Wingman's Hangar ep029 . July 12, 2013

Well, it's great. When we started the livestream, right after you pushed that red button, we had some problems. We had just an incredible amount of load on the site as everybody was refreshing the page, loading the images, migrating their accounts. It took us about an hour. We added a lot more capacity to the website on the back-end servers, which is actually something we can do on the new site that we couldn't do on the old site. That's a big deal. So it took us about an hour to get up to the amount of hardware for the load.

Which was what? What did we plan for?

It's all technical stuff, right? But on the back end, we had eight web servers at launch. And based on the loads that we saw on the old site, we thought that was more than we would ever need, right? And what we ended up needing was about 20. So the demand far exceeded even our expectations. After we got that worked out, it took us about an hour to roll up those additional servers. Everything has been smooth as silk ever since.

So this week we've had very intensive planning meetings all week long with the team here in Austin, from the design side, and from our web team at Turbulent. We have been working on two different phases. We're going to make some very immediate changes to the website that you'll start seeing in the next week, two weeks, three weeks. We've got about eight to nine weeks of changes that we're going to roll out. You're going to see these things coming out on a regular basis. There's going to be some feature enhancements for the forums that a lot of people have asked about. There's going to be some feature enhancements on the site to make things a little easier to navigate that some people have talked about. That stuff's all going to be really cool.

The feedback we've received has been fantastic. We're listening to all the feedback that we get. We're reading the forums. We're looking at all that sort of stuff. We're also looking at feedback that we find on other sites like Reddit and other places where there are really active sub-communities. So we're looking for all the feedback. We've taken it to heart, and we've got some changes we're going to make really soon. We've also been looking at the longer term of what we want to do with the site once we get farther down the road. We have some really ambitious plans, and it's a little too early to start sharing those plans, but we are going to have some cool stuff to share later this fall, and we'll start seeing some more of that stuff come out. So the website is really exciting. The word I would use is ambitious. We have a lot of plans about things we can do that will be really cool.

Well, it depends on the system, because sometimes a jump point will actually just be a new way into an existing system, which obviously you won't be colonizing. Sometimes a jump point will be into a system that already has a different race there, like a Xi'an or a Banu or a Tevarin, Vanduul, or potentially some other race. And then also there will be a case where maybe it's a new system that hasn't necessarily been discovered by humanity or anyone else, and then in those cases that would probably start spawning some colonization-style missions to bring equipment in to terraform, to bring personnel in to work on the planet and all that kind of stuff. So that would feed into the expanding economy that we would have. And there would be missions to mine raw resources that you would discover. And perhaps if you're an explorer, you could go and chart the different planets or areas out in the outer reaches where you'd find an asteroid field or some other resource that you could potentially exploit.

Well, it depends on what we're talking about on fast travel.

I think they're thinking of jumping into the ship, right?

Which, I don't know, it breaks the immersion, if you're over in another system and your friends are being attacked ten systems over. There's a couple of things that we're going to let you break the immersion on. Friends can drop in and they can drop in on your ship to man it as crew. So if you had an NPC crew, a friend of yours could take it over to control it. But if they were bringing their ships and they were going to fly alongside you, they would have to fly from wherever they were on their ships. But certainly, like you're flying your Constellation, you say, 'Hey, you guys want to fly with me on board my Constellation?', you're not necessarily going to have to fly halfway across the galaxy to help crew the Constellation.

Well, there you go. That's sort of a compromise between immersion and gameplay.

How smooth is that going to look for the person in the side chair if the guy's jerking around the front of the cockpit, I guess?

Yeah, I mean, I guess it would depend on the targeting system on the ship. So if you had a targeting system where the turret moved to where you were looking, then it would probably do something like that. But if it's a more old-fashioned turret, then it would be just the same thing as if you're a B-17 gunner in the back and the pilot does a barrel roll: well, you're going to have to be altering your gun. You're not going to have quite the same targeting. So I think it mostly depends on how you target, whether you're manually targeting or you're doing it on your point of view. And so I would say probably not so much, but it will depend.

How safe is it for your crew to attack? I guess the question is if people crew a ship and pretend they're nice and then they try and hijack the ship from you.

So I don't know. That's an interesting question, how necessarily that would work. I guess you could always insist that your crew don't have any weapons on the ship. So that would make it kind of hard for them to attack or steal it from you. But we really haven't gotten into that level of it yet. So that would probably be something that we would have to think about. There's definitely something that griefers could do in that situation. Although we haven't fully discussed it yet, there's a whole mechanic in the hiring of either NPCs or real players that we're going to do, which is going to be very similar to... In Europe, you probably don't know about this, but in some cities in America there's this thing called Uber, where you can actually hire black cars, limousines, or actually some smaller cars now, and it's on your iPad or iPhone, and it can see where you are, and you can say, 'I need a car,' and it says, 'Oh, a car is 10 minutes away,' and you can see where the car is and you can see where you are. But the cool thing about it is, when you hire a car, you rate the driver when you exit your car.

It's reputation.

And also the driver rates you. So as you go and look for new drivers, both sides can say, 'Oh, look, this guy's a five star. OK, I definitely want to take him as a fare,' or 'He's a one star. No way, I'm not taking him. He's a pain in the ass.' So we're going to enact basically a kind of rating system where both someone that gets hired and someone that hires can rate each other at the end of the job. And so essentially, that's a way for the community itself to say, 'Oh, well, this guy, he's a five-star mercenary, so he's pretty much done all the jobs he's taken. Everyone's been satisfied. He's definitely worth hiring.' And probably that person can charge more money. Whereas someone that's a griefer, like, 'Oh, I'm going to help you out,' and then shows up and has consistently ripped people off, is obviously not going to get a high rating. And that would be someone you would stay away from.

And maybe a bounty put on their head.

Yeah, and also it would show whether that person had bounties and stuff. So I think there will be systems that will enable you to know whether you're hiring good help, so to speak, whether it was NPC help or real player help.

So that's a good question, and the answer is that it's going to have both. So it depends on the kind of mission. Basically some missions can be specified or filtered for various organizations, like this mission would be only for people in the Merchants Guild, or this mission would be only for people in the Mercenaries Guild, or you could have missions that could only be in player-run organizations. We'll be unveiling and talking about some of the stuff we're going to do for organizations that I think everyone's going to be really excited by, which we're going to deploy both on our website and obviously in the game later on. The game itself and other players will have the ability to specify who can take this mission. So you can filter and say, 'I only want it for people of this guild,' that's a player-run guild, if you want. The game itself may not be so specific on that level, but players can be. The game itself could say, 'OK, this would only be for people in the Merchants Guild. This could be for everybody.' So it's a combination.

Well, no, the answer is yes. Some of the Rift implementations that were done on Doom and some of the other stuff were not, in my mind, the best way to do the VR representation. The Oculus Rift should be about where your head's looking. Where your gun is aiming should not be tied to where your head's looking; it should be tied to where you're holding it. So if you were just using a gamepad in the Rift, one of the ways is one of the sticks would control which way your gun aimed, and the other stick would be controlling which way you walked, and then the Rift would be where you're looking. If you add a gun that you can have the feedback of its direction and an Omni treadmill, then yeah, same thing. So yeah, it will definitely be decoupled. I mean, the system's set up to be decoupled. It's just a bad interface implementation that you've seen on some early Rift stuff, which makes the experience kind of weird, because it's weird for me to move my head to aim a gun if I'm in first person mode. I understand it if I'm piloting a spaceship and that's how I'm tagging targets, which is kind of what the EVA thing was, because that makes sense. That's how, say, an Apache helicopter manages its gun, but it doesn't make sense in first person. So no, it's definitely decoupled.

So, good question. Definitely long term, yes, because even though there's a big open sandbox and a lot of procedural stuff, stories, Squadron 42, a bunch of other stuff is pretty important. And we want to have tools to do that. We've got some plans longer term for more linear story stuff. I don't know if it's in the very first release, because we've got a lot of stuff to do, so in the early persistent beta, the level of the mod tool side stuff will be much more limited, and then we'll be rolling that stuff out after we've got the persistent universe running and people are playing with it. We can start having all the rest of this stuff, because there's a big suite of stuff. So long term, yes. Short term, you may have to wait a little bit.

Yeah, because the mod tools we use internally, they're not real GUI, interface friendly for everybody else out there.

No, no. It's a whole bunch of super high-end packages, between MotionBuilder, Max, Maya, the stuff we're using on the motion capture, in the engine itself, Sandbox, Cinebox, which we'll be using on CryEngine, which is the film-side stuff. So it's not particularly an easy one-stop workflow, so we'll have to do some work for that. Long term, that is definitely our goal.