Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - Persistence and Scanning

OK. So this is a bug that actually we knew about before even going to Evocati. This actually did work at one point, but there were some changes. There's actually quite a few changes that happened to persistence and the way that we handle persistent data throughout the 3.0 release. And it was just one of those bugs that we knew about, clearly identified, had repros and everything for it. We just didn't have the time to dedicate to fix it. It was one of those things that we decided that it was okay to let slip for this particular release, and we are absolutely going to fix it for 3.1. We did release a follow-up patch in 3.0.1 that solved it in part. There was actually a large amount of persistent data regarding the player that wasn't getting sent to the game server whenever a player would log in. And it would make it to where there were certain persistent behaviors that wouldn't track across servers. That has been fixed, but it doesn't completely fix this particular issue. So we just need to actually dedicate the time to it to actually investigate it and fully kill it off. But yeah, this is something we've known about and we're absolutely going to fix it for the next release.

All right, so just to clarify, it's actually not a feature we're waiting to implement. It's something that's supposed to be in now.

Yeah, it's a bug that this doesn't happen. Both just like, say you signed out at Levski, you would expect you respawn in that Levski, but also the ship spawning feature, our logging off feature that we added, in that in certain ships you can log off in the middle of space and then actually re-log in and be back where you were in the middle of space. And so that is something that we worked on and was actually working. It was actually kind of a Rube Goldberg machine of persistent data to get this thing to come together. And we actually had it working, but then it broke, unfortunately. But yeah, we'll get it working again.

One of the perils of running a live game environment in the middle of game development. I do want to add one more thing just to cover your butt a little bit. You said it'll definitely be in for 3.1. I want to say that it is our intention to have it in for 3.1.

It is definitely our intention to have it in for 3.1.

But just like we didn't let it stop 3.0 from going out, we're not going to let it stop 3.1.

That's right. We'll always identify what really has to be in the minimum viable product for the release. If this ends up being cut, again, it's not because we didn't know about it or it slipped through the cracks, it's because we felt like there were some other more critical features that we needed to give attention to.

And I'm actually going to field that one myself for a couple of reasons. One, we run these things, we make these shows, Calling All Devs, Reverse the Verse, Around the Verse. We are doing this in the middle of active game development. One of the challenges of that is that in the middle of active game development, you are still developing things, and one of the things you're developing are the answers to these questions. Now you'll see a lot of comments from Chris Roberts over the years on either 10 for the Chairman or Wingman's Hangar or ATV where he'll share ideas of how he wants that system to work. We've mentioned in the past that's a good use for multiple game packages basically. Every game package you have equates to a character slot, and of course, then the possibility of selling additional character slots. These are still things that we are open to exploring. But right now, there are no plans to implement a multiple character slot system in 2018. That's something that's a little further out on the schedule. So because it's a little further out in the schedule, we don't have the locked down answers for that system now. It's simply a matter of priorities.

Okay, yeah. Beyond salvage, absolutely. Scanning is in the process at the moment; we're getting the baseline of what scanning is. Kirk's team in LA are doing great work and just kind of getting that delivered. But if you don't want to know about how we scan other ships just in general... Well, no, I mean, we've got salvage, but that's different to just normal scanning anyway. So we've got your normal scanning, which is: see a ship, I don't know who that is, I'm going to see what's inside kind of thing. Which pirates will be using and which everyone will be using. And all scanning is made up of two parts. We've got location and then we've got analysis. So you'll ping and you'll identify with the radar that something's over there and that's worth my interest, and so I'm going to go over there. And then when you get the thing that you want to know about, you'll scan it and you'll analyze it and you'll get a readout of what's inside. And so that's kind of the fundamental of how all scanning is going to be. You locate and you analyze. So for salvage, even though you don't want to know about it, for salvage, you will locate derelicts and you'll scan it and you'll find out what metals it's made up of and how I can use this to strip it for parts. And so other things we're looking at in the near future will be mining that's coming through. And so for mining, we will be locating deposits of resources. I want to go over there to break up these asteroids or that field or whatever. And then when you get there, you can analyze these rocks, analyze the ground, analyze the asteroids and see, okay, this has got crud that I don't need, there's too much waste in here. Ah, this is a thick vein of gold or something like that. So again, taking the same phrase, location and analysis. And that's what we're looking at. But I can't really say when that's coming through, but that's where our heads are at the moment with both salvage and mining.

And just to tack on to the when question, I know we're having a little fun here. It's because the people who are developing these features are not responsible for the scheduling and stuff. They do their work. The people that can tell us about a thing are usually not the people that can tell us the when of a thing; that's different departments. So I figured the thing that you want to know more about is how it's going to work anyway, because the answer to almost every when question is when it's ready.

Yeah, these will be the first implementations of the system.

The Merchantman. So a little bit of bad news in that it's unfortunately not on the active ship development schedule for 2018. Last year we did commission an external artist to do some concept art for us, which was delivered and we approved. And we're just under-resourced at the moment to be able to move it into the 2018 schedule. So as soon as we get those resources freed up, we'll begin to schedule working on it and get it released to the community as soon as we can. And I'm sure that when we do get those resources freed up and start working, you'll definitely inform the community about when that's available.

Yes, you can be sure the very first Ship Shape when this happens will be me running around the camera.

It's happening! Obviously, we're working on as many ships as we can at the moment and we're just booked up. And since so many resources are required to get ships in the game, we just have everyone working at 100% capacity.

You mentioned that we did do some outsource concept work last year. We've actually shown those images. You saw those images on Around the Verse last year when we did features on the Banu and the Banu Defender. We wanted to flesh out more of the Banu style guide when developing the Defender. You guys have seen everything that exists for the Banu Merchantman at this time. So like Kirk said, when its time on the development wheel comes up, you can be darn certain that I'll be right there on a Ship Shape telling you guys.

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.