Chris Roberts

Well, it's around the corner. I think probably middle of July is when it'll probably release. We're in Evocati right now. I think we'll be going to PTU in the near future. And it looks beautiful. I mean, I think we just released an Inside Star Citizen that shows off Orison, which is beautiful. And it's got the first generation of the cloud tech in that we're still continuing... I think there's a lot to work on that I think is pretty stunning and it's going to get better as time goes on, which is volumetric clouds, and it's a bit more of a challenge for what we need it for compared to, say, what you would see in Microsoft Flight Sim or some other games, because we have to deal with scales that they don't have to deal with. So we can pull all the way back and see the whole planet and have to see the cloud layers in a way that you wouldn't do, say, in Microsoft Flight Sim, and have it work as you come all the way in and fly through it. There's still some optimizations to happen and visual improvements and a lot of layering and detail on effects, but already I think it looks beautiful. It basically combines the rendering and the lighting all together with the atmospheric model. So we raymarch through all the clouds, and we'll have it on Orison first, and then as we go forward, we'll start to roll it out on some of the other planets and then start to work on dynamic weather. But that's down the road. But I think it's going to be pretty brilliant. And then Orison in itself, it's a floating cloud city. I mean, I'm sure I'm not the only sci-fi fan out there that's wanted to step foot on a floating cloud city in person. And it's beautifully done by Ian Leyland and his environment teams. They've just done an outstanding job on it. So it looks beautiful. So if you haven't seen it, you can check it out in the Inside Star Citizen, or obviously you'll be checking it out in the PTU or in the game in a few weeks, two, three weeks.

Okay, well, server meshing we're working really hard on. We have put together probably our biggest engineering strike team. So we have a whole bunch of the engine team that's working on it as well as the networking team, led by Clive. So on the engineering team we have Chris Bolte leading up server meshing work and Steve Humphries is also contributing a whole bunch to it. And we have a whole backend setup that we're doing here internally, but also some of the backend services and connections are all being engineered partly up in Montreal as well with Turbulent. And there's about 20 people, mostly engineers, working on server meshing. So it's probably our biggest overall technical initiative. It's super critical. I mean, we've talked about it before. It's the bit of tech that will allow us to open up the number of players, but also just help a lot with our performance issues that we have. Because when you play right now in the game, you play in the live build and you're running around Stanton, if everybody's in one location, it's a lot better than if people are spread all over the system, and typically what happens is as a server stays up for a longer amount of time, people spread out. You'll have people in Area 18 and ArcCorp, you'll have people in New Babbage and microTech, you'll have people in Lorville, you'll have people flying around in space, you'll have people at space stations. And so the longer the servers stay up, the more you've got different actors and different entities that are all coming around the star system. And as we build out the star system, more and more entities and objects get created. So like, we're going to have Orison coming out, and that's hundreds of thousands of new objects and entities that just come in with that. So if someone goes there, now all of a sudden, that's hundreds of thousands more entities and objects that the server has to simulate. So the key with server meshing is that this is allowing multiple servers to handle different areas inside a star system. And even later stages of it, multiple servers working together to handle even one area, an Orison or a New Babbage or something like that. And allowing players to seamlessly travel around and be passed under the control of different servers. So the authority passes from one server to another server as one goes. And that allows us to have a much larger amount of players in the same space, in the same instance. It's also incredibly critical for transitioning to new star systems. So if you go through a jump point and you go to Pyro, for instance, we need to transfer you from the server that was handling you in the Stanton system to the server that will handle you as you enter. And so a lot of the core features of server meshing we've been working on for quite a long time. So the authority transfer, there's a whole bunch of stuff that's already been built, and we're building out the backend database, what we call the entity graph, that is going to persist and remember the state of every single entity and object in the world. So if you stream out an area, you completely remember the state, where everything is, whether you dropped a Coke can in the middle of a forest on a planet. And that aspect of it opens up, obviously, the persistence we talked about, which is great, but is also a fundamental building block for the server meshing. So we've been really working hard on that. We're making really good progress on it. I don't promise any dates because it's by far the most technically challenging thing. I will say probably by the end of this year, we should hopefully have the proper persistence in there that we talk about, the proper global persistence, which is this streaming entity graph thing that I've just discussed, which is the new version of what was being called the iCache before, if people are getting confused about that. But yeah, we're working really hard on it. This year we're not doing a physical CitizenCon because it just felt a bit too early coming back from the pandemic, whether everyone could travel or not travel. I mean, even now, we're going to go to the UK next month and we're all vaccinated, but still it's going to be a pain and we've got to quarantine and do all this other stuff. So we'll probably do a physical CitizenCon the following year, but this year we're going to do a virtual one, which we didn't do last year just because we were just overwhelmed with everyone moving to work from home and everything. But this year we will do one, and one of the panels is going to be on server meshing, which will drill down much more into the technical setup and details. But I'm actually quite looking forward to Virtual CitizenCon, and I think everyone making the game loves to share what they're working on with everyone. So it's actually quite a morale boost for the teams. And it's nice when you do it in person because you get to meet people in person and you can see how much people really love and enjoy the work that everyone's working on. But the next best thing is to do a virtual one. So that will be later this year in October. And I'm looking forward to that and hopefully you guys will like it.

Well, I mean, outside of the meshing and the persistence, there's some really cool features that are coming online. Actually, the next patch, so 3.15, I believe it hasn't aired just yet. I don't know when we have this thing edited. So it may have come out in a Calling All Devs or not by the time you see this. But Richard Tyrer is going to go over the personal inventory and the medical gameplay, which is a big thing for 3.15. I mean, first of all, the personal inventory is another part of that proper persistence and the world behaving like it's meant to, where you don't have this infinite bag of holding where you have every single armor piece and weapon and cloth and you can access them all and equip all of them. That's not realistic if you're running around out in the Sahara Desert, you don't have access to all the stuff, you just have what you can carry on you. So personal inventory is going to be about what you can carry and how you can equip that, whether you have something in a backpack, whether you have something on your suit, and it'll be just limited to what you can use and carry. It's also coming with a whole new way to equip your character, because to be honest with you, the PMA is horrendous. It's the most counterintuitive...

PMA?

Yeah, it's a personal management app. It's like how you currently put clothes on, but anyway, it wasn't done properly all those years ago, and then we were always like, we're going to fix it up, and haven't got around to it, but we have a whole new way of equipping and doing it, which is much more a paper doll drag and drop setup, and it's going to be far, far more intuitive, far better, and will allow you to properly behave like, okay, I'm going to wear my civilian clothes now, okay, I'm going to take that off and now I'm going to put on my armor, but it will be limited to what you have around you, whether it's in your hab or in your backpack or you're right next to it. And it will make your behavior be much more like it would be in real life. So that's a big deal. And the other big deal is the medical gameplay, which is really the first stage of the death of a spaceman, which I talked about many, many years ago. And that involves allowing players the ability to fix up and heal people at varying levels of damage, more so than we can do right now with a medpen. Also revive people depending on the severity of injuries. And then it involves also the respawn mechanics. So if you die, you get brought back to life in a hospital bed. Currently, there's been a slight tweak to a bit of the lore, because I saw some people get quite upset about the fact that we mentioned that the respawn in a place away is now being covered by the fiction of you've recorded your DNA and you're cloning. But the bottom line is if you got atomized in an explosion on a planet somewhere, how are you finding that body to recreate the person? That just doesn't actually make much logical sense. So the kind of concept we would have is that you can only come back to life so many times, which is basically you've taken a little bit of your DNA and you can grow a clone, but you can only do that three or four times. It's like having three or four lives. After that, your DNA's degraded too much and you're basically permanently dead. Your next of kin will take over in the game, which is the death of a spaceman mechanic. So it's exactly the same as the death of a spaceman mechanic that we had before, which was you had only so many lives before you would have to pass on to your next of kin. But just scientifically working, I mean, it's all hand-wavy at this point, but it just logically makes a bit more sense and also allows players a choice if they don't want to wait around to see if someone can rescue them or find them. Because it may not be dead if you die on a planet, or you freeze to death on a planet and no one's around to come get you. That's not a fun game experience. You may want to just respawn back in New Babbage. But anyway, so it's the first stage of that. We delayed it a little bit. We could have pushed it to get it into 3.14. We wanted to hold it to 3.15, mostly because it's to do with the hospitals that you respawn in. If we had it in 3.14, we would only have two locations that would have hospitals, which would have been Orison and New Babbage. With 3.15, we also get all the space stations and Grim HEX. And the space stations are in orbit around every one of the planets. So even if we haven't got the Area 18 one or the Lorville one, Maria Pure of Heart, done just yet, they'll be in, I believe, the subsequent release, maybe the 3.16 one. I'm not sure, I'd have to take a look at the release schedule. But now we've got a place that no matter where you are, you would basically respawn where your home base is. So that was one of the biggest reasons. And just to give a little bit more time to polish things like the UI and the experience. And that's kind of one of the focuses that we'll have going forward. It's a bit of a shift, but to try to deliver more final or more polished features rather than a very basic version that you then leave for a while before you come back to it. So those are big things. The persistence, which I mentioned at the end of the year, the proper full persistence of being able to remember where all these items are, which opens up having your own hab that you can store things in, your own hangar. So we're going to have persistent hangars and persistent habs too. I don't think we've put those on the schedule just yet. They will be there shortly after persistence, but that's a big deal because then storage space and where you keep things and where you store things will be huge. And I think that will radically change the game experience that people will have. So those are all very cool stuff. We're also working on the proper iteration of the cargo stuff. So a whole revised cargo system that will be just much more physical and practical and ties into the object and item persistence that I've been talking about. So for the traders out there, it will be a lot better. And I swear to God, the AI guys are working on some really good, cool stuff. And I'm determined to make sure that in the live game server you actually see it, because really there's a lot of problems that come because of the low server tick rate. It's really quite frustrating because in reviews I see fun behaviors, a lot more behaviors than are actually in the PU right now. And it's a lot smarter, but you get into the live game like I did with my nine-year-old daughter last night, and there's just a lot of people standing on tables doing nothing.

You got reamed last night.

Yeah, I got told off, I was told I should be embarrassed to have all my AI standing on tables. But yeah, because I mean, the AI is actually very powerful and there's a lot of really interesting stuff that can be done. It's more a matter of the server being able to run fast enough to handle that. And then there's some synchronization things that we have to fix. The AI system, like the streaming in and out of stuff, the object container streaming, which is both on the server now and on the local, but the server one's the problematic one because that has to remember state when it comes in and out, and that's one of the reasons why the persistence that I talked about there, the entity graph, is really important, because you really need to remember all the state properly. And right now, we don't remember the state as well as we need to, and we do need it for server meshing, but that is one of the reasons why you see AI problems out there, is because they were streamed out in a state like sitting on a bench or doing something. And then when it gets streamed in, it hasn't remembered that state properly, and that's how they stand on a table or T-pose. Because we're always streaming in and out stuff as you're moving around the world. And the AI, if we were not streaming stuff in, you wouldn't see a lot of the problems you see. But unfortunately, we have to stream things in and out because we can't keep everything in memory all the time, so the global persistence will also help a lot with that. So that's a very short answer.

Well, I'm finishing up something that I started, I don't know, last year or something. I mean, I don't have that much time to really do all the coding, but I'm trying to finish up what we call physical skins. So all our characters in the game, the physics that determines whether you collide is defined on the skeleton. So the skeleton has a physical joint for like the arm and the hand and the head and the legs, but it's the same skeleton and the same physics geometry for every actor in the game, whether you've got heavy bulky armor on or you're just wearing thin clothes. And actually most games are like this. In fact, a lot of games just have a simple capsule that defines a character. But all our characters, when you see a helmet come on or they put the armor on... And that's what's called the skin, which is just geometry that gets mapped to the joints of the skeleton. And then as the joints move around, the geometry deforms with it. The change is to enable the skins to have physics information embedded with them. So when you bring in the armor torso piece of a heavy armor, it actually brings in physics geometry that basically represents its shape. So as you put different things on, your physics... And that's really important because that means, first of all, better collision and hit detection. So like, you could have a case right now where you have a big bulky helmet on, but the physics geometry is just the head size. And so a bullet could look like it's hitting the helmet, but it doesn't actually hit the physics geometry. Well, we can change that now. So the geometry is the same size as the helmet. And also it makes a big difference for things like physical interactions, like with cloth. So if I walk through a hanging dangly plastic, if I've got my proper shape, then it'll move out of the way where the visual render mesh is. And the same for if I have a cloak on, it will now drape over me properly. Because right now if we put a cloak on the back of a character with a normal skeleton and they had heavy armor, the cloak would look like it's going through part of the heavy armor, because the actual base skeleton physics geometry is smaller than the heavy armor.

So you're saying you're making it more specific?

Yes, it's essentially just making it more accurate. It's allowing for better simulation. It's necessary for cloth and hair simulation, so you can make sure that the hair is not going through what looks like the head because the physics geometry of the head is smaller than the actual render. So I've been working on that for quite a while. It's been something I've been doing in the background. And yeah, it's almost ready to go in, probably not this release or the next one, but the one after that. They don't put my code in right away. We need to make sure it gets tested so it doesn't blow everything up.

Yes, so when we get back to the office, which is probably going to be a little later on this year, we as a family are going to move over to the UK for some time to be with the Squadron team to get it finished. So instead of being here in sunny LA, we're going to be in...

Sunny Manchester.

Sunny Manchester, yeah. I mean, with global warming, everywhere's turning into California anyway. But yeah, so whether we're doing it at the end of this year or the beginning of next year, we're definitely over there. The UK office, we're going to be moving to new offices in the UK next year, which will be good because our current offices are not big enough for how many people we've got in Manchester now. We've grown up, but we've got some new offices that we'll be moving into next year in Germany because our lease was up there, and we've got a great new space. It's very close to where the old one was. And it's going to be a very cool place in Manchester, and the new offices will hopefully be the new flagship for the CIG offices, and we'll have about 400 people there. And anyway, that'll be fun. And I'll be there with everybody because that's where the core of the Squadron team is. And so I'm getting over there. I'm going to be there on a day-to-day basis with them getting Squadron finished out for you guys.

The idea of Death of a Spaceman is to try to get some kind of meaningful consequence to dying in a game. Most games you play, modern games anyway, you die, you respawn back a few seconds before you die and you keep on doing it again. So it doesn't really feel like there's much consequence to dying, and a lot of times your gameplay approach is pretty sloppy. I know when I'm playing a standard FPS shooter in the story mode, I just keep blasting in at people. I don't really think about it. I die. I start again. Whereas if you play a game like, say for instance, Demon's Souls all the years ago and all the ones past it, there's real consequence. You die, and you've got to fight back through all those enemies. You've lost all the experience that you've gained, the souls in the case of Demon's Souls. But the thing with Demon's Souls, it was one of the things I was playing, it reminded me of the good old days in the 80s and the 90s when you'd make games, and dying had a real consequence. You wanted to finish your level before you died or else you had to do the level again, right? And consequently, when you finished the level or achieved something, you really felt proud and happy, which is definitely, I think, one of the mechanics that makes Demon's Souls and its subsequent games both infuriating and rewarding when you manage to do it. So the idea was, what kind of consequence can we have in our persistent universe in terms of how do we encourage the players to stay alive? We don't want people to just go, "Oh, I got a scratch, I'm just going to respawn in a perfectly pristine state for the character or the ship." And so Death of a Spaceman was sort of an idea to give an association with your player character in the game in terms of: this is who you are, and you want to keep yourself alive as much as possible, and identify with your avatar as an actual real person and character that you care about and you want to keep alive. And then finally, when you've had one too many close calls or lost one too many battles, you no longer can be resuscitated and you have to pass on, essentially, to your next of kin, which you will call out basically when you're doing your character creation. And that idea is, whether it's passing it down to your son or your daughter or a relative or a friend or whatever it would be, you call that out, and when that happens, your possessions and reputation kind of pass down, but not all of them, right? So there's inheritance tax, and the sins of the father aren't fully invested on the son, but there's a little bit of that. And so the idea would be you would want to live as long and healthy a life as possible before you pass on to your progeny or whatever. And so that was the inspiration of Death of a Spaceman, to really give a sense of close association with your avatar and your character. And if at the end of the day you've got to be there at, essentially, the God view of the funeral of the character that you spent a year or so venturing around Star Citizen with, there should be a tear in your eye when it happens. So that was the goal. And so it was really a mechanic of how can we do that inside the game, inside our science fiction setting, which was coming up with this concept of: in the future, with all the medical science we have, in states where you may consider you would be dead now, you would not be able to be brought back to life or repaired, potentially we could do that in the future, but maybe we could only do it so many times. And so in some ways it's a little like the old school of you've got so many lives, right? And once your lives are done, the game's over. And the concept was that maybe the worse the death, you're in some big fireball, that's more serious in terms of the lives you lose off your character than it would be if you were down and bleeding out and someone came and got you and managed to repair you, fix you up in the medical table or a hospital. And the idea would be you would want to not run out of lives, and potentially there could be things you could do over time, go get some gene therapy or whatever, that maybe add a life back to you. I'm talking lives in a game sense here, but in general we're trying to put it inside the fiction of the world. But the idea is to have real persistence to your avatar and wear and tear. It's also one of the reasons why we've got things like wear in the game. It's essentially one of the things that we have for equipment; we're going to have it for characters. You're going to get older, things are going to get old, and all of that. We have parts of that in the game, but it's not fully working, but that's all systems that are on the plan or that we need to turn on properly, because that's part of the problem with what we're doing right now: we're building this incredibly complicated, interconnected simulation system, and not all the pieces are there quite yet. So even though we've built some of the pieces and we can functionally do stuff with them, because the other pieces aren't there, the whole system doesn't work yet. And that is actually one of the challenges of building a game the way we're building it, while people are playing it. Death of a Spaceman is a good example, because it's something that I talked about at the very beginning as a core concept. It's always been a core concept, but we're only just now getting around to starting to implement the actual functionality and gameplay features that will enable it. And I think when you have it, that will make people behave very differently in the verse, which is going to be super cool.

Well, we've already kind of started. Body dragging was the first feature that we released that gave you the premise to be able to manipulate dead bodies. But as Chris calls out, death is going to be a really important factor in Star Citizen. Now, there's kind of three deaths along the spectrum. There's what we're calling the downed state. So that's when your health has gone to zero and you're there. And when you're in that scenario, you'll be able to choose to stay there and be like, "OK, I need my buddies to come and rescue me. I need the law enforcement to come and help me," or maybe I pay for some insurance that rescues my body or something like that. Then there is the kind of you've died in terms of you've given up the ghost. Nobody's coming. You're like, "OK, that's it. I'm leaving that body there and I'm going to go back to a hospital and be revived." But that's kind of part of your DNA. That DNA is going to be re-impregnated into essentially a clone of you. And then you'll be able to go back to your location and you'll be able to see your dead body there. And as long as nobody's been there, you'll be able to retrieve your gear and so on and so forth. And then the third aspect, in terms of you passing on to your next of kin and that kind of thing. So what we're actually evaluating now is how this is integrated into the core healing gameplay and the actor status. So we already did some of the actor status with temperature, in terms of hypothermia and hyperthermia, and things like starvation. And what we want to do now in terms of the next iteration of this is what we call the healing and actor status T1. And what that will do is introduce drugs. So you'll have a blood drug level and you'll be able to manipulate things, but it will also introduce all the different statuses that are surrounding you as a character. So for example, when you're in battle and you take a really bad wound to the arm, you might say, okay, I've got a fracture, so my arm, I've got a permanent fracture. I'd have to go back to the hospital to get that repaired. Otherwise I'm going to start to suffer some status effects surrounding that. But if you keep taking damage and you keep taking more damage, that fracture might turn into an actual break. And then it might turn into actually coming out of your arm kind of thing. And the level of that status will dictate the level of care and level of healing that you need to go and basically get that healed. So you can go to a med bay and get them repaired. But it also allows other people to act as support roles and come and help you. Let's say you've got a really bad broken leg, which means that you can't walk anymore, because you haven't just fallen over and taken a little scratch. You've repeatedly taken damage in your leg and you've not gone to heal it, because MediPens, for example, will no longer just be like, "Oh, I'm a MediPen, I'm full health." You will have these permanent statuses like hypothermia and hyperthermia. And those will only be able to be removed when you go to these locations, either a medical bay in a ship or a medical bay at these hospital locations. So when essentially you go into that downed state, that's where body dragging will come in, so that people can come in and drag your body back to the medical facility. We're going to have obviously the medical gun in terms of the multi-tool attachment; we'll be able to inject essentially the material that's inside the MediPens, but a stronger version of that. So the MediPens will basically turn into something that is stabilizing you in the moment. You'll still be able to replenish your health, but if you've got a bleed or something like that, it'd be like a clotting agent that stops that bleed. And that allows you to get back to safety. And at that moment in time, you can then go, "Okay, do I want to go on and push on? But I've got this status effect." If I go back to the fractured arm, my weapon's now swaying more, similar to how we have the eyeball effects with the other things. And that progression of the actor status T1, in terms of the different limb statuses that you're going to have, in terms of whether you've got a traumatic brain injury, whether you've got leg injuries, whether you've got arm injuries, whether you've got internal bleeding in terms of your organs, the level of those statuses will basically go up and up and up to the point where you're like, "I can no longer function now and I need somebody to come out." And you'll have plenty of opportunity to back out. So it's not going to be something that's going to be like, "Oh, hello, you've broken your legs and that's it." It's going to be something like the other actor statuses, where you're going to have junction points where you can make a decision: should I go on? And it's that moment like in the Arctic: I'm close to the edge, but I might lose my toes. So essentially what we're working on right now is that healing circle and that healing gameplay. And it also allows that cooperative gameplay, that when you do go into this downed state, which covers the first of the three death states, that's the state where you really don't want to go to the next stage. Because as soon as you go to the next stage, that is what Chris touched on in terms of, it's almost like the DNA integrity, because you're going to go to the hospitals. When we release this, hospitals will be live in the locations. You'll be able to go to these hospitals and almost download your DNA matrix into the hospital database and say, "OK, if my body is unrecoverable or my friends can't get to me, then I'm going to die and have to be recloned into this body. My DNA is going to have to be re-imprinted into this shell." And during that process, that's the process where your DNA can kind of fracture or lose some of its integrity. And that is what Chris touched on in terms of you're losing a life in gameplay terms. That is what's happening as it's being imprinted into you. And depending on the manner of your death, and depending on, "Oh, if you've just been ignoring all of these statuses and all of your arms don't work and your legs don't work and you've got a brain bleed," some of that DNA integrity, as it's being injected back into your body, can be re-inherited from those systemic statuses that you've had. And that means that you might come back in your body with a prosthetic arm, or you might come back and your eye color has changed, or you're not as tall as you used to be, because there's something that's gone wrong with that DNA imprinting. That's kind of what we're working towards now in terms of that hospital healing gameplay loop, actor status, the extension of the actor status system that we went live with before, and obviously body dragging and all of that, setting your spawn point in game terms and the lives. That's the stuff that we're working on right now. And to be honest, that's going to be a significant change in how people play the game, because when you go to the third stage, where you're shedding your tear... I'm not shedding my tear at the character I've lost, I'm shedding my tear at the inheritance tax that I've just been levied. And it's at that stage, that permanent death where you're having to pass on to a next of kin, where it is the sins of the father. You're still going to have some of your reputational statuses, but they may not be as high as they were, because it's like, "Oh, your dad was part of X, Y, Z, but you're going to have to prove yourself." And that kind of loop is a really unique aspect in terms of an MMO. And that really ties into death having a real meaningful consequence. Like in Demon's Souls, the amount of times you get to the boss and you get to that 1%, and your palms are sweaty and you're moving the mouse and you're like, "No." That all of a sudden changes when you get to the edge of that cave and you're like, "Yeah, I'm just going to go in there, and if I find something in there that's not friendly to me, then I'll just respawn." Now it's going to be like, "Well, if I respawn, what happens to my ship? Am I going to lose my gear? I'm going to have to come back to it," because obviously physical inventory ties into it. "And then, oh, will I lose some of my DNA integrity?" And all of a sudden, it changes the choices you make along the journey that you're going on. And that is critical.

Yeah, one of the other things we're doing is that we're not going to be despawning player bodies anymore. So when you die, the body that's there and all the equipment will stay there. So if you end up having to be recloned, you could essentially go back to where you died and recover some of your stuff and see the skeleton of your previous incarnation. But the other thing I would say is that the cost of the new life, basically, and you're only going to have so many of these to degrade, is much more than getting rescued or having someone come and grab you and fix you up. So there will also be an economic incentive to live, to essentially not just go, "Oh yeah, I'm just going to respawn," because A, you're only going to get a very limited number of those, and B, they're going to be very expensive. So you would prefer to have other players or your friends or a service come and get you and fix you up. And I think that'd be really useful and important, because even in gameplay like that, okay, if I'm now exploring in a corner of the universe that doesn't really have a lot of people, my level of risk there is much higher than if I'm in the middle of a really well-traveled area of space. I think in terms of gameplay, things like finally getting around to the full health, Death of a Spaceman setup and the physical inventory, the gameplay potential and just what's going to happen and the interplay with players... there's not other games that I can think of that quite have all this stuff all together to do this at this level of detail. And personally, I'm super excited to have these come together. We've talked about them for a long time. Obviously it's taking a while, but that's because we're building something incredibly high fidelity with all this detail, but with all the scope. But it really will change a lot of the gameplay mechanics. A lot of how people are playing the game right now, you just wouldn't want to do. It just wouldn't make sense. And I think that's super exciting.

And hopefully you can see some of the method to the madness of the development. Because it's not like, "Hey, overnight we go, let's just add this cool thing." It's like, okay, it's underpinning these things. So when we add actor status, when we add eating and drinking, when we add physical inventory, when we add the ability to hold things in the hand from grenade throw T1, all of that is tying into the bigger picture of what we want to achieve. And that core gameplay loop of: I'm not just stepping into my ship and flying into space and I could just open my PMA and have access to everything I want. There's no consequence, there's no feeling that you're in the world, because you have access to this infinite bag of holding. This consequence of: I'm going on a real adventure. The things that I take with me are the things that I have access to. The ships that I have dictate how much storage I have and what I have access to inside those ships. Do I have a kitchen that provides me food and drink? Do I have a medical bay? Have I got room to take a buddy with me? Is he going to wear support armor that allows more replenishment of the medical gun that can revive me when I'm down in the cave and we can get out together? All of a sudden that becomes not just a single player "Oh, I've just got access"; all of a sudden those shared experiences are the things that make it a true experience. All of these individual systems in isolation, they're really cool, and we put a lot of effort and a lot of heart into them. And they're complex because we want scalability on the size of Star Citizen. But when you pull them all together and they start talking to each other, and they start, "Okay, have you got space for the amount of food and drink you need? Have you got space for ammo? What guns are you taking? Am I going to take the grenade launcher? Well, I can only fit so many magazines of that. Well, maybe I should take an energy rifle because that recharges." All of those different decisions tie into making it... That's when all of a sudden you go, "Hold on a minute, the game was already there. We just needed these systems to start talking to each other."

I feel like at some point we need to rebrand this to the Life and Death (and Taxes) of a Spaceman. It would be more appropriate.

Ultimately, we do joke a little bit about it, but the goal with Star Citizen is, essentially, it's a virtual life. We are trying to simulate, obviously in a more primitive state than the real world, all the things that would happen. Naturally you would think, okay, if I'm going to go to the Antarctic, I've got to bring my supplies with me. I've got to worry about if I get hurt, and all these things that I think create great gameplay opportunities and also great cooperative gameplay opportunities, right? So there's a lot of things that we talked about where clearly, if you're going to be adventuring in a dangerous place, having equipment and having people with you is probably a good thing, because otherwise something goes wrong and you're by yourself. And there's been a lot of engineering just on the very low level and some scalable stuff that we have to do to enable a lot of these systems, but over the next year or two years, we've got a lot of this stuff coming online. And I feel like when they all start interoperating together, then it will be an experience like no other. I don't know another game that does it to the level. There's some games that do some really nice... Red Dead Redemption 2 is great. There's a whole bunch of other stuff that does elements of this, but I think not to the scope and the level and the detail that we're doing. And that's one of the reasons why it's taken so long. It's definitely taking longer than I'd like it to. And it's part of my frustration when people are like, "Wow, where's my gameplay loops?" And I'm like, "But it's going to be so awesome. You've got all these elements." I know the big picture and how they're all going to pull together. And it's just one of the things that, when you're making a game live, developing in front of people, people experience what you wouldn't normally. Normally, most game developers will tell you, in the old way, certainly when I was making the Wing Commanders and all the rest of stuff, and Richard probably can opine on all the ones that he was making, that the game really only comes together near the end, right? So you work on all these disparate parts, and you do it for years, especially in today's world; people work on it for years and years and years, and then it really only comes together sort of... We're kind of in that alpha to beta stage. I know we say we're alpha, but we still got a lot of features to come, and normally a traditional alpha would be you've got your features there but you don't have all your content polished, and then beta is all content and features are in there and you're working on the bugs. So a lot of it doesn't... Like Wing Commander, you weren't playing through until a couple of months before we released the game, and it was all in different pieces. In the way we do Star Citizen, people see us develop all these pieces in different parts, and they go, "Well, why have you got that? That just seems silly that you're focusing on this aspect over here, where I don't even have this other thing over here." Well, we have a plan. We're working on all those pieces, and when they all come together, it's going to be a great experience. Already there's elements of it now, so you can go around and run around the verse, and yes, there's going to be a lot more, but there's already fun stuff to do, and there's the social aspect of it. I see amazing videos every single day. It's one of the funnest things for me, to see cool videos by whoever; there was one that Tarada just did on 3.11 that was shared around here. The point is, this is really cool stuff that people are doing with the sandbox we're building, even though the sandbox isn't finished. But whether it's me or Richard or Todd Papy or Tony Zurovec, we're all operating at the level of: we see the matrix, we just haven't built all the elements of the matrix yet, but we know it's coming together, and when it's done, it will be this amazing simulation. Our only frustration is... it's not like me and Richard are like, "Oh yeah, guys, take longer." It's like Richard and Todd and everyone else are like, "Is it really going to take you that long to do that feature? Are you sure you can't do that in half the time?" We're always on that case. I know everyone out there is on our cases, but some of this stuff just takes time to build, to test, and also to do it when you're doing it in a live game, right? Because we are building in a live game, so you can't just break everything by introducing a new feature. You've got to make sure the old features work as well. But to be honest with you, it's actually a fun way to do it, because a lot of how we're doing it also informs our development as we go along. Because yes, we've got our big plans, but some of the feedback we get helps tweak how things are coming in or what areas we'll address, or what things worked well or what things didn't work well that we need to adjust. And if you were doing it the old way, you wouldn't get that feedback. You'd just basically put it all out there. It'd be your best shot at it. And then you'd be like, "Oh shit, well, we've got to fix this thing or improve this thing." So I like it. And also just people experiencing what we're building so far is awesome for the team as well, because the team get all inspired when they see cool stuff that the community is doing. So there's upsides and downsides to what we're doing, but I wouldn't change it for the world, because I think it's one of the funnest things I've ever done in games, and it's awesome.

Well, you've got to understand what unified friends list really means, because we had separate friends databases. There was a couple different ones, basically, that didn't necessarily talk to each other. So, for example, on Spectrum, I might have added Paul as a friend on Spectrum. I would never see that in the gameplay. The same vice versa. If I added him in the game as what we call the platform friend, I wouldn't see him on Spectrum. So that was kind of the first thing to work out. And that took some backend services to make sure that this was all talking to each other and coming from the same place. Now on top of that, we wanted to make that all real time. So as somebody on Spectrum is adding you, we wanted to see that in the game immediately.

Whether it's on your web platform or in the game, it's all the same. You can see it. It's live. Continue to finish it off, which would be like the VoIP and the VoIP communication between the platform and in-game, as well as a more rich presence. You kind of would know, oh, yeah, look, Sean's on Hurston. I can actually be in Spectrum seeing Sean and I can see he's in the PU right now.

He's in Stanton on Hurston. So it's just stuff that honestly just needed to get worked out. And this is the inevitable starting mark for what is really social management tools. So it's not full rich presence yet. We can't tell you exactly where in the verse they are. I can say you're online and you're in the PU. And there was one thing as well that I really hope forward we move into, and it's something that you had mentioned a long time ago, and I think the orgs really want this, but it's being able to, within some sort of social panel, social control, be able to work on, the military calls it radio etiquette. Where the commander can talk to the captain, the captain can talk to the pilot, but let the orgs sort of organize that stuff. So all those controls, whether it's org alliances and all these kind of things, that's where this will all go to. It gives the players the ability, well, they had the ability, but an easier way to play together. Which really should just be a no-brainer. Should just be that easy. I wish we could do it with our emails.

I mean, I guess you can answer that question. I mean, we go to 3.9, the stuff that you've heard so far on 3.8.2.

Me, personally, I think it's a big step in the right direction. We can lose some in-game persistence, but we can't really lose people's earned UEC or their items they bought and the ship they bought in-game, right?

And hopefully we've cleaned up some of the initial glitches of it. I mean, of course, if there's an exploit and someone's figured out a way to get a couple billion credits, we reserve the right to either individually edit those people's accounts so we can just take the money or the items away from them.

Or apply a general cap.

Or just do a general cap, as Paul says, or even occasionally we may decide, well, we need to just reset the database and do a general wipe, which we're going to try not to do if possible, but you never know because we're constantly adding new structures. The next stage on the persistence, which Paul can probably talk about, is the iCache side of it, which is more fidelity in the persistence. So what we have right now is saying, well, these are the items you have, and we're storing those in a way that can survive the patches, but we're not necessarily storing every item. We need iCache for the foundational, that sort of micro persistence, to do the physical inventory, and that's a big thing. And the other thing that opens up, which is sort of the next stage, which is sort of bigger things, but it would be now because we can persist anything. You can be a player or an organization, you can go down onto a, like all those beautiful shots that people share of microTech and go, I'm going to set my homestead up here. Well, with that technology, that is what we need to be able to do there and that is our plan. So when that's online, we're working on the aspects that would include sort of what you would call base building. So you would go there, you'd have to bring in the right resources and sort of create your little homestead or your base. So organizations or players can create their own areas of interest and essentially will help sort of build out and populate the universe as much as we on the game design side. So as we get these things on, as we get closer to that, we get closer to this sort of completely dynamic universe that you can sort of go anywhere, leave things, build things, destroy things, pick things up. And I think when we get to that, it's going to be pretty amazing.

Exactly. And iCache is obviously one piece of the puzzle, which is our internal high-speed database to store all that data, because obviously that's a lot of data, right? Every single bottle can be persisted and restored. iCache is just one piece where server OCS is a big part of that too, right? So something needs to take the data and stream it in and stream it out and restore it properly. There's a lot of tech under the hood developed right now, which obviously people won't see, like all the features you talk about, they come eventually, people won't see them in 3.9 just yet, but we built a lot of the foundation. And like the server OCS on the server, for example, when we rolled it out in 3.8, which was a big win for us. I think people out there, they were like, oh, we expect it to be like better performance or whatever. But in reality, it is one giant building block to get to this full persistent universe. Right now, without other tech, which is not there yet, you don't really see the benefits yet. But for us internally, it's a real big milestone to get to exactly that vision where we can store every single object and we can stream that area out and we push all the changes the player did to that. We push that up into the database and then when someone else comes back to that area, we stream it all back and it comes back in the exact same state.

If you have the iCache and you have the server streaming, which we have, they work together. Those two are necessary for the server meshing. In the server meshing, because we can have tens, hundreds of servers all communicating with each other, we just need to be able to save out any arbitrary area with its full state, which means whatever items were there or not there or whatever, to some back end so that when we come in, we can stream it back in, whether we stream it out on this server or this server or this server, the state is the same between all of us. And then you also should get much more of the performance impact. So yes, like Paul says, while you don't see the front end feature yet, getting these things in are actually quite exciting for us technically because once they're in, we know, okay, now that enables this next stage. And once we get these several stages in, then all of a sudden all this great, sort of dynamic, tactile universe with state that you can go to with many, many players all together in the same areas becomes possible.

There's just so many layers of it. And we talked about it in the last Pillar Talk exactly, and it was all theoretical. But I did mention one other benefit during that last Pillar Talk that absolutely was in place. And Paul mentioned it, but the load times. Generally now, by default for a developer, it's about seven gigs when it loads up. It's so light in comparison to the 45 that it was.

Before, it was loading the entire universe. And now, as a developer, you usually have one server and one client, and I'm the only client. And I see a lot of benefits. The server starts immediately.

Big, big benefits behind the scenes for us.

Quality of life can mean a lot of things as far as the player is concerned. So from my standpoint, a big focus has been, and it's mandated from Chris and Erin, the player experience, the quality of life of playing the game. So there's no frustrations, there's no annoyances. They can do the things, they can play the way they want to play when they want to do it, basically. In an intuitive way. But I think it also goes down to a more technical level, which is sort of build stability.

We're definitely trying to have a stable build and try to at least be as stable as the previous build or even more stable. And we're willing to hold the build before it goes live for a little longer to get to that stage. So we'd rather not push it out and say, oh, we've made exactly this date, but it's crashing all the time.

There's always the balance between, obviously you can't spend too much time on it because that takes away development time. But it also needs to be enough time so people can actually enjoy the game and start playing the game.

Sometimes it sort of goes up and down a little bit because, for instance, server OCS, that actually was a massive fundamental change in the back end because parts of the universe just would not exist in the server anymore and they used to. And so we would see issues with that that we would never see before. And so I think when server OCS came in at the beginning, we took a little hit on the stability, but we've been fixing and moving those things on. In general, we're doing lots of little things. I think also, by the way, in this 3.9, we've reduced the latency, the rewind time for the FPS stuff. So Star Marine will be much better. It's going to be way snappier. And so will the PU.

And the PU, but the PU benefits a little, and I think, when did I talk about this last on ISC? I can't remember when, but the PU benefits a tiny bit less than Arena Commander because it's really good when the server performance is perfect, right?

30 frames a second on Arena Commander, great. Everything's great.

Once it gets a little cratery, to the fives or so, I guess it does still happen sometimes when the players get all spread out, but anyways. Yes, it's in there, and yes, there is an improvement, especially for a fresh server when it's running really fast.

Sure. So when the players are playing, very commonly, they'll have to go to the button mappings. And you've seen this on live streams or anything, and it hits escape, goes to the controls. Okay, how do I pull out the flashlight? Okay, how do I do the dance emote? Okay, how do I...

It is the worst when you're standing there as a director or I'm sure as the CEO going, how do I go third person again?

That's an easy one. It's like a quality of life improvement was needed on this side. And we used to joke that the button baron has struck, and it just got changed. But anyways, to do away with that completely, not only having good default mappings anyways, is to be able to give the players some ability to not just remap that, but to have access to all their actions in-game contextually and quickly.

And it also opens up, for instance, one of my pet peeves is we've got all these great emotes. But before, to access them, you had to go into the chat and slash dance or whatever.

And that's if you know they're there.

And if you know they're there. And then the whole idea of the personal thought system was to sort of open up different stances or actions, like whether you want to be dancing or sitting down or whatever it would be. Or all the various emotes, salute. And so it's just one place you can go select it. And the concept is sort of, because I've talked about this for a while, the StarCraft method, right? Which is you go there and you can play StarCraft with just the mouse. But once you start to learn the hotkeys and you become the pro player, you can do things much quicker. 200 actions per minute. But what we need is someone where all they know is the simple FPS, WASD, running around, your interaction key, your mouse. And with that, you should be able to do everything, figure out how to use a ship, how to use weapons, how to do all these things, access all these actions. And that really was the idea.

And that was the intent. That was the exact intent that he gave to us, which was make playing the game a little bit easier. That's really what that comes down to, is playing it easier out of the gate. That was the thing because the controls haven't really changed, but your access to those is. So now you don't have to go into our key mapping stuff, which actually isn't connected to our Illustrator. You have to go into a big list and figure out where your key is going to be or where your button is going to be. Within the inner thought, within the radial, you can just assign the key right there and it even tells you what it is. So you can adapt your style of play in situ to different shortcut commands if you want or just kind of remap it all right there where you want it to be. So that's really nice. But then further to that, we've got shortcuts to different categories. So the idea here is that your interaction system or your inner thought system is a lighter version of the mobiGlas. It's what you're doing in situ. So you're not in barracks preparing your weapon and taking it all apart and cleaning it and doing everything. But you're reloading it or you're changing out the ammo real quick.

And I mean, you kind of touched on it a bit, but the other thing that I think is really cool with it is the fact that you can bind any key to any of the actions and you can rebind dynamically right there in the personal thought. So there's no going to an option screen. Like most games, you always go to an option screen; here, you literally, it's kind of like as you're doing it. Car radio, you just hold number one for a second, and then it's programmed to the station you're on, right? Well, this is the same thing, which is you're going to hold the key down for a period of time, and then it binds to that action that you're highlighting in the personal thought. And so you can sort of rebind on the fly the things that you're commonly doing. So you go, oh, you know what? I'm playing with my group, and I want to be able to give them some hand signals because we're playing FPS, and I want to be able to go like this.

So you can bind that to whatever you want.

To whatever keys you want, and you can move it around. So if you don't like, for instance, me, I hate holding R to holster, I would rather have, I don't know, H would have probably been fine for holster, right? H, holster, who knows? So I could do H. But I think that's a big UX usability positive for the game. Those are all the kind of little things that we need to get into the game.

We're kind of taking some of this stuff into the new role where we're pushing some design in some of the feature teams. Same idea that we used to do our developer tools with, just for our players, because it's push the player experience, make it easy for the player to play our game a little bit. And I'm really liking how that's going and I think it's working.

So the attachments UI, it's pretty straightforward. You go into a mode through the personal inner thought system. You can go there or there is also a shortcut to it where your weapon comes up. It's basically like the inspect mode that we had when you were going shopping for the weapon. So you could take a look at it and you've got attachment points on it. And within those attachment points, you've got a barrel one, you've got an underbarrel one, then you've got the scope one. As you mouse over each one of them, you'll get a list, or actually not a list, it's going to be a grid. So within that grid, you can select the actual options and then you just go.

Of the things you have that would fit on that weapon.

And it was, we went from a list and now the grid looks great. That works a lot better because you can kind of see what it is rather than seeing NV-TAC 18X whatever. So you can see the scopes. You can add them right on there. You can swap them out as you go. And you can also stow your weapon, which will keep those on it, with an option for later that if you pull out another weapon, you can pull that attachment off that weapon and put it on the other one.

And also, like I said, when we shift to physical inventory and just be more tactile, this is a necessary interface because pulling up your character as a thing, that's like a paper doll, like an RPG paper doll thing. We want Star Citizen to be much more sort of in-situ, tactile. I see things, I interact with them. Hey, I need to put a scope on. I put a scope on. And so we want to shift towards that. And so like you've been talking about in this session, a lot of the stuff are building blocks towards cooler and bigger stuff that's coming down the road. It's got benefit and it's cool, but it also enables some of the other stuff. Without this sort of functionality and features, we wouldn't be able to do some of the other stuff that we want to do that I think ultimately will give you a pretty cool experience.

And it's a great point because all the features that we just talked about, all three of these things, the unified friends, player interaction system, personal inner thought, as well as the attachments UI, it's all done through building blocks. We couldn't have done it without building blocks. Actually, there was one little thing that came out of the attachments. When you're holding the weapon like this, it doesn't do it as much justice as it should. When you have inspect mode, it was cool enough, but really the pose of it, oh man, the guns are cool. It gave me a new appreciation for the way the weapons look because you get so used to seeing them. And also to understand the modularity of it.

They spent all the time to break them up properly, to fit all the sniper scopes properly and all the stuff. And now you can actually see that swap in real time.

I hate admitting it, but I stopped seeing it so much. But then, oh, yeah, that looks so good. I'm really happy with how they all turned out.

I really think on the environmental side, I think some people just think, oh yeah, New Babbage Landing Zone, what's special about that? But I think a lot of what makes Star Citizen special is that our locations, even though we use procedural tools to help sort of create at scale, they're very specifically authored. We have a lore, we have a universe, we have a history, and you can feel it. And so when you visit the places, you feel that. And I feel like that's kind of one of the things that makes Star Citizen special, even though we don't have a billion planets or anything yet, you do feel like when you go to microTech, it is different than going to Hurston, for instance, or when you go to the moons. And as we build tools to allow us to sort of create that stuff a little bit quicker, but still with that same level of quality, it'll be great. But I really love that, and I feel like the environment team did an amazing job on New Babbage, and it's going to be fun to go around there and get your burger or get your coffee or just hang out. And there's another nice thing, which we also showed off on ISC: we have the ability now to sort of change our light states based on the time of day. So it's also the interior of New Babbage. One of the really cool things about it is it's one of the first implementations of that. And also there's a whole area, there's a whole bar with a DJ and at nighttime, there's laser lights and it's the party scene. And during the daytime, it's a bit more of a sort of chill day drinking scene. And it's equally cool. Both equally cool. The three moons, which I think we've also done some ISC on, they actually created those in, I think it was like two weeks per moon for one person. So it was three moons, each one took two weeks, basically. And those look great. I mean, they're some of our best looking ones. And now that team's off doing some stuff in another star system, which is looking quite good, but that's another story. But I think there's going to be a lot of fun. Definitely keep people busy for a while. So I think that's really cool.

The other big thing in 3.9 is the prisons, which I mentioned kind of at the top, which I think is a unique consequence when you have something like a law system. And so you now end up in a prison and you've got to do your time. And so there's a consequence to it. And we got some fun stuff, like you can potentially find a way to escape from the prison. You can also go down and sort of reduce your time spent by mining down in the caves there and basically getting what we call merits that will sort of reduce your time. And it's kind of a fun element. And it's also a very beginning building block of fully fleshing out sort of the law enforcement, which would include the bounty hunting side. So we've got a lot more stuff planned for the prison stuff going beyond this V1 implementation we've got, where we'll have the ability to have prison fights and all sorts of fun stuff. And on the other side, the bounty hunting side, we've got some stuff long-term where we want you to be able to track down other players, secure them, put them in your ship, take them, drop them off at the local Advocacy office, and then that person wakes up in the prison, and you'd be able to hopefully track them long-term. So we want you to basically play that Mandalorian-style game. When you watch The Mandalorian, it feels very much like the sort of Star Citizen experience. But anyway, the idea of bounty hunting and tracking someone is stuff that we're working towards. So the prison is one of the elements that's, again, we talk about putting bits of the gameplay there. And of course, we're going to build on top of it. And I think by the time we've finished all this stuff, it will be really cool. The prison system is one element that would add towards making your piracy and bounty hunting and sort of law enforcement cycles all work, and that's one of the elements, but it still needs other stuff and we will get there, and that's kind of our sort of plan. But it's this iterative point where we put another, it's like putting another brick in the wall, another brick in the wall and finally it's there.

It's always the last 10% which brings it from, okay, there's a base system here, to actually now it's a polished feature and you can use it intuitively and it's fun to use.

I think that's the challenge. In normal game development, you wouldn't be doing this out there publicly, but because of the nature of the way the game is, we develop it with the community out there who support us; it's a totally different way. And I actually quite enjoy it because you get the feedback and the early feedback. And we can also make things better and more stable longer term this way. But in the short term, it does present challenges because we always have to make sure that, for instance, we have as stable a build as possible. So we do spend a fair amount of time stabilizing a build that we may not necessarily do if we weren't having to release something every quarter. I think long term, it ends up with a better product because we're iteratively testing it and we're iteratively getting feedback. But on a short-term basis, it means that you always have to spend some time making sure you're triaging your current build and making sure it's working. So that's time that you couldn't be spending on a feature or polishing it. If you're expecting everything to be fully polished and working brilliantly the very first time you load it up, then you shouldn't be playing Star Citizen just yet. But then you would have to wait. That's the flip side.

That's the big advantage: people can play right away. They test out a feature. Not just, oh, I'm part of the last 10% where we polish everything, or I'm a beta tester. You're a part of it from day one almost.

I would say a project of this scale. There's definitely some smaller indie projects where it's very like that, and that's very cool, but a project of this size and this scale, there's not many people doing them, and the people that are, are the big publishers, and the big publishers would never do what we're doing because they just wouldn't want to have to be open to that much feedback early. Star Citizen is never getting canceled. We're just going to keep working on this thing until it is the best space sim, or universe simulator, I should just say, not really space simulator, because it's a complete universe sci-fi simulation game, possible, and that's kind of cool, and it's fun to be working on it, because I feel like Willy Wonka, and it's imagination, whatever you can dream is possible.

The server OCS stuff is a fundamental piece of the puzzle that we needed to solve in order to effect server meshing. What it doesn't do is allow you to transition from server to server. Therefore, each server is still effectively an island where you have a certain number of players and they can basically go anywhere in that solar system, but they can really only directly interact with other players on that server. And we do give some mechanisms, like when you join parties and stuff, you're given the option to jump over to the server of another player. But what you don't see is things like when I request personal transport or I request a combat assist or when I need something that another player could potentially contribute, whether it's via service beacon or whatever else, there's no way for players on other servers to just automatically see that and then basically accept, and then now you two players are basically joined together so that when you go to this location, you're going to wind up automatically transitioning to whatever server he's on. And so it's still a bunch of isolated pockets for now. And that's what still remains to be done in the future, which is allow players to seamlessly move back and forth.

One of the abilities to do that server meshing that we talked about is the functionality of what we have, which server OCS will deliver, is necessary for the meshing. What has to happen is each server, if they're all different viewpoints on the same star system, for instance, we're all linked and we're all playing, having that server be able to go anywhere and just only deal with that aspect is exactly what you need to have first, and then the server meshing is stage two, because then you glue all these servers together that can dynamically have viewpoints around and they will talk to each other.

That's why I said it was a foundational piece of the puzzle.

I would say that it's getting us away from the traditional concept of saving in a game where I have to explicitly save something at a particular point, and this is just becoming more realistic to where wherever you leave items, wherever you place items, they stay in perpetuity unless some other player, perhaps...

Or the system we decide to... There's too many cups in a location, and we know that'll be a problem when we stream it back in, so we clean up a few before we stream them.

I thought you were going to talk about a janitor coming around and cleaning up my cups.

Well, it depends on what you're talking about. It's like you would expect realistically if you left a cup on a table in a place, it's like, yes, that's going to be gone the next day. And there will be mechanisms for all of these, so if you're actually there to witness it, then at some point there is going to be a janitor, he's going to come in and he's going to grab that cup and put it over in the sink, et cetera, et cetera.

But the difference beyond 3.8, the iCache system that we're talking about is not only saving it essentially in memory or off in the local cache database, but to a back-end cloud database, so that if you came back a month later, it can be retrieved from the database, and then when you come to that area, the state is the same. I think the really cool thing with long-term persistence is that that allows us to almost shape the world with this persistence. As a player, I could make a homestead on a planet, build myself a little outpost or a hut or deploy some defenses or place that there, go back, come back, and my home's still there as long as someone else...

Right, and to be clear, it's not just the you thing. It's like, well, if you build that homestead in the middle of nowhere and someone happens to stumble upon it, then they can interact with it, they can raze it to the ground, they can customize it, they can have them and their friends move in. It's like, you don't really know what the state's going to be when you leave things out in these public places.

It's completely emergent behavior that's kind of like what you would see...

In the real world, really. These are all actually very simple things to leverage this long-term persistent functionality.

Yeah, and it sounds so simple, but the emergence of it is incredible.

That's exactly it, but that's what we do so often, which is we build in the low-level, the fundamental mechanics, and then you get all of this complex functionality that just naturally results.

I think the key is our planets are fully realized. Every single square inch is realized on them. There's a vast amount of real estate and it's great. I mean, we're going to be working hard and we build tools to populate this stuff and put outposts, but if the players themselves can also be doing their stuff and creating outposts or bases, then this whole world becomes alive and breathing.

In fact, I think our team is doing it this quarter.

For 3.9. So the cool thing with that is that now there's just always whatever the mineral is there, but with the persistence, absolutely, if there's a really strong vein of stuff there, it will be gone if players are there and they've already...

Yeah, and this goes back to, again, it's one of the things I find most interesting. It's discovery. It's actually finding...

And that's exploration and scanning.

That's exactly it. And eventually, right now we're still very limited. You basically fly over the surface of a planet and you happen to come upon stuff. Eventually we want to be able to do a more analytical, a more detailed analysis of a planet so that you can find these things, but it's time consuming, it's labor intensive, it requires equipment.

That's exactly it. Because a lot of times you find the rocks and you're like, I don't know which one it is.

Not only is it hard, but most of these things, excepting things like plant growth that regrow and things like that... when you're talking about metals and minerals and things like that, there is a fixed quantity of those within the ground in a given area. And that's what we're looking to deliver for 3.9, so that there is this much gold in this particular area. And if you happen to extract it, over the course of a day or two or three days, whatever, there will gradually become less and less and less. And then you need to go out and find a new location. And this is where it starts getting interesting...

A lot of conflict over the locations.

That's exactly it. And it's easier for me to follow a miner to wherever he's going on the presumption that he's already found some valuable place than it is for me to go scan and do all of this analysis of the planet and find my own location, which might involve, who knows, eventually hours and hours of work to find a really rich one. And so now you'll have people tagging along.

Driven by, oh yeah, this is a great place to buy resources, therefore I can make money. I mean, that gameplay all emerges out of it, and then if it feeds into the background universe simulation that we're running, the thing that you're working on, Tony, I just think, I haven't seen a game like this, and it is literally like a second universe that you can just escape into.

Yeah, we're not going to be in Stanton forever. I think that was such an important thing to do at CitizenCon. It's been such a great evolution, just in scale, if you think about it.

Because in that demo that we do, SOCS is running. That's how it all works. And as we enter the jump point and we're going through the wormhole, Stanton's going away while we're loading in Pyro. And then we come out, Pyro's there, and it's all seamless. There's no loading screens, there's no cutaway or anything. It just all happens from gameplay straight away.

It's still mind-boggling to me. It was good training to start in probably one of the two or three most difficult of all the solar systems planned, in terms of four planets, a dozen moons.

Four landing zones.

It's the landing zones, yeah.

Pyro's a lot lighter weight.

Well, the point I'm making is it's forced us to basically deal with a lot of the most complicated problems sooner in the process, so that going forward now, we've got a solid foundation to deal with any quantity of content, decoupling the frame rate from necessarily how much stuff needs to be loaded by any given server and things.

And also the Planet Tech V4 is allowing them to... Pyro, I think, has six or seven planets, and then a lot of moons. I think we're only going to have a couple of landing zones, but it doesn't have the population density of Stanton, but there's a lot of places you can visit. But we have the tools, and Pyro is sort of a hotter system, so that's where the active status comes in.

I just feel like we're starting to really coalesce everything, right? And that's what really excites me for this year.

That's the carrot, which is, so why would you go to this incredibly dangerous, lawless place? Well, there must be something. That's exactly it. It's the risk-reward, which is, that's where you can really make the big bucks. That's where you can make the killer return. There are some exotic materials, and in greater quantity there than in other places, but you're going to have to be willing to get bruised in order to retrieve them.

And I think Pyro, we're not going to promise exactly what the release is, but it's going to be at some point next year. It won't be 3.9, maybe after that, at some point. But it's a bit early to promise because we still have to make sure a few things are going. But, for instance, you're in a system like Pyro where there probably won't be a lot of stations that you can go and get fuel. You may want to be able to collect fuel yourself with your ship, or someone can make a good living by selling it to people in Pyro.

One of the next occupations up will be salvage. And I would expect in any kind of lawless place, a lot of conflict, you'd have a lot of debris, a lot of derelict ships, a lot of stuff to salvage, a lot of value for people that basically want to strip, whether it's the hull of a ship or the internal components and things of that sort.

So we're going to keep iterating on the law system for another several quarters. The prisons are basically the next major step forward. We've added an automated prison to Aberdeen. And what it really does fundamentally is it increases the consequences for you doing all of these illegal actions. It will make every player that's engaging another player, whether it's for the fun of it or to basically take their resources, steal their ship, whatever... now there's this whole prison thing. You don't get your ship. You're going to be stuck in there for a longer period of time. You have the potential to escape. You have the potential to reduce your sentence. But in general, the penalty is much more substantial than us simply allowing you to restart.

My big objective with the game is to not have people basically respawn. You want to keep your ship as long as possible. You want to stay alive as long as possible. I want to crash land on the planet, and it's better for me to have my friend rescue me or get rescued than for me to basically commit suicide and wake up.

Well, that ties into our front ends, basically even our launcher and Spectrum associated with it. There's how you group with people, there's a lobby associated with it, there's the front-end option menu. All that stuff we know needs to work, and that has been a focus of ours in talking about how we can update the lobby and update grouping with people, just because we know it is a pain right now.

Because basically, we talked about it before, we basically have three different areas of friends at this moment that have different management techniques. You've got Spectrum. Well, it's also, I have to reach out to you, and then you have to reach out to me. It's really from our website all the way down into the game and you're playing with your buddy.

You mentioned one thing earlier on the server object container streaming, to where if the tools basically make it too difficult to achieve a desired result, then people have a tendency to do less of that. And that's very much been the case, which is a lot of what we're talking about here requires significant amounts of user interface work. And we've done this over on my side: the service beacon still doesn't have features that we wanted in from version one, because every bit of that UI work is so expensive and you're always weighing it against what else you could get with that amount of time. And so with the new Building Blocks stuff that we've had coming online recently, that aspect of it should become dramatically faster.

Yeah, I mean, that's the tech thing. We've been investing in the UI tech, which we've done some ATV episodes on. It's still got some stuff to happen, but it's becoming easier. That, hopefully, is something that will pay off in us being able to expand things like the group system and our front end and during the game, and just getting into your mobiGlas and the Galactapedia or all that sort of stuff.

It's about empowering the teams, too, because before we used to have very much a bottleneck with the UI team, but now every single team is getting used to using the Building Blocks, and then it's just making sure that we have the oversight so we have the cohesive nature of the UI experience and the UX experience. But groups and lobbying and all of that is definitely on all of our radars and is very important to us, just because when we play the game, we have to go through the same headaches.