Tyler Witkin

So we've been thinking a lot about the roadmaps lately, and ultimately we want to improve how we communicate in a variety of ways so we can basically provide a better idea of what's being worked on, why something may have changed, et cetera. So more specifically, we're looking at some creative ways that we think we can better illustrate our progress that ties closer into how we're blocking out our time internally. We're already well underway with exploring some creative options for how we can visualize that and how we can share that with everybody. But of course, it's going to take a little bit of time. But I think we're heading in the right direction. We think we're working on some stuff that you guys are going to like.

As far as blocking out time, some of that stuff we already do on the dev side as well. We block out sprints that guys are working on, and you can see their completion progress. So we even talked about, could that be existing information we have that pulls in, again, as long as it doesn't give away spoilers and so on.

Yeah, absolutely. We also recognize that as we're developing Squadron 42, much of that content ends up making its way into the PU, which is something that we feel we can track and also illustrate better. And so that's another thing that we're working on. But in the short term, obviously you can still look forward to the monthly reports. You may have seen recently we did an AMA on prisons. So we would like to continue doing those AMAs more regularly and actually talk Squadron 42 when we can. Like Brian mentioned, we don't want to spoil the game, but as often as we can, when it makes sense, if we can do some AMAs surrounding different aspects of Squadron 42, we'll take those opportunities. One of the favorite parts of Inside Star Citizen is the Sprint Report. We're going to start leveraging the Sprint Report for Squadron 42 content again as often as we can. You probably see the pattern here: we just want to start injecting more Squadron 42 content into our regular communications, but also getting creative and seeing if we can introduce some new stuff. For example, we might do some fun regular video check-ins with Brian, with you, and the Squadron 42 team. We've been talking about some fun ideas. I think that you guys are going to like the direction we're going to go with that.

No, we're exploring everything. We're looking at it from all angles. We've even had some discussion, as we've said, and everybody knows that a lot of the things that we do from Squadron make it to PU, or PU to Squadron. So could we even have some type of shared map that calls out which ones are shared, which are unique and so on? Because a lot of stuff you see in PU, although we're not loud about it, absolutely makes itself into Squadron, right? So by nature, it already starts showing some of that progress there. It would just be us calling it out.

And then of course on the video side, opening up shows like Calling All Devs to host Squadron questions when appropriate. Maybe even an Inside Star Citizen segment here and there related to Squadron. Again, where we can find stories to tell that don't spoil the story being told. Basically, what it sounds like is we're going to pull back the curtain, we're going to push open the closed door as much as possible. It's going to be slow at first. We've got to be careful not to spoil anything.

Yeah, I'd say the key takeaway is that we recognize that we haven't been able to share progress as effectively as we would have liked to with the way that we've been set up. And so we're in an area now where we're willing to experiment, we're willing to tweak things and see what we can do to ultimately give more information. And I think one of the big parts that I'd like to note is that we're going to be looking at Spectrum for y'all's feedback. We'll start a few feedback threads. And we want to hear what you think of the direction that we're taking it. We want to hear your suggestions, and we want to keep that conversation open so that ultimately we can give you guys as much information as we can.

I'm confident that we'll find a way that's informative and gives people a good idea of what we're doing on a regular basis.

Okay, so that's a really good question. One of the things we like to do with our communication style is to be adaptive to some degree. What that means is while Spectrum has a lot of good information, announcements, Ask a Dev, or even frequently developers hanging out in the live chats discussing mechanics or accepting the latest feedback, we also work to provide information on a variety of other platforms that our community uses as well. Now the reason we do this is because everybody absorbs information in different ways. While one person may prefer a text post, another prefers a video, and another may prefer something more interactive like a livestream. So what we try to do is utilize all the tools that we have in our belt to be as accommodating as possible for everyone in our community. And so what this allows is actually some really cool things like getting to send developers to community-run events like BritizenCon, Bar Citizens, getting to do a cool article in a magazine, just to really reach everyone in our community in a variety of ways. So yeah, we do a lot of cool things. For example, a lot of our developers will take the time to actually go on our community's podcasts and videos. And so that's really what it comes down to: it's not that we don't use Spectrum. It's not that we don't use Facebook or Twitter. It's that we try to use a variety of ways to communicate. For example, a number of shows like this one. So information is everywhere and we try to be accommodating.

Yeah, and a lot of the information that you see on Twitter or Facebook is repurposed information that was presented elsewhere, either in one of our videos or on a Spectrum post. So it's reaching out to as many people on as many different platforms as we can. And I think it's served us very well over the last couple of years. And of course, for anyone that's like, you don't spend time on Spectrum, talk to Matt Sherman, Phantom of Spectrum.

I was about to say, that's who comes to mind as soon as you think about Spectrum chat.

Living up in the rafters of Spectrum, waiting for somebody to say something and then rappelling down and saying, ah, here's the information.

And it's funny, you mentioned information coming from Reddit. Well, we're not actively posting information on Reddit. A lot of the information that you may see on Reddit comes from places like our videos, our streams, Matt Sherman on Spectrum.

So our community is such an important part of disseminating our message. And a lot of the stuff gets repurposed to all those things. So we use everything, in every way and every shape that we can. And I think we'll continue to do that in the future because it's served us so well.

Oh, yeah. I think now's a good time. So in the past, we've had opportunities given to our developers and to CIG staff to appear on various YouTube videos or livestreams for members of our community. Now, as our community continues to grow, so does the need for us to streamline this process. And so this is actually really exciting. So in the past, the way it's worked is people from our community would tweet at us or send in a support ticket or try whichever avenue they could possibly get through to see if they could get somebody from CIG to appear on their show. And what we've realized is that we love that we're getting invited to do these things. We want to do them more. So we're going to help facilitate an organized process to do just that. So coming soon, TM, to the website is something we've been working on, which is an Invite a Developer form. And what this basically is, is an opportunity for you to fill out a form that says, hey, what's the name of your show? What are you guys all about? What's your scheduling like? Because obviously scheduling is super important. Our goal is for this process to not impact the game's development in any way. So much so that a lot of our developers are going to be doing this in their free time after hours just because they want to, which is really cool. But in this form, you'll also be able to request things like, let's say that your livestream is going to be all about environment art or procedural planet technology. Well, you can actually put in the type of discipline that you're hoping to get from CIG to appear in your show, and we'll take that into consideration. Now, of course, as a disclaimer, I have to say there's no guarantee that we're going to be able to accommodate every single request that comes in. But I will say that our goal is to be more accommodating than we were before. This is going to help us by taking all the information, all the invitations, all the requests, being able to put it in one place for us to really evaluate how much can we do, how frequently can we do it, and for us just to make this process better so that we can get more involved and be more engaged with all of you.

Yes, thank you for putting that disclaimer in there. Of course, always the highest priority has to be their work on the game. But I think it'll be a good step towards reaching even more communication platforms than we currently do now.

Most complicated animation? I have to think about that one. Everything has its own complexities, right? And there's different ways of solving these problems. I'd say probably the most complex ones have to deal with the ships. The way the ships animate, they're super challenging, just super challenging because they're still building the ship half the time. You're getting the ship to animate it and then they're changing things and renaming things and pivots are getting moved and it destroys your animation. So that's really challenging, just getting the ship animated and then getting the character animated on top of that, because characters got to get in the ship, right? And I remember back when I did the Hornet, I believe Hannes did the first Hornet enter maybe? I can't remember if it was him or if it was somebody from CGBot. I went in after I started and touched up on the animation to make it a little bit nicer. And one of the things I did when you hopped in the Hornet was grab ahold of the yoke, which meant when you grab ahold of it, it's animating with the character and you got all this movement in it and everything like that. And it's like, hey, it's great until they decide to change something. It just completely destroys the animations, and things don't line up. And you're like, why is this not lining up?

So it's like a whole other layer there, because you don't just have to worry about the character, but then the ship's animating, and that's where metrics come into play, right? That helps a lot.

Totally. Metrics come into play. One of the challenges that we have right now with our metrics, and again, things that are going to be challenging: one of our animators is doing all the sitting consoles. In order to get the character to sit in the sitting console and look natural, you actually have to pull the chair. Just like if you were to sit at your desk, you don't just sit down at your desk and you're out like this, I'm working at my desk like this. You sit down and you got to scoot up to your desk so then you work comfortably and naturally. Same with getting out of it. So what we need to do is we need to sit that character in the chair and we need to slide that chair forward in order to have the character feel like they're naturally sitting in this workstation. We call them sitting consoles, but just computers. Like you go on the bridge of the Idris and you see all these AI navigating to these seats and sitting down and working these computers. So how do we do that? We got to sit them down. We got to animate the prop to move forward at the same timing. We also don't want to create like 500 chair animations of them sliding forward. So we can't have a unique animation for each sit-down animation. What I had Vanessa do, she's the one working on this, what I had her do is I had her take what's the average time of the character to sit on the chair. That's when the chair starts to move forward. Make every character fit that template. It's basically an animation metric. So hopefully we only have to animate the chair twice, enter and exit.

It saves a lot of time. A lot of time. Memory. It saves a little bit of memory, but it saves memory as well. The more we can reuse an animation, the better.

I think the throttles and joystick thing we do have.

Yeah, so those are programmatic, right? So when you throttle forward or you're banking or whatever you're doing, dogfighting, what's happening is your character's hands are IKed to that throttle.

What does IK stand for?

Inverse kinematics. Forward kinematics is I grab my arm, I move it, I grab my elbow, I move it, I grab my hand, I move it. That's forward, right? So what we want is we want inverse kinematics, where you grab the end and you pull it. And so I'm grabbing the hand and I'm pulling it out. So what happens is they grab ahold of the yoke and then IK turns on, which now the yoke's in control of the arm. So when you're flying with your joystick at home or your mouse and keyboard or however you're flying, when you're banking and everything, it's saying, hey, I'm going this way. Code says, hey, yoke, you're moving in this direction. And then because your character's hand is IKed to it, it's being pulled with it. So again, back to metrics and making sure things work. If things don't fit and things are not built correct and things are not set up to fit with human proportions and human anatomy, when that thing goes forward, there's a chance that you can IK out, which is joint locking. You see the arm just kind of stretch out like that. Looks really bad and ugly. But yeah, so those are things that we kind of have to watch out for.

I think we showed in this week's episode, actually, the combat speed exits. What else is there?

No, I think that's pretty much it. You kind of have three speeds, right? Think of it as a walk, jog, run.

So it's the emergency exits, which we haven't really shown yet.

Yeah, the emergency, I mean, they're flying. One actor actually broke his ankle or twisted his ankle or did something to his ankle really bad jumping. This guy's a stunt guy too. I think Steve Bender was like, hey, do you really want that pad there? And the guy goes, yeah, that's okay. And he totally missed the pad, off center, and he hit it wrong and he messed up his ankle.

I don't want to be insensitive, but that seems like a perfect opportunity to record mocap for the injured states.

Well, that was there, so I'm sure we could probably use that for something, right?

Oh, yeah. Motion capture is very interesting. It's like in a movie, right? You have these prop departments that build all these really cool things for the actors to use on set. We use PVC pipe and duct tape and gaff tape and plywood and everything else imaginable. We use scaffolding for climbing up onto stuff, and ladders that are strapped to it if you've got to go up a ladder, and things like that. If you want to do something on the fly, I want to do this, you go out there and you put out a bucket and a piece of plywood and you hammer it together. You can do a lot with motion capture because you never see it, right? All you care about is the metric. Is it this high? Is it this wide? Is it this far out from this other thing?

And I remember seeing, we released the video for Andy Serkis a while back showing a lot of the Vanduul mocap. And they go all out with some of that stuff. They had him wired up, so when he would jump, he would fly across the room.

Oh, yeah. Totally. He'd totally do wire work.

Well, a lot of it's production and whoever the upper echelon of management is at the time for that particular feature. So they'll say, hey, these are our goals that we got to hit by this release or 3.0 or Gamescom or PAX or whatever thing that we're pushing forward, and say, these are what we want. What do we have in our current library of animations? If we have something that fits it, then we'll go and we'll draw from that and we'll make it work. And if it's not there, then we go, okay, these are what we need to shoot. And then we spend a lot of time actually saying, all right, because a lot of times you're not only thinking, what do I have to shoot? You have to think, how am I going to shoot this? If it's something that requires a metric, you have to make sure, okay, we got to go to a cafeteria line and we got to get your tray and you got to put on the thing and slide it down and grab the apple and this and your pie and put it on there and grab the tray and walk over and set it down, because you want this incredible mess hall animation of cool interactivity and stuff like that. So you've got to think, all right, how big is this tray? How high is this thing? What are the elements that design needs to be able to hook this up? We need to enter this particular line. And how does it work from there? We've got a bartender scene coming up and we're talking about how does the bartender function behind the bar? Well, we're going to have these zones, and these zones are going to be shot this way. And so you have this zone for mixed drinks. You're going to do the mixed drinks. You have this zone for taps. You can pour beer into a mug from a tap. Where are the glasses? The glasses are kept under here. We have to figure all this stuff out in advance before we can go to the stage, or we could just capture a bunch of stuff that can't be used. And we don't want to do that.

Pre-production is super important.

Pre-production is super important. To the point where, going back to your cockpits, the full-size cockpits that these actors are jumping into for the ship animations, right? All that stuff was measured out and it went to a prop master over at Imaginarium. Him and his team built out these really nice cockpits. I mean, they look like skeletons, like things that you're climbing up onto, but they build all that out and then we show up. And the actors show up and they break their ankle. Or they get on there and they play with it. They figure out how to get in and get out, and then we shoot.

No, I don't think we're thinking quite that far ahead. We're at this moment thinking, let's just get this out.

There's a lot of ships still to work on.

Yeah, there's still a lot of ships that we have to make that are still just the base ships that we have to release. And the Mark II was sort of born out of the thought of... First we did the Constellation redo, because it was just unflyable on the ship. So we had to redo that, which was a free upgrade. And so the Mark II Hornet was the first time we sort of thought of it that way. Like, hey, the Hornet needs a redo. And I was sort of like, hey, I think the Hornet looked sort of old school and a little bit out of date compared with some of the other ships. When we did the Mark II, we were like, well, let's keep the Mark II. The Mark II was, I think, more or less maybe going to replace the old one at first, but then we thought, let's keep the old one, because a lot of people like the old one and the old style and everything. And since it is flyable, we'll just update it and bring it up to standard. So then we just kind of thought of that, like, hey, let's make the Mark II be a new ship, with updated lines and everything. It was sort of born out of that. And we haven't really thought of, hey, we're going to... I mean, since we have thought of that, now, when the game comes out and we keep updating, that's definitely a possibility now, right? We can just take a line and every year, or every other year, however it works, we update the line. And at that point, we'll probably think about design and stuff like that. It's kind of nice, because you can kind of base it off the old one. You can bring out something totally new or you can update the lines. So there's a lot of options.

Well, from the first ship, it's changed quite a bit. It took a while. The first couple of years were a lot of almost pre-production and trying out things. Now we're kind of reworking the ships because we have changed it and improved it so much, also with the help of some of the guys in England. Nathan, he knows a lot about CryEngine, and those guys. They helped out a lot and we built out the pipeline and now it's pretty solid. It's good, it's fast, and now we're able to reuse some of the textures or assets to build ships faster.

I think a lot of people have noticed that and even called it out. It seems like there's a flight-ready ship, a hangar-ready ship coming out practically every patch. And I think that mentality of honing a process over time and structuring that pipeline really goes even further than just ships. It seems like a lot of the content picks up momentum, and then we start seeing large amounts of content get pushed out.

Yeah, it pushed through the whole development, like the characters and the environment and all that. It just gets better and more efficient as you go, and everybody just kind of gets worked in and then it just kind of flows. And for the ships, we definitely need it because there's a lot of ships to be done.