Reverse the Verse: February 26th, 2016

We've got physicalized EVA, we've got the flyable Sabre, hangar-ready Xi'an Scout, 24 player max in instances, the very first installation of the reputation system, made some changes to the layout of the Crusader region of space so it seems more realistic, added some bits and bobs around there. It's going to be a nice update. We switched our exclude process mid-month to one that's better, but it caused all sorts of issues. We had to go back and reimport all sorts of textures and missing models and things. So some of the early PTU builds were a little shaky. In fact, all of space was going red 'replace me' because there was a missing light for a while. Or if you got in, I think it was the 315, the inside of the ship looked like a seedy nightclub. Remember the Windows hot dog stand theme for Windows 3.1? It looked kind of like that.

Oh, Port Olisar looked like that. The landing pads were fine, then you'd go to the edge, and as you looked out over the rest of Port Olisar, it looked like it had a hot dog skin on it.

In fact, we had an initial PTU build, the candidate, last Friday, and we loaded it up, and every single character had a 'replace me' tomato around them. It looked like that movie about killer tomatoes. And there is a new build for the PTU going out later today, hopefully. These things can always get screwed up somewhere between them telling us and it actually happening. They've got a build that's being put together right now. It is looking good. It'll go to the PTU. It's a potential release candidate. We don't know that we can go to live tonight. It'll be something we'll have a go/no-go. We'll discuss that later today after we get a little bit of reaction from the PTU. But at the very least, watch for an attempt at a nice PTU patch later today.

Yes. This is a big discussion on the forums right now. And we've looked into why that happened and how to make it not happen again. And this is what we figured out in the last 24 hours. Several months ago, a tech producer, I'm not going to name any names because I'm not a jerk... You've all seen the earlier concept model with the two seats. One of our tech producers looked at it and said, well, this won't work because you can't have a ship where one person is blocked in. This is a problem with the Gladiator right now and they're refactoring some of it. Essentially, it was a design no-no to have one person blocked in. And their response was, okay, remove this extra seat. It didn't have a function at the point. We hadn't come up with a function for it. Where the process fell down is that that was not really communicated. It was put into our internal Confluence, which is what went to the tech setup team, but it did not propagate to design or community. So that's how that happened. It's kind of like when, you remember that probe that NASA sent? I think it was a Mars probe where they mixed up miles and kilometers. So it was an honest mistake, but unfortunate. So we're going to look at a way to have a second seat. It's not something we can necessarily promise, because it is still a tech blocker and because it will be more work that's not scheduled.

When we found out, it was very soon, just before you guys found out. It was the day we were filming that 10 for the Developers. And that's why Kirk leads off with it in the episode, even though that's not what the question's about. As soon as we figured it out, we wanted to get that information out there.

I told them on the forums that we would figure out what happened. And that is exactly what happened.

I was on the interview with Nikki 'Batgirl' D'Angelo. She does a weekly, sometimes weekly interview with me for some reason. And she asked me something like, is the Sabre still a stealth fighter? And I was like, no, it's not a stealth fighter. In my head, I'm thinking super angular, F-117, actually a bomber. So to clear this up, the Sabre is a dogfighter with an emphasis on stealth. It's like a modern air superiority fighter. Thank you to the person who pointed this out. It's the F-22, the F-35. It's designed to dogfight other aircraft, and to be very stealthy, which in our mechanic means lower signature, lower observability, so on and so on.

As opposed to like an F-117.

Yeah, as opposed to like an F-117 or a B-2 or something. What I had in my head, and this is something we've been discussing as a later in the year concept, is an actual stealth, stealth, stealth something that looks like it's angular and radar absorbent, and its whole purpose is to get into battle, fire a missile and get out or something. So that is what threw me there. Not an intent to reduce the stealth. No design change for the stealth plans for the Sabre.

You have a lot of ship information rattling around in your head.

I do. Sometimes it collides. In fact, there's like a 300 email thread right now that's like ship classifications, and it's every single reference I ever made, they've gathered up, and they're like, but what is a medium fighter? There's no such thing as a medium fighter. And I just reply, no, it's from Wing Commander. Doesn't that make sense to you? Nobody else understands how I think. My brain is too much Wing Commander and 1990s books about World War II airplanes to make sense to anyone.

Not forever. We experiment with different sets, essentially. So it provides us a lot of information to have ships be a little bit slower, look at combat not as quickly. Because obviously one issue that I think everyone sees coming is time to kill. So you want a little bit slower combat in the PU. So we're experimenting with different ways to make that work. Because we don't just want to do that Wing Commander 3 thing where a cap ship starts to explode, and then you have to look away before it does.

In addition to constant changes, we're constantly going to tweak up and down to see what the effects are. There was a persistent bug with SCM in the first couple builds for PTU, where SCM was artificially locking people at 10 kph. I don't remember what the actual speed was. So even when you weren't triggering it, the SCM was triggering on its own and locking people at slower speeds. So that may have been what you were experiencing specifically with the Freelancer that you mentioned.

The Freelancer reminds me, the patch now includes Freelancer damage states.

We use Adobe Premiere.

We use the entire Adobe Suite.

We use the entire Adobe Suite, yes, but they wanted to know if we used Avid or Adobe Premiere. We use Premiere.

We do not have an Avid machine. Actually, we do. We do have an Avid machine. It's on the other half of the office. They're using the Avid machine for Squadron 42 dailies.

I wonder if it's the same one, because Chris had one back in the Wing Commander movie days.

The hardware's pretty recent, though. I had to work on it when we were doing the CitizenCon timeline retrospective.

It's not actually an Avid machine. It used to be called the Avid. It was actually a machine. Now it's a software program. Some people still call it the Avid. When it first came out, it was a machine called the Avid. Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier used the Avid to cut Chasing Amy and stuff like that. Now it's software. It runs on a PC just like our Premiere does. They're actually not cutting dailies with it. They're rewriting the script, using the dailies to make changes. So if an actor improvs a line, they're going back and looking at that footage and changing the master script.

To answer the question, we use Adobe Premiere.

Well, the guys in Austin just dropped, if you haven't seen it yet in Shotgun, a whole bunch of Nyx updated art. Behavior is kicking butt. As soon as Tony Zurovec says we can show you guys, we will.

Yeah, I've talked to Tony about it a couple times. We've shown a lot of Nyx so far, really, but he really wants that sense of awe when you first play it. It's always a balancing act.

And we will always defer to the project leads for stuff like that, as much as we really want to show all this stuff.

That's always the hardest part. We want to show things, honestly, just as much as you want to see things. At the same time, we want to preserve that game experience. We want that sense of discovery in the game.

I'll tell you what. The time to become a subscriber will be right after Squadron 42 launches. Because I will put out hundreds and hundreds of Vaults of stuff like, here's the 500 iterations that became the Deck Firemen and here's the launch offsets. There's so much stuff I desperately want to share.

It's not hung up yet.

I know I've heard Eric Davis looking for the hardware.

We found the hardware. Hennessy's coming out to tell us.

It is hung up. They did find the hardware. They were mounting the holes because there's other artwork going up ahead of it. It's in the lobby outside of the big conference room. Just the glass piece and the mounting stuff is on the wall, so we still have to put the actual raised Star Citizen logo emblem, which goes behind it. There's other stuff that's in there. We're going to get some lighting and stuff for it to make it look nice. But technically, if you go into the under-construction lobby right now, the plaque is actually hanging, and you can see all the names on it.

So as soon as everything is completed with that, I'll get a photo of that up in the Subscribers' Den for everybody.

I mean, there's still a lot of construction, but it is a milestone. It has its place, the hardware has been found, and it is mounted in its resting place.

To add part of this story that you folks probably are not familiar with because you're not here every day, when we moved into the office, the development side was all set up. Our area was pretty much set up. There's been all sorts of construction, minor things like holes in the roof being fixed over the last month or two. But the lobby itself was not done at all. So over the last two months, they've been building the front desk. They actually have to blast a hole in the building where the door is going to be. Right now, everybody comes in the back door. It's going to look really cool. We're going to get dev up first.

Which furniture specifically are we referring to?

What we can see in this show.

No, we built this. This is built from a big pile of wood that we got at Home Depot. So this room, we built from the ground up. And the table is actually a table that came from Chris Roberts' office at the old office that he wasn't using and I had stolen. And occasionally they steal it back from me. So it's kind of a constant back and forth.

This was the Ten for the Chairman table.

It is still the Ten for the Chairman table. Ten for the Chairman on Monday, you'll see this same table, only without the tablecloth on it. We're working on some other more practical stuff that works better, because obviously this table is really small and it doesn't make for a great way to shoot this show and some of the other shows, but we're making do. So slowly but surely we're making progress. We're in the process of having a new desk built. That is where this stuff comes from. I scavenge, I'm a scavenger. I'm Rey.

And then he brings these furniture bits and things to me, and I dole out portions. I hate to say it, but that is actually how this process works. [Hennessy] is like, I think we can build a set for $200 in lumber. I'm like, okay, we can try it.

Yes, so I know there's been all sorts of, I think Mad Catz released their earnings statement and I guess their CEO had quit the day before, and everybody was sure they were going out of business. They're not. They just had a bad quarter, but their actual numbers look good for the future. We're still committed to working with them. But we have told them we want to have the production prototype before we offer them for sale, because we want to make sure the quality is up to our standard. So once we get the prototypes for the first five of them, then we will offer them for...

Can we put them on the table here and show them off?

Yeah, we'll show them off. As long as we're happy with them. If we're not, then that's it for them. No, everything we've seen has been positive. I'm really excited still.

We've talked about that before. That's a very cool idea. It takes a lot of bandwidth, actually, because there are several types of 3D printers, and they all require the models to be formatted differently. And so there's a lot of research that goes into it, and then we'd have to hire an artist to do that and to reduce them, because you don't need 10 million polys. It's a lot of bandwidth. It's something I think we're all interested in. We all would like to do.

People will write in and ask for that stuff. It's really not as easy as pulling the file and giving it to you.

It never is. Ask Mr. Combustible, the guy who made this up there, how much work went into taking our game model and converting it into something that could actually be printed. Firespikes was his helper on that, by the way, so kudos to both of them. It was a lot of work.

In the original Wing Commander 1, Wing Commander 2, Privateer, they didn't have 3D models in the game because they had bitmaps. They had a high-res 1990 model, they would render it in every possible position, and then the actual game contains the bitmapped images and scales and moves them. So I have in my archive most, but not all, of the original high-res 1990s models for Wing Commander, from Wing Commander 2, Privateer, Strike Commander, a couple of others. And when 3D printing, Shapeways, all that became a thing, I was so excited. Oh my god, I'm going to print all the ships from Wing Commander. No, it's way more complex. They did not design those models to be 3D printed. All sorts of holes and things you never see in them. It takes days and days and days just to get one ready.