10 for the Chairman: Episode 12 (2014.03.17)

Yes, there will be benefits for ejecting out of a ship just before it explodes.Not all ships will have that capability. The Hornet has it, the 300i will have it, but something like the Aurora, which is much more of a basic ship, doesn't have the ability to eject. Some of the bigger ships will have escape pods that, if you get to them before the ship goes out, you'll be able to get out before the ship goes up in a big fiery explosion.The benefit of ejecting rather than going up in an explosion is it sort of saves a life so to speak.So if you refer back to my Death of a Spaceman write up that I did a while ago, the concept in Star Citizen is that there's a progression in your character's lives. You don't always respawn at the same level of health, and as time goes on, your body takes wear and tear.So every time you get killed in a dogfight, you'll end up waking up in a medbay,--Think of it like Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back--and maybe you've got a little bit of a prosthetic arm, or you've got a scar here.After that happens so many times, your body just can't get built back up or revived, and that character will pass away, and all your possessions and family name or whatever you want will pass on to your designated successor.The benefit of ejecting is that you get to try and preserve a life. Which is something you probably would want to do, and we may or may not have some level of... Maybe your medical bills are less because you don't have to get fixed up as much. I guess it depends whether we have national health in our world.We haven't made a decision on that particular aspect, but definitely you would want to eject before your ship blows up if you possibly can, or have a ship that will give you that, 'cause it will give you an edge.And by the way, on the Aurora you will also, if it's about ready to go, you just would have to get out of your seat and go out the airlock manually verses hitting an ejection button.

You'll definitely be testing the unfinished version of the game because we're releasing the game in these modules that are only part of the functionality of the final game.So the Dogfighting Module is coming up, before that we had the Hangar Module, and then we'll have some other ones like for first person combat and on the planet-side.The primary point of having the community play it is two-fold. One, for people to play it and we get feedback in terms of "Yes this is working," "No this is not working," "These are the things we would like to tweak." So it's like a super massive focus group.And then there's stress testing, bug testing, so we have our own dedicated group of testers, but of course on a game this big with this many things you can do, it's impossible, even if we had a testing department of 200 people, to cover it deep.Luckily we have a testing department of 200,000 people at the moment. That obviously makes a big difference because the amount of people banging away at it means that we'll probably flush out most of the problems, most of the bugs, most of the issues, at a much earlier stage than you would normally do in game development.Normally in game development, it only goes super wide once the game is released, and then it's already out there and then you start to see some things that you didn't even see in your own testing.So hopefully we'll be flushing that much earlier in our process, which is why we have the whole early module and the whole alpha testing.I would say it's a combination of feedback and stress testing, and figuring out bugs we haven't seen. Now that doesn't mean once someone finds a bug in the community that they write up a full bug report or anything like that, 'cause it's probably not practical with that many people, but what it does mean is it's a good place to find problems and then we on the development side can put our dedicated engineers and our internal test staff on it and go "Ok, that's a bug we need to fix, we didn't see that before." It just gives us a great head start.And we'll probably build in some sort of automated bug report tool at some point. It won't be on the Dogfighting Module v1, but down the road it will.

Yes, the game will definitely take advantage of multi-core CPUs. CryEngine already has multi-threading in it, so it runs the renderer in a separate render thread...It runs a separate render thread, it runs the physics in actually several CPU threads, animations run in another CPU thread, the main game loops in another game thread, I think we've got networking in another thread.So in general the engine is already fairly multi-threaded, and longer term we're working at adding in, doing more of that, to take advantage of it, because that's just the way modern day PCs are going. It's less about faster clock speed, and more about more CPUs.Memory, definitely, the more memory the better. We'll be able to pre-cache more, and you'll have higher resolution textures. If we're running low on the memory side, you would probably reduce the textures, where as if you have 16-32 GB, you may get them at the full 4k resolution in some cases, or there'll be less disc loading, so we'll be able to pre-cache more into memory.So I would definitely recommend having a multi-core CPU and lots of memory.Most of my machines all have 32 GB or more. I think you're gonna have to, 'cause there's a lot of developments we have, lots of applications open at once, and usually we've got 6 core or 8 core machines here.