool things planned planned for the months ahead such as sitewide notifications a massive shared content calendar where you can sort between official cig events and Community created and organized events and so much more and the best part about the new community Hub it's live right now and if I'm not mistaken uh that new

389. 05:24:02

     version of the community Hub should be pushing live right about now or now I don't know what time I watch is saying says it's like 12:30 in the morning uh one last thing before we let you go because we got more endings than uh Lord of the Rings movie uh atmo Esports is running our 10th anniversary racing event uh the the the new babage bash or the Babbage bash or something like that uh that's immediately following this stream uh we got a short video just telling you a little bit about who they are and what they do so let's uh throw it to atmo atmo Esports operates a little differently born from emerging community events like the DMO rally the natural progression was to create Esports events within an emergent environment and

390. 05:24:50

     provide tournaments for Esports teams in a unique way all right here we go wow oh baby let's get this sprace started guys go volunteers create events within massive sandbox gaming environments and we work with talented Community Gamers to supply supporting roles such as camera crew shout casters event organizers and so much more our team is a group of passionate professionals from all over the world all with gaming in their veins we operate purely online and everything we do is created collaboratively it's going to be it's going to change the way we play the game let's go go ready 5 4 3 2 1

391. 05:25:49

     go and well that's it another citizen Con in the bag uh the debut of our new uh home for our Evergreen recurring uh weekly video content for the foreseeable future uh hope you enjoyed it uh there's a ton of information that I'm sure is going to feed our our our our content creators in the community for months and months to come uh but the last word on things shouldn't come from me let's throw it over uh to to the peanut gallery to the our steamed group of of of of guests and visitors uh Chris hold on let me get in here there we go get in here get in here hey uh what do you want to say uh I think I've said quite a lot already I don't really need to see that do like 15 minutes well let me start with back in

392. 05:26:39

     um no I all I'm going to say is that we wouldn't be here without all of you out there that have supported us over these years and believed in the project and the world and the universe that we're doing I know everyone that meets everyone from the community out here really appreciates the sense of support and love that everyone puts in from your side and also from our side into the project so we really appreciate that uh you know this year citizen Khan didn't quite have the big flashy demos that we've had in the past but that's mostly because we've got a huge amount of people heads down uh working on getting persistent en streaming out and 318 which hopefully we're going to go to everti this coming week right Erin we think maybe absolutely working all right so we'll see gam over here he's not Mike so he can't really say much but um he's our director of development on Star Citizen live um and uh so we're working

393. 05:27:28

     hard on that for this year and so that's going to be a massive patch with a lot of really cool features and gameplay in it and uh of course we're working very hard on squadron 2 uh but uh it's been a great time it's been an amazing ride so far I'm looking forward to the future so you did get someone to be twinsies with you yes go uh and thank you very much Happy Birthday Star Citizen happy birthday the community happy birthday happy birthday cheers cheers cheers let's throw it to atmo bye everybody goodbye bye see you next year bye everyone cheers