Sandi Gardiner

Yeah. I mean, I was talking to John Erskine in Frankfurt at the Frankfurt Christmas party, and we were saying when you're really doing it, when you're really in it, you're just on high alert. In the lead-up to October 10th, there were so many balls to catch and plates spinning in the air. We just didn't know. We thought it was going to go well, but we weren't sure. Did I tell you Chris was singing? Chris is not a great singer, but he called me from Germany. You know that song, Big in Japan? He was singing "Big in Germany" badly, because all the journalists had brought old Wing Commander boxes and they were raving about the prototype. And he thought, well, maybe we have something. Maybe it's going to be good. Because Sean Tracy, Hannes, they all thought it was good. And I'd seen the prototype. I thought, this is something. But you never know. And we'd set up the website. And I was doing everything at the time. I mean, everything. I was his personal assistant, the meeting organizer, dealing with publicity, everything. I booked Chris into a broom closet in London; we were on a budget. And of course, when he got up to give the speech at GDC and the presentation, and then we launched the site, it crashes. I just was like, oh my gosh. It was in that moment I thought, oh my gosh, it's over. It's so done. It was horrifying. It was all that work, and then you're thinking people are going to go away and not come back, because the world's so fast and fickle. Then it just snowballed from there. It kept going.

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.

I think I said at CitizenCon that in terms of Squadron, we've been working on this for quite a long time. We're definitely on the downhill slope now. We're publishing this. We're showing a six-quarter schedule where by the end of '19, we'll have pretty much all our features done. And then in Q1 of '20, we're doing optimization and it's the alpha phase and polishing and hardening phase and finishing the levels, the chapters. And Q2 would be the beta phase where it's mostly just bug testing and continued polishing.

So I should keep my time free next summer?

Yeah, you should. But anyway, that's our time horizon that we've been working on. And it's a lot of work, but on a caveat basis, it's similar to what we do on the PU. So some of these tasks may take longer than we have estimated; there may be some unforeseen problems. I will say that the uncertainty, the R&D technology aspects are much less of an issue or risk now on Squadron because the biggest remaining one was really object container streaming. We've got mostly that sorted on the PU, Star Citizen side. We still have a little bit because some of the server-side technology for object container streaming is needed for Squadron 42, because Squadron 42 is basically a server and a client all together. But once that's online, we'll be able to stream this really high-detailed world and keep the frame rates up, which is really important.

Well, we sent out a letter to all you guys and it's on our corporate website, but we've taken on an investment that I think is going to really secure our independence. I think you guys have known, I've said from the beginning of the campaign, that all the money that we've been bringing in on crowdfunding is going towards Star Citizen, is going towards Squadron 42, is going towards development. And we've been upholding that side of the bargain, and that is something I feel really strongly about. But of course, as an ongoing business, we have some other needs, like, for instance...

Marketing.

Yeah. Well, Squadron 42, we're now on the downhill ramp. We're 18 months away, looking like, from when we have to be ready to release it. And as you tell me all the time, you have to start doing a lot, start the preparation and planning and booking and all the rest of the stuff for the marketing long before.

Yes, I have actually had this plan for a very long time and it has shifted and shifted and shifted. And finally, I feel like we might have an actual plan that I can execute.

The other aspect is being able to do that properly, being able to fund it without having to go to someone. There's a lot of other people in the crowdfunding world anyway that have raised their money, made the game, and then partnered with someone like a publisher to release the game in a wider format, but we don't want to do that. I value the independence. We've been able to have the independence because of all you guys. We really appreciate it. And so for us, it was really important to be able to control our own destiny. And this is really going to enable us to do that and also have all the money that comes in on the game front, the crowdfunding, go to the development. I never wanted to take any of that money and spend it on ads that we would buy in places. So this for me is the best of both worlds. It gets great independence. We have security, more chests. We can do various things as well as build the best damn space sim out there. So there you go. Happy about it.

We do our Monday morning leadership meetings, and in the most recent meeting, basically production came back, crunched the numbers and said, look, if we go from Game Dev into 3.4, based on if we come into the worst case scenario and it takes us four weeks to stabilize that, we're going to have no time to get testing and PTU and Evocati and be out for December 20th. So basically everyone came back on the development side and said, look, if we do this, we'll be in grave risk of missing a 3.4 release at the end of the year on December 20th.

So it's either no 3.4 for me or 3.4 light.

Yes. But we're a big company and there's a lot of things going on. And we have better tools now to look at how long it takes us and estimate trajectories and make decisions in soon enough time to not have everything, for instance, miss getting out 3.4 at the end of the year.