Simon Bursey

Well, the easiest answer to that question is just wait and see. But no, we're hoping to bring things in a bit at a time so it won't be a big lump of, here's all the new features. When they're ready, they're going in, and they're going to be ready as soon as possible. We're doing our best to get them from being showcaseable to being production ready, so release status, which is still quite a jump, but we're doing our best.

I imagine most of it is just as simple as take the stuff you did for Squadron, check the 'make multiplayer' box and it just works in Star Citizen.

No, in a word. I mean, just integrating the code is a multi-day, multi-week problem. And then there's additional features for, let's say, the visor and the mobiGlas, which are obviously maybe not in Squadron, that are going to be in the PU. And then there's obviously different maps and different layouts, and also people can go anywhere and do anything, and the combinations of stuff that people can do when they're playing the game all need to be tested and go through that.

Skydancer in the chat said that stuff looked pretty far along, and it is. It's as far along as we showed it at CitizenCon. But again, that was for the single-player environment, and integrating it into the multiplayer environment will take the work of not just your team, but multiple QA teams and multiple other Persistent Universe teams. You've got to hook it into the mission system. You've got to hook it into the overall location system and stuff like this. So server meshing and the replication layer, all things that aren't necessarily a part of the Squadron development that you now need to take account for. That's not to scare anybody away and be like, you're not going to see this stuff in a year. It's just we want to be very forthcoming that this isn't stuff that's going to show up tomorrow, but it's not necessarily stuff that needs to wait until 4.0. You guys will tackle the work, and as the work is completed and ready to go, it'll just go into the PU.

Yeah, we're not holding all of that that we showed at CitizenCon back for the 4.0 release. When it's ready, it's ready.

Those team leads are planning that right now. I was talking to Jens earlier about, can we do this here and can that go there? So we're on the case as well. We're figuring out how soon we can get stuff.

And some of the things are out of this group's control as well. So like the interior map, you think, well, we showed the Carrack, but we've got a few other ships that we'll need to ensure look great.

I think you should be able to. I think we should offer various ways of actually sorting through that data. So one of the ways that I think would be good is to be able to have user-generated folders so that you can organize your own data how you see fit, but also be able to organize it by hierarchical locations. So Stanton system and then planet, moon and so on, and be able to filter your markers that way. And possibly also tagging the markers, so you can tag them individually, and then that will go into the sharing of it, because you might want to only share a subset, right? So you need to have good ways of filtering by subsets.

And then being able to add notes to the map markers, titles, stuff like that, full labeling of things.

Yeah, I mean, we already showed the titling. I think we should be able to have that flexibility, because otherwise you don't want to be stuck in a box. So yeah, we'll look at that for sure.

Yeah, we're going to start drilling down into it. One suggestion that we probably will look into, we're not saying we're definitely going to do it, but we can potentially get data from the surroundings as well. So if you've got a mining deposit, we could potentially automatically say what's in that deposit on your little marker. So things like that we've got potential to do one day.

It could go anywhere, really. Where we're looking at for now, the core functionality will be similar to what's in the current Star Citizen, just with this much better interface. But in future, you've seen Google Maps, that's changed over the past 10 or 15 years and it's constantly changing. We could do the same kind of thing with the star map if we wanted to, but our priority is to make it nice and playable first, really useful.

We understand that maybe the current implementation is not so usable. So there's a priority of making that usable, and then we can look at all these additional features. We've got a feature list as long as your arm, with, oh, that looks cool, we could definitely do that, we should put that in. But I think showing things that you know about on the map is really important. When you learn things about a planet or a location, then this could be integrated into your map. So pinning stuff or finding out, I don't know, it's an icy moon with this kind of population, whether it's safe or not. A lot of that is based on your knowledge about what you've learned about the universe whilst you're exploring around it.

Well, there's that, and then there's things like the Galactapedia, which exists outside the game right now, but eventually will begin to be incorporated into the universe. And I imagine there's a lot of opportunities to plug into that and pull information from that. Just easy cross-reference through tags. If I'm looking at microTech, what other information? There's the information that I've gathered or members of my team have gathered, but then what does the universe already know?

Yeah, what are the governing bodies, find me a safe place to go and land and refuel and things like that.

So I would say that probably seems more like a Galactapedia feature than a star map feature, and then maybe the star map can tap into that in places once the Galactapedia comes online.

Well, for now, it'll probably do very similar to the current implementation. So you can plot multiple stops on the way, but for now we don't want to do a full, like if you've got a sat nav on your phone, we don't want to go into that much detail where it's doing everything for you and you can choose multiple routes. But I think in future, those kinds of features do make people's lives easier. So yeah, I think it's the kind of thing we'll probably look into later on.

I don't want to be flying through some really dangerous zone. Being able to avoid it sounds a good idea.

Yeah, I think there's big things like, you want to be able to know where you need to stop for fuel and how far you can actually reach with your current ship and that kind of thing. We can probably improve the way that's dealt with in future as well.

Well, we definitely will have the ability technically to do it. This is sort of a design decision about what you can track. We already have a thing for tracking with the AR markers anyway, so there's no reason why anything that's on the AR wouldn't also be integrated into the mapping system to show exactly where you left it floating around some moon somewhere.

I mean, for now, you'll definitely be able to see where your current ship is. If you just got out of your ship and you're wandering around, you'll be able to see that on there. For ships that are, say, locked up on a space station, so it's not actually in the game world, that will probably, for now, live in your inventory and the other menus.

But yeah, stuff flying around is much more likely than the ships that are associated with you.

One thing, we never really showed the radar very much at CitizenCon, mainly just because it didn't really fit with the flow of everything, but we've improved the radar generally, and you can zoom into that and see it full screen the same way you can with the star map. So the kinds of things that you would see as contacts on your radar, you'll also be able to see in the big version too.

Yeah, that's another use case for a ship hologlobe, actually: the radar, and you're seeing all the ships and possibly the whole fleet and planning a battle.

Yeah, it's so cool for multi-crew gameplay if you're stood around and you can see your friends flying around you and wandering around.

So it's very much a pervasive UI throughout the game. It serves many, many purposes.

Well, I checked with Rich Tyrer about this just now. And so yes, at the moment, that's the way it's going to work.

So I think technically it'd be harder not to, thinking it through. It'd be really hard to exclude that data. If you know about the ship, you know about the inner workings; you might not necessarily know who's walking through it at any time, but you might go, hmm, that door seems to have opened and closed.

So it does have gameplay implications, so it might make it trickier for some people, but also for people who do want to snoop on that stuff, it's going to be a fun bit of gameplay as well, I think.

So a couple of layers to that. One is whether you can see people walking in your ships. Another one, whether you can identify them. If they've done something to hide their presence, maybe you don't see them, but you'd still see your own doors opening and closing in your ship.

So yeah, a couple of different layers. The markers on the interior map are what you detect on the radar. So if you can detect people, like we saw with the ping stuff in the demo that we did, then they will also appear on the interior map. But as you were saying, if they've got some mechanism of hiding themselves, then maybe they won't be so clear on the interior map as well.

We have the ability to hide and show different render layers. We could hide all doors if that's some gameplay requirement. Also, you're able to see the weapons on the ship as well and all the different components. We can hide those individually. I don't know if it's something where we get a base schematic of the ship, and then you have to hook into the ship to get that extra information or whatever. We just have that capability in the display.

Yeah, the fact it's live is really cool, and we haven't really explored that too much for now, so maybe there'll be some interesting gameplay that comes out of that as well.

No. So you've seen in the live demo we did, the on-foot routing is pretty comprehensive. So you can go from anywhere within the location to anywhere else that you can actually get to. But when you're actually navigating in space, we don't want to hold your hand too much, essentially. So for space navigation, you will have to plot the route like you do now and so on. But there won't be this thing where it says go to the space station, get in your ship, then it'll take you straight there and then you've got to get out of the ship. That kind of thing, we feel that's a bit too far.

I'm not getting from my hab in Area18 to my friend's hab in microTech door to door.

And one thing we do want to avoid as well is there's a term that some of the directors have used, which is called 'playing the map', where sometimes if it's too much, you don't even look at the game screen. You're just looking at this tiny little circle that shows you where to go. So we don't want that. We want to make people feel immersed in the world.

There's some crazy technical challenge behind that anyway. If you talk about the hab thing: well, where's the first step? Does it route you to the ASOP terminal? And then does it tell you what ship to pick? Because you might have 10 ships. You might already have some ships on the landing pad. Which one is it going to pick? Is it going to pick the fastest one? Is it going to pick the safest one? I agree with you, Simon. Just on a technical basis, I don't want to set off down that route. I think let the players play the game how they want and give them a hand moving around some of our more complex environments, but it's not about just... You've seen people drive like this, right, where they're just following the sat nav into a field or something.

Playing the map's a very real thing, I think. I eventually tapped out of, I think, the Arkham series of games because I was just constantly in the map mode. I was running around in bat vision or whatever it was. It was just like, I'm not playing the game, I'm playing the UI. It was great UI, but it superseded the game at that point.

Much as we like to promote UI, I think we've also made some great visuals beyond the UI.

For instance, with the new ship HUDs, we've made the effort to try to clear up the view of all these UI elements. It's really cluttered in the PU right now. It's really messy. We want to clear it up so you can appreciate the environments a lot more.

Well, there's two levels anyway. There's in-lore customisation, as in how you'd actually customise your ship. That's a bit beyond the scope of what I know about. But we also talk about accessibility as well. So the size of text, colour blindness and all things like that. As a systems programmer, I have to deal with that kind of stuff. We're building all that in anyway because we have to do appropriate things for colour blindness and text sizes so you can read things and not just have tiny text everywhere. But that really helps the game designers as well, because the game designers will talk about how we want to be able to customise our ship or we want to be able to customise the way a shop looks or something. From a systems point of view, which is what I'm involved in, it's just about trying to make the UI as flexible as possible so then we can do that sort of stuff. I don't know where we're at with the design for customisation, particularly ships. Obviously, the ships are the most important things. I mean, Yogi showed quite a lot of that stuff off at the show, which is pretty cool.

Yeah, I think at the moment there's more that we can do as well. A lot of the customisation at the moment is things like on the MFDs, you can choose which MFD you're looking at, that kind of thing. For now, our main focus is to take all that information and get it good for the player, and also try and get it contextual. So you're not seeing things you don't need to see. So while for now you can't customise everything to a great deal, it hopefully is a better player experience. And I think longer term, we've always talked about, say, if you buy a new helmet, maybe it has a different style of UI. If you've got a different mobiGlas, maybe you've got the pink version, for example. I think tying things to items is probably going to be the first thing before we get to the level where we're letting players customise every single piece here and there.

Yeah, I think the customisation will probably manifest itself first in the accessibility options, like for colour blindness and text size and things like that, and then anything beyond that is probably later down the line.

I'll start. There's plenty of things that Bone could say on this. But I think the important thing from my side is that we've rolled it out from something that the core UI team used to use, and we were working out how to use it as well. It's got to a point now where it's good enough for the rest of the team to use. So we rolled it out to game designers across the company, some of the artists, and that kind of thing. So it kind of makes our jobs easier, I suppose, because it's not just six people trying to get the UI done for the whole company. Now, those particular teams can take control and they can make their own kind of demos and functional versions of stuff. So that's a really big thing that it's brought to us. I'm sure Bone could go a lot into the technical things that have changed over the past year as well.

The past year, I think the major thing that we've been working on at the core tech level would be adding 3D. It's a big feature, and as soon as you jump from drawing some text and some images to, hey, I want to be able to draw models, I want to be able to draw characters, vehicles, and all these kind of things as part of the UI scene, things get pretty complicated. We've been working on that as part of the year. That involves lighting for those models, how the materials look, do you do holograms? How do they appear in the UI? Do they appear in a screen? Do they appear over a screen? Do they appear without a screen? If you can have hologram UIs of floating letters, ships and stuff like that. There's all kinds of exciting rendering tech that we've been involved in with that. I think the first thing we've seen it in is the inventory. That was really, really quite complicated. We show 50 models at a time, and each of those individual models has its own scene, its own camera, it has three lights. So there's just thousands and thousands of little objects we have to manage all the time. So that's what we've been doing over the past year. So as a core technology group, we develop that stuff ready for the gameplay teams to use. So I'm hoping that we're in a space that they start using it, and then they'll develop their UIs, and hopefully the players will get to see that in a couple of releases' time after that, because we're right at the start of that chain. So it's now in a state that the gameplay teams start to use it, and then they come back to me and say, hey, it's not quite working correctly yet, and then I fix a few things, and then they can start developing their features with those kind of things.

As well as the 3D, actually, we've put a lot more time into reusable pieces as well. So maybe when Bone did his talk before, I know Zane showed some restylable stuff, which is really cool. But the actual process to do that was pretty complicated. So if you wanted a button, you had to make it from a square object and put some text on and all that kind of thing. And we've got a system now which means we can package those things up. So if somebody wants a button, instead of having to build it from other pieces, they can just drag a button into their scene and change the name on it. So we've added quite a few bits like that. It doesn't make a massive difference to what people see at the end of the process, but for less technical people, game designers and artists, it's a lot easier for them to just build a screen out of pieces. And also, all those pieces are restylable as well. So for example, at the moment, we've just added a Crusader style to the game. So if someone's already set up a screen, we can just turn it to Crusader and it will change colors and some of the graphics will change and so on, which is kind of cool.

Well, I think clean up is probably a bit overdoing it, but I definitely get a lot of calls during the release phase of saying, hey, I've made all this and it's not working quite how I expect it to. Now, is that because they've implemented it wrong or is it because maybe my stuff's wrong or the core tech is wrong? Trying to help them debug what's going on and find out what the problem is. I think that that's grown, but that's a really good thing. I can only see that as a really positive step because we get lots and lots of people contributing now. And being a support role is a lot easier than what we used to do, which was having a really compressed role at the end of the release cycle, which is all the gameplay teams have finished their feature and just go, it just needs UI now. Can you just make the UI for it? That was really tricky because you had to really get involved in lots of other people's work and understand what they want, then design it and write the tech and the UI for it. These would all be completely individual systems. You'd be working on vehicles one week and then you'd be working on the mobiGlas the next week and then you'd be working on the front end. That was really difficult. You'd get these jack of all trades, master of none, because we were diving in and out, but they were all equally very important at the same time. But now that that's spread out, offering support is a lot easier because I'm supporting them in a role where I know the tech and I can give advice about the stuff that's going on. And I also can hopefully write tools to help them debug their own stuff as well.

One thing that's interesting is with AI in games, you get this thing called emergent behavior where the game starts doing stuff that you didn't expect. We almost have a similar thing with the UI tool where it's not AI that's doing it, but we'll decide to do a particular thing and we hand it over to people to actually use and they come up with all these crazy ways of using it that we never expected. They're usually doing really cool stuff, but I suppose there's two sides to it. Sometimes we'll get something that works really well, and then we'll look at the file that's been made to construct it, and it's like spaghetti. There's just connections everywhere. So we sometimes go in and kind of tidy that up a bit and let them know, here's another way you could do it that's going to be a bit more efficient, that kind of thing. And other times, it's like, there is no better way to do this. So Bone, for example, might go away and write a new system that does that thing that they want to do or do it in a better way. That's where a lot of the support lies as well.

OK, so it's progressing. It's a really big system. What we want to do with it and what we've designed in the background, which we're not showing anybody yet, is this really big system that kind of combines the radar, the star map, potentially some of the AR markers, and also the interior map. We think really that should be one thing, essentially. Chris Roberts has always had this idea that he wants to be able to start from the radar and zoom out from that. Then you can see the star map and you can zoom out and see the galactic view, essentially. We've been writing around that idea. We've got this really massive design that ties all those systems together, which is pretty cool. We started writing code systems to support that. One thing that's tricky with it, there's all this data from all over the game. So we've got the planets and stuff. We've got the radar data. We've got even things like missiles. We've got to somehow tie that together in a way that we can put into one place. So we spent quite a lot of time working on the tracking system for all that stuff. So that's all good now. And we're kind of at the stage where we want to start building the real thing. So the challenge is spending the time to fit all that stuff together. So that's something that we've been kind of ticking along in the background, but we're going to start ramping up on that very soon, I think. Couldn't give you a release date, but we're really keen to get it going and it's moving.

Well, we are working. I literally was working on it this morning.

OK, so I think anyone who's seen the ARK Starmap will have a good idea of, I suppose, the general idea of where we want to take it, because we do all like that. It's easy to interact with. It's quite clear. You can navigate between different pieces of it easily, a lot more easily than what's in-game at the moment. So that's definitely inspiration for us. So visually, I definitely wanted to try and push it a bit further than that. So try and get a bit more of that sci-fi movie feel to it. And in terms of functionality, because it's kind of your window on the world, I think what we need to do as well is have a bit more of a Google Maps, Apple Maps style navigation thing going on. So for example, if you want to find the planet on the other side of the solar system, being able to search for it, maybe just quite easily navigate to it from this central interface. I think all that sort of stuff is going to make it feel nice. And so we're looking to take inspiration from the best maps out there overall.

Because these are UI guys. They're not building the mining. The team who is doing the mining can continue to work on mining while these guys work on their other stuff. It's not an either-or proposition; all the teams don't just work on all the features.

Yeah, that's true. The main way that we support other teams at the moment, we're kind of the start and the end of the process. So Bone's team makes the initial bits for people to make their feature from, I guess. And then UI team will sometimes lend support on the visual side as well. So at the moment, we're working on some refueling stuff. So EU PU have been working on that. They've made this system that works really well. They've done UI that is OK. It doesn't look great. But they're not a team full of UI designers and artists. So what we'll do is pass some of the stuff over to our visual guys to upgrade it and make it look cool and Star Citizen. The end product is really good. In general, it's the code side that's involved with things like the star map.

I will say it's working. Those who have been following the project for a while, going back to 2014, 2015, 2016 days, might remember a familiar refrain: this feature is waiting on UI. That was such a common refrain back in those days because of what David just said earlier about how you'd get to the end of the feature, then it's like, okay, slap a UI on it. It was very clear that UI being downstream of everything was not the solution for a project as broad as Star Citizen. So not to keep harping on the success of Building Blocks, but these new refinements to process that you guys have made and the new tools that you've provided have definitely sped up the process. That said, like any team on Star Citizen, there are only so many things we can work on at any given time. You have to prioritize and stuff like that. So not everything can be worked on all at once.

I was at this point of that, when everyone was waiting for UI, and this is why Chris correctly pivoted the team at that point and said, this isn't going to work, because we want to grow how many features we're going to develop. Unless we just magic out of thin air another 20 UI guys, it's just not going to grow. It just turns into a great big bottleneck. So that is why around 2017, I think it was, we did change the mechanism, so you develop the UI and go wide and spread it across a lot of these teams. I want to say put the onus back on them, because when any trouble comes in, it's not just developing it, it's at release time. Inevitably, there's a few problems with any given feature, but if you have 10 features and each of them have a few UI bugs in them and they all have to be done by one UI team, it becomes a real bottleneck. So it was really good to go wide across the company and each of those guys then get the ownership of their particular feature from start to finish and not just go, it's done, just needs UI. We're just waiting on UI guys. It's like, you are the UI guys now, with nice fancy graphics and animations from the art and design departments.

Seven.

We have seven to go, or are we seven along? What scale are you using, Bone?

Oh, I'm not giving you the scale. I'm just giving you a number. Quite far, I'd say. I can't give an accurate number. We're definitely past halfway.

We've definitely got the process down. We know exactly how we're going to do it. And we've got designs for a lot of the things that we want to change over. But a lot of it is balancing new features, I suppose, with going back to the old stuff and porting it over. One thing that we like to do, and I think Chris Roberts likes to do this as well, is when we touch an old feature, we don't want to just take what was there and just put it in exactly the same. We'll tend to work out what the problems were and redesign little bits, maybe make it visually better as well. It's quite an involved process to convert things over overall.

I think it's a really good opportunity to revisit. These are inevitably some of the older features across the game, so it gives you an opportunity to revisit them and say, what's not great about these things? What would improve it? Would it look miles better with some 3D models and stuff or better animations? Things like the inventory on the mobiGlas was just completely redesigned because it wasn't a favorite feature of ours at the time, so we looked at it and went, right, actually, if we're going to redo this, let's rethink it in a more appropriate way. But certain other things are, if it ain't broke, let's just make a neat version of this that we can manage and maintain a lot easier. Maintaining the old stuff has become quite difficult now. The knowledge base of people that want to work on this stuff is reducing.

Also, Flash isn't really supported anymore by Adobe. The further we get through time, the harder it is to fix the Flash stuff. So we definitely want to get that ported over when we can. I think the major features that we want to do: there's the star map, which we're working on, obviously. mobiGlas is a big thing. The MFDs on ships and also the visor, so the lens and visor that the player looks through. We want to update that and bring that into the modern day, I guess.