Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - All About Alpha 3.5

Well, it's definitely a step in the right direction. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that still has to be dialed in. We've got aspects of it that aren't finished. So the next quarter, one of the things we're working on is sort of the VTOL hover stuff. We've actually, on our internal stuff, already done a lot of work on it. So we've been playing around with it and it's quite nice, which is going to make the sort of low speed hover stuff just feel better and give you a little bit more control and also sort of play into the takeoff and land. Because really, with the remodel of the flight model, we wanted to get more realistic, as in the maneuvering thrusters couldn't put out six or seven Gs in every direction and were at least as strong as the main engine, which was like 10 times as big visually. So we wanted to sort of go closer to what it should be like. Maybe not a hundred percent, like The Expanse does a pretty nice job of sort of, I don't want to call it... It's still science fiction, but it's got a little more science fact behind it. Your main thrusters, your main engines should provide most of your thrust and the maneuvering jets are helping maneuvering, and generally they should be more useful in space and less useful in atmosphere, and in atmosphere maybe various lift surfaces, whether it's your wings or tail or whatever, would help you to move. So we wanted to move towards a more realistic model where if you had a ship that had atmospheric features, which we have quite a lot of, they have an advantage in atmosphere over a ship that's not as atmospheric friendly, so to speak.

The Herald.

Yeah, like the Herald. That would be a good example of one. It's not so atmospheric friendly. Or the Starfarer, it's like a big tanker. And so we wanted to have that, and I think I can already see people flying it, people having fun, seeing the difference between the atmospheric and the outer space, and the fact that the maneuvering thrusters are a lot less powerful than they used to be and that you can get additional forces from lift on your wings if you've got more aerodynamic ships. All that aspect's good. The VTOL hover side of stuff will enhance things, because really what should happen on a really big ship where it really doesn't have the power of its... Yeah, here we go. Well, this isn't a big ship, it's a Nox. But basically, say a Starfarer, right? So a Starfarer should be able to slowly push its way up, but it doesn't really have much more than say like one G or something in terms of being able to go up here. So then you have to engage your main engines to sort of go forward and start to go like that. And then that's how you would leave the atmosphere. And if something had big main engines that rotate down, then they could probably go like this pretty easy, or much lighter craft. But I think it would give a more realistic sort of takeoff and entry. And I think with some of the VTOL and hover changes that we're going to bring in for 3.6, landings will be cooler and better. And we'll also be able to get that sort of, what you normally see in movies, or helicopter gunship kind of things where you can sort of be hovering and doing this. So the Valkyrie and stuff could be cooler with some of the newer stuff that we're doing. So we're doing that.

We also have a bunch of stuff that's moved in that works with the flight model, although it's not fully finished out. So we're still trying to balance the component and the heat system and the power system. So there's some hiccups. I mean, this is the first time all these things are working together. And in fact, a lot of the aspects of the power system and the heat system weren't properly working before. So we finally got them to be working. And now, of course, we've got, I don't know, it's like 80 plus actual flyable ships. So making sure all that stuff works and there's balance is going to be an ongoing task over quite a few patches. So this first one, yeah, there's some cases where it's like, oh, well, this is not necessarily what people would call fun or balanced, but we'll start to sort of dial that in and also bring in more aspects. So one of the big things for the next patch is sort of the wear and the tear and the misfires on items. So as the item gets used more, and if it's a lower quality, it potentially could have a misfire or have a critical failure, and that would impact systemically the ship itself and its operation. So whether it's a thruster doing that or it's a power plant or a cooler doing that, it would have a negative impact on your ship's performance and you would see it because it's all done systemically.

So I guess the short story on the flight model is I think that we've made the right changes. It's not finished yet. It's going to be a continual work in progress. We also have some other aspects like the EVA and the missile flight guidance system that we need to switch to use the newer system from the older system. This newer system is a lot more efficient in terms of processing time and power, which is good, because that means we can have more ships out there, AI ships, more player ships. So in general, I think it's a very good step in the right direction. I think from the feedback I've seen so far on PTU, in general, people like the changes. I know there's some debate back and forth on aspects of it or aspects in combat. And I also sort of think that there's so many variables still to play into this that people are going to have to sort of learn how to do things differently. So I feel like people did things the old way, and now with this new way, some people are a little sort of like everyone is when things change. They're like, I don't like it. This is a new way. But I think there will be more variety and there'll be more potential with all the things that have arrived and will be coming in that will just allow for a lot more interest and options for players, especially in the PU, because it's not just about combat, right? It should be about a lot of other things like flight as well as the combat and how you're getting around between places. And we've got a lot of aspects that we don't really have right now in the PU, like we were showing in Squadron where there's the Coil, which is this sort of huge gas cloud nebula that's kind of dangerous.

It affects all your components.

Well, yeah, and also it's in its way its own little atmosphere, so you would perform differently in it. We'll have versions, not necessarily of the Coil specifically everywhere, but there'll be areas where you would go into, say, scoop and collect fuel, for instance. And there'd just be all sorts of different textures of experience that you can have out in space and down on planets. And so that was one of the bigger reasons to sort of move to a more systemic model. So there's definitely more systemic modeling of, say, the thrusters. Thrusters get damaged, and especially when they start to misfire, which will be in the next patch, I think it will be interesting. And I think we'll start to see over time people realize some of the subtleties, and then there will be different strategies and techniques that people use. So in general, I think it's a really good step. It's not finished yet, but I'm quite happy with the direction we're taking. And from my sense on the community side, I think that most people like it too. So there you go.

Well, in terms of quantum, they still need to dial it in. I mean, the concept with the quantum side is that the small, sort of single-seater ships really aren't built to travel across the system just in one go. And there's a reason why you would want a bigger ship like a Freelancer, a Constellation, or go even bigger, like, okay, I want to take a bunch of cargo in a Hull C, or I want to fly in my Idris and go from one side of the system to the other side. So the concept has always been that the bigger ships, they may not be faster, but they're better at extended travel, so extended quantum travel. And this will be a reason, for instance, like, okay, I've got an Idris and I've got some Gladius. Now, I want to get from one side of the star system to the other one. Well, maybe that Idris can do that in two quantum jumps or travels or whatever you want to call them. But if I did that from one side of the star system to the other side in the Gladius, it could take me 10 or 12, right? So that's why the Gladius is on the Idris and then you do the long travel. And then when you get to where you want, the Gladius launches. It's just the same reason in the real world. It's like, yeah, that nuclear carrier can pretty much drive around forever, but the F-18s that you're launching from it certainly can't circumnavigate the globe. So that's the concept.

In terms of it being dialed in for the ships, that's an ongoing process right now. So I think right now it's not necessarily dialed in, right? The way I would sort of feel it is something like a Freelancer or Constellation really should be able to jump from one planet to another planet. It shouldn't be able to do it from one side of the star system to the other side. It would take several. But a bigger ship like an Idris or a Reclaimer could do multiple, span almost the star system or half a star system or whatever you want to take. And the limiting factor that we were considering, because we have this heat mechanic and the cooling mechanic, is that the quantum drive itself is creating this sort of magnetic field around your ship that's sort of pulling you forward. But that takes a lot of energy and generates heat and requires cooling. So the bigger ships have, first of all, the bigger power plants, but also the bigger cooling capacity, so they can really deal with it. And if you look at the Idris and you see the power plant in the Idris, I think we've showed it off, it's like submerged in it. And so that's kind of the concept, that you just don't have the room or the equipment to be able to do that on the smaller ships. But as you get bigger, you have more capacity for that. So it's kind of nice because, yes, the big ships can't fly as fast, they can't maneuver as fast, but they have the advantage of the distance.

And so I think what people have been complaining about is not that concept, but that it's not dialed in. I was talking to John Crewe this morning about it because I knew this question was coming up, and he said, well, from this planet to this planet, it's like 90% of the way you get there with the medium ship. Well, okay, if that's a Freelancer or a Connie, you should be able to get the whole way unless you're interdicted or there's some obstacle in the way. So that's a matter of dialing in the numbers. But for me, the concept that I just talked about is very important. That gives you a reason to have the bigger ships, because they're the ones that you can travel the greater distances with. And that's why you would sort of have a bigger ship that carries your smaller ones. So what we want to do is have a reason for all these different sized ships. We don't want someone to be able to just get in an Aurora and do a jump across the star system the same way that you should be able to do with a much larger ship.

Yeah, so we have talked about exposing it in much the same way as, I don't know if anyone's gone to a car configurator that you can do online for a lot of different car manufacturers. And you can say, oh, I want this color, and you do your sort of customization of the car, and a lot of times it gives you a code. And then if that code gets plugged into that configurator, or you can send it to your dealer, it's all there. So we've definitely considered sharing that.

We've got a whole bunch of stuff that we're going to work on for this quarter, Q2, 3.6. So there'll be a lot more on the DNA. What we've seen right now is the beginning. So we actually have some pretty cool stuff going forward. So there'll be more options, more variety. We're actually going to overhaul a little bit of the user experience to make it easier to sculpt and model your head in a much more 3D manner. So what we see right now is good, but we've got a whole other level that I think is going to go beyond that, that we think is going to be more intuitive and easier to make the head that you want. And it's also part of what we need for Squadron anyway, so it's going to go in the specific Squadron, what do you call it, the Calliope machine or whatever. And so that will be very cool.

And the other stuff that we've talked about is the possibility of, like we have the death of the spaceman, and you pass on to your next of kin, some element of your DNA is surviving and then you're just modifying from there. And we're still discussing the possibility of blending a male and a female together. I mean, you can blend multiple males together and multiple females together, but male and female is slightly more challenging because the actual rig itself is different. In the DNA system, there's a proto-rig for a male, there's a proto-rig for a female. There is a slight difference in the mapping between those two in the bones, so we would have to have a smart way of converting it. But it would be really great to say, oh yeah, here was my mother, here was my father, and this is what I look like, and then you can do some modifications from there. So those are all things that are on the table.

But we will have a lot more hairstyles. I mean, right now the hair is pretty weak. So we have a whole new hair shader setup that isn't in 3.5 right now, but our plan is to release it with the next one with new sets of hair. And that will be an ongoing process, so it won't be like all this new hair, that's it, no more hair, and that's all you get in 3.6. It'll be like, okay, we'll roll out some of them, and then continue to roll them out. Because the current hair assets were built using an older technique, so this newer technique will create better hair and we'll just slowly be adding new styles. We're considering facial hair, beards, mustaches, and a bunch of other stuff. So it's going to be cool.

So that's sort of the early stubbing in for additional content around ArcCorp. The longer term plan is that there could be a building and you could get a mission to go in there and take out a crime boss or something. So if you look at those hangars, you can go down stairways, there's a door, we just don't have it open at the moment, right? But the concept is to add procedural content, not too dissimilar to, for instance, the underground facility that you have in Hurston, here in ArcCorp. So places for delivery missions, or maybe even some combat missions or whatever.

And then on top of that, on a longer term plan, we have the first stage of persistent habs right now, which means that if you get this hab and you have your stuff and move it around and leave things there, when you come back, your hab will still have those things in those kinds of positions, how you arranged it. But the real long term goal is that as a starting player, you get your starting apartment, hab, whatever you want to call it. And it's always like building five, apartment 28. That's always yours. It's not like that changes every time you log on to a different server. And obviously, in something like ArcCorp, there is a vast amount of buildings. So there's plenty of space, even if we have tens of millions of players. But the longer term of the persistent hab system is to allow you a persistent location. And then one of the challenges of that is, okay, well, there could be a thousand building blocks that any one of our players could be in, because they have their own persistent address. How do they get to those? So one of the ideas is those landing pads on top, because then you could just fly to your own little apartment. And then we just have to figure out how you get to the central area. Is there a bus service that runs to a thousand places? Or is there a little sky taxi that can come get you? But those are the kind of things that we're talking about. Like we were talking about in Hurston, if you expand it, it's along the rail line, and maybe there's a place that has three or four buildings off a plaza, and that's repeated around different areas of the city. And so every time we add more players and it gets filled up, we open up a new one of those sections and go from there. So that's the longer term plan for it. So people would have their own real estate. The idea is everyone will get their starting location, and then on other planets or even on this planet, you could go and get yourself, oh, I want the big penthouse. Well, I get this penthouse on the top, but that's a 10 million credit place. I've got to earn enough money in game so I can go buy that place. So that would be the other aspect.

So it is not going to be the only one, although it's going to be the only one until we've fleshed out the Stanton system. So our goal on the Stanton system right now is to get all the planets in and get all the basic landing zones in, right? And then, as we're also creating other systems, we're going to go and be expanding the existing stuff. So you could see more areas open up in Lorville. You could see more areas open up in ArcCorp. You could ultimately see more areas open up in microTech, et cetera. But first we want to get Hurston-Lorville working, ArcCorp-Area18 working, microTech-New Babbage working, Crusader-Orison working. And then, I mean, you've already seen a little bit in this release, there's now a direct line from the spaceport to the business district, which makes sense, right? Because that was how it would be done. We just didn't have time when we did the early release.

Our goal is to keep improving things, so we still have things to do on the city tech. This is our first iteration. There's a lot of lighting stuff that we can't do just yet in terms of real-time global illumination and stuff. And we have plans for it, just those are bigger projects. But in something like ArcCorp, where there's all these buildings with a lot of artificial light, and between night and day it can be quite different, you want the lighting effects and the shadowing to feel better. So I think we've done a pretty good job with the tools that we already have. But it can be a lot better. And so that will be stuff that we'll be improving, and then also improving the fidelity of the buildings, and maybe taking some of the stuff that we've improved for ArcCorp and bringing it back into some of the Lorville buildings, because the first pass of Lorville was lower poly than some of the stuff that we have in ArcCorp, right? So it's just an ongoing process: we get the Stanton system done, we get the base landing zones, and then we'll start to improve those while we're doing the other systems. And as we go, we learn more about how to make everything work better and be efficient.

Well, I mean, the idea with ArcCorp is we want you to fly between the buildings. I've already seen people doing videos. There's a kind of hard deck that you're really not meant to go below, and then your IFCS is going to take over. Right now we're fighting through some issues with getting all that to work well and have the right performance. But ultimately, the idea is, we don't really want players taking their spaceships and landing them in the central plaza, because it would be a problem. So we want to prevent you from doing that. We don't want to blow you up. If you do that, though, what we would rather do is take over your ship or fly you away. Or rather than blow you up, you just fade to black and then you fade up and you're in a jail cell in ArcCorp or whatever, for unauthorized flying, and your ship's impounded. You have to pay a credit fine to get it back. But yeah, we definitely don't want to kill you. And we also don't want to have too much HUD AR visual stuff that gets in the way of the pretty city. You want to see the city, right? So we've been talking about ways of, so even the current one, I think it's improved in 3.5, but it's still probably too much. So that will be something we'll be continuing to work on.

It's a hard balance, because even in the real world today, you can't take your Cessna and fly it over any part of the city and land it on any street in LA.

You've got to keep away from LAX. And if you do do something like that, you will be in trouble. Unless you're having an emergency landing and you had to land on the street, but even then it's dangerous. What we really don't want is someone just taking their Hammerhead and crashing it into the central plaza trying to kill as many players and AI as possible.

But it makes sense from a lore point, is what I was getting at, because less than 0.1% of humans own private airplanes and you can't fly them anywhere you want today, 940 years from now when everybody owns a private airplane...

Well, not everyone's going to own a private... In our world, not everyone owns private airplanes. You're playing one of the, whatever you want to call it, maybe not the top 1%, but the top 5%.

Yes, absolutely. So the current state of the player and the vehicle UI is absolutely not even close to what we want as a final state. And it's sort of become more and more messy over the years as we added features, but it's not been considered holistically. I kind of feel like in some ways our best version of the HUD was all the way back when we did the Dogfighting Module. So we're actually engaging in a full reconcept of how everything should feel and look. It's not coming online yet because it's going to take a while. But we basically want to build it so it has real character, it's usable, and also different manufacturers have different feels, and it's a lot more contextual. So for instance, the visor clutter, right? If I'm sitting in my cockpit and I've got my two monitors here, my ship status should be here, my ship target should be here, which is exactly how Wing Commander worked, right? I don't need to have these two big things cluttering up my visor, unless perhaps I want to say, oh look, I want to cast this to my visor, and you'd have a button on the MFD to cast it up there. And it can be contextual, where it gets smaller or bigger depending. Like right now, there's a huge X there if there's no target. Why would you waste space like that? You want to have as uncluttered a view as possible.

So there's several things. One is the feel and look of that. The second is working on the tech itself, to make it much easier for us to implement it. So up until very recently, we've relied very much on Flash and Scaleform, which is sort of a game implementation of Flash. And it's very difficult. Not that many people work in Flash anymore anyway. And it's just awkward. So we started about a year ago building our own UI building block set, to not have to deal with ActionScript, not have to deal with Flash. It's a totally different thing. And it's been led by Zane Bien, who's our senior lead UI, and so they're starting to pull it together where we have these various different building blocks that we can put together. And it should be much easier and quicker for the game teams to implement the UI, because right now it's one of the reasons why our UI is a bit... it's just hard to get UI resources to deliver all the UI we need, for DNA or for cockpits or maybe glass screens or whatever. So we are going to fix it. It's going to be much better.

Well, we did do some things, whether it was brightening or looking at putting a drop shadow, and we haven't finished that. It definitely will require more work. From our standpoint, since we are trying to refactor the UI tech, we're moving to our own system that's more flexible, that is much more 3D object or holographic object based. Because all this stuff is engineering time on graphics, and everyone's got two years' worth of work in their backlogs, we didn't really want to focus too much time on a dead system, and have that come in more with our new system. Because in the old way, it's too patchwork in terms of how the various elements get displayed, it's too custom, it's a pain. So we'd rather change things out and then work on a more proper solution. So we've done some stuff to improve it, but yes, we haven't finished, and we will. That is something we would like to make a better solution for, whether it's more a drop shadow or detecting what the value of the background is and adjusting to that on a more dynamic basis.

Yeah, no, it sucks. I mean, basically, the problem that we have is that the client-side object container streaming made a massive difference for the client frame rates, which people can see. You've seen people play at 60 plus frames a second. But on the server, since we are not doing the streaming, as we add more content, so we've got all the moons, we've got Hurston, we've got Lorville, now we have ArcCorp and Area18 and all the stuff, the object and the entity count on the server just keeps increasing. So I think we have something like 330,000 entities that are being updated on the servers. We've actually done quite a lot of optimization on our entity updates and a bunch of others. So if we had exactly the same as we had in 3.4, you would see an uptick in the server performance. The problem is, because we've now just added a whole other planet and a bunch more moons and a bunch more entities that are sitting around all the time on that one server, the server is the bottleneck right now. So the server starts to get slow, like really slow. Our target for the server ultimately is 30 frames a second. But now the servers could be at 10 frames a second or five frames a second. And that manifests on the client side, because things are moving around on the server at a much lower fidelity than they are on the client. And that's why sometimes you can see jumps or jitters even if you've got a decent frame rate on the client side.

Object container streaming on the server is what will fix that. And it's also the first stage of server meshing. So the concept would be that you're playing the game and there's a server that only has ArcCorp and Area18 streamed in, and it's just simulating that. And then there's one that's doing the same for Hurston, and there's one that's doing the same for a moon or whatever. And as you as a player go between these locations, you're getting handed off to these different servers. And the servers dynamically can stream in whatever area they care about simulating. So that's the very first step of server meshing, for which we need to have the object container streaming. It's basically the object container streaming plus the very first step of the server meshing, where we have servers that handle areas and they're sort of static. And then the final version of that is that it's just sort of fluid. It's always spinning up and adding servers as it needs them for load. So that's what we are working on right now. We have our top men, and we really have top men, not the Raiders of the Lost Ark version of top men, like Christopher Bolte and Steve Humphreys and stuff. This is what we're working on to get going.

It's the same problem we had without the object container streaming. We couldn't have added Hurston on the client side. And unless we get our server stuff up and running, which is happening right now, we won't be able to get the full Stanton system with all this detail all working at once, because the servers themselves get bottlenecked. Because outside of the entity updates, we still have the issue on physics, where the physics is constrained to a limited number of threads. And we're working on the physics system to stop that. So this physics system will move from the parallel threaded system, which has four separate physics threads running, to what we call a phase batch model, which would be: you update all the entities, and every core in the server does all the entities together. They all work together to get it done. And then once you do that, then you update all the physics. Every core does it. Then you do all the rendering with every core, which is not on the server, but on the client you would do it. But that's what the phase model is. So instead of being parallel, you basically do things in steps, like update entities, update physics, update animation, render. As you do each one of those phases, you use every single core you possibly can on the computer to do that work. So it gets done much quicker. So we're moving from the parallel threaded model to the phase batch model. We've already done a lot of that. That's a lot of what we've been talking about on the entity system, and we've been moving over to that. On the rendering side, that's why moving to Vulkan is important, because Vulkan allows you to do that. We can't do that with DX11. It doesn't matter how many cores are working on it, you've got a constrained pipe in DX11, but in Vulkan, you can do a whole bunch of stuff in parallel. So we're moving to that. So the combination of that with the object container streaming and first stage meshing on the servers will allow these star systems to expand out. So that's all the background tech work that's happening right now.

Well, okay. So there is a level of persistence now. For instance, what you leave on your ship or in your hab now should persist. Obviously, what happens to your items, their state and stuff, should persist, not between patches, but during the patch. But we're doing a complete refactor of the whole database, the item cache, and that's the other big hand-in-hand job that's happening with object container streaming and server meshing, so we can persist everything much more easily. So the goal is, if I'm running around and I drop my gun in the woods somewhere in Hurston and I leave, when I come back, that gun will be there. And obviously there'll be some limitations, like we'll only allow so many objects in certain areas. And if someone, when everyone's not looking, probably just came by and took that gun and got rid of it... We'll do garbage cleanup if there's too much stuff there, but the idea is that fluidly you can persist anywhere in the game, whether it's in space, whether it's on a planet, whether it's inside a room or a location. So we're refactoring the database to be able to do that in an efficient manner, so we can properly persist states, objects and locations, which also is necessary if you as a player decide, oh, I'm going to set my base down here, and you put your own little outpost somewhere, that persists. So we're building the structure to do that.

And then the other thing that's actually quite important for me, and I think everyone on the game side, is that we currently wipe the database between patches. We don't want to do that. So once this refactor to the more flexible and fluid item persistence cache happens, it will enable us to not have to do that. Because the only reason why we wipe the database sometimes is because some of the data schemas have changed, for how we're storing item data and stuff like that. But with the new setup we don't need to do that. So the money you earn, or the items you've gained, or the ships you've earned in the game, you can persist from patch to patch. So our goal is, even if we roll out a new patch, we're not wiping the database. Now, we'll reserve the right to go in there and make some unilateral fixes in case there was an exploit and everybody earned a bunch of money. We'd reserve the right to say, I'm sorry, we're going to have to take that money back and those items you bought with it. But the goal would be that people should be able to play, keep their character going from patch to patch, not have to start from scratch again. Because it's fairly frustrating. It's like Demon's Souls. It's like, oh, I died, I gotta start from the beginning again and go all the way forward. Because right now the motivation for you to be earning money so you can buy that ship or the item is not so great when you know the new patch is coming up, because you know, okay, I get it and I'm going to lose it anyway. So we want to be able to persist that. And then, of course, there's things like additional insurance, like item insurance. So again, I bought my gun, and I get some extra item insurance, and if I lose it, then I can have a chance of getting it back. So I think those are all things that would encourage people even now, even though the game isn't fully finished, to be playing it like it's a finished game and building up their possessions and character and really engaging.

Yeah, so the object container streaming on the server is happening now, and the persistence stuff is being worked on. The tasks are happening in this coming quarter and the quarter afterwards. And then the first stage of the meshing is in some ways hand in hand. Because the problem is, even if you're streaming on the server and you don't load everything in, if I have players that are in 50 different locations and they've hit every area of the content, that server will have had all those areas streamed in. So it's going to be spending the same amount of processing power that it's currently spending right now, if the players distribute themselves all over the place. So the way it really becomes effective is when you say, you as a server, you're only really focusing on this area, and then it only has that part of the area loaded in. So the server object container streaming will come pretty quickly together with that aspect of it. You've got to have the streaming aspect there so you can just load in this place. But then what you need beyond that is the handoff mechanism, so a ship can hand off from one server, say, taking care of Hurston, to the server taking care of general space, to the server taking care of ArcCorp, for instance. But I would say expect to see the persistence changes come... I mean, go take a look at the roadmap, but these are all things that we're working towards this year.

Well, definitely, yeah. I mean, depending on where we were and what we're doing on the server, we could quite easily do more than 50 players right now, because we've made a bunch of performance improvements. So for instance, if we were doing a game mode like Arena Commander or Star Marine, we could probably have a mode that had a hundred players, because we wouldn't have this huge system that we have to simulate on the server. And we've made a huge amount of performance improvements because we know we have to scale for this huge PU universe. So as long as you don't have to simulate all that, then the processing for the individual players or clients wouldn't be so relevant. So you could potentially see us have a game mode that could have more than 50 players in a more limited fashion. And then on the main PU side, that will depend on the backend server side. When we get the backend server side in the way I've described, then we can up the player count too.

That is not the same as confirming or hinting at a Battle Royale mode. It's one thing to say that we have the tech to do something, not to say that we're planning to do something.

We're not planning on doing that, but we are looking at ways to make Arena Commander and Star Marine, like I think we had on ATV yesterday, relevant again. Because the difference is, you may want to practice dogfighting, you may want to practice your FPS skills, and not do it in a situation where you're going to lose things that you've earned in the PU. And then the other thing that we're quite keen on is some of the cool stuff we see, like, I don't know, Rexilla puts together cool games or whatever. It'd be nice to facilitate that sort of interaction or gaming experience happening for our community. So those are all things we've talked about. Nothing is happening right away, I don't promise anything, but those are all things that we're interested in doing, and we could do some interesting stuff because of all these performance improvements that we've done over the last few patches to enable the PU growing to the size it has. As anyone knows, if you play Arena Commander, I think it's just locked at 60 frames a second, as is Star Marine.

Well, so right now, even though, yes, we have some performance issues in quite a few areas, we can also be render bound. And we're partly render bound because of just the complexity of the scenes and the fact that DX11, and how you talk to the graphics card, is not as conducive to a multi-core, multi-threaded situation. And so once we move to Vulkan, you can do that. So you can have a lot more of what you would call draw calls, right? Right now we do a lot of special tricks on the graphics and art side to have very detailed objects but actually keep our draw call count down. I think we normally aim to have 5,000 or less draw calls on the screen at any time. With Vulkan you can have 50,000. You just have a lot more. So the fidelity of the scenes can be greater, and we maybe potentially don't have to jump through quite as many hoops or do as many tricks. And so it will allow the game to grow. And then importantly, if you're doing something like VR, of course, you're rendering left eye and right eye. So you're rendering twice. So if you're constrained on the render side, you're doubly constrained. So Vulkan will, with a powerful machine, help you to be able to render proper VR at a decent frame rate that you would need to not get motion sickness. So Vulkan first, then it would be VR.

Yes, there definitely will be legitimate ones. There are actually already some that we've recorded and shot. They're just not in the game yet. For instance, on ArcCorp, I believe there's a Blacjac Security rep that will give you more lawful missions from ArcCorp's standpoint. Definitely on microTech there will be. I mean, Hurston, Constantine Hurston really is kind of a representative of the Hurston setup. He's a jerk. He's not evil or anything. And longer term, you'll be able to get missions from, say, for instance, the Advocacy, or perhaps the UEE military will reach out to you for something. So we're going to have all sides of the spectrum, both legal and illegal. Law and chaos, so to speak. So that's just the implementation of the mission givers. We're working on that pipeline to make it more efficient, make the AI logic better. So once we've got that down better, we should be able to turn out more of them. So there's a lot of things that you see in the current PU that are the first stage, but we're also thinking, okay, how do we scale this so we can do this across many star systems without having it all be so painful or brute force. And so that's a lot of what you've seen in the Stanton system: us doing this and then figuring out how we can do it much more efficiently and at more scale.

Yes, well, we should get roads in. The planet team actually implemented what they call the road tool, where you can draw roads on a planet, two years ago. And then the environment guys never used it. And then by the time the environment guys said, hey, let's do some roads, it was broken in the editor, and everyone had so many things they didn't fix it. But it is on our list to address roads, because we actually had it in the system and then it kind of broke with some of the changes, because they keep on reformatting the procedural planet stuff. So I would anticipate at some point in the future that there will be roads. I'm not 100% sure when you'll be seeing that yet, because I would suspect even with microTech the first iteration would not really have the roads in. Probably not. Crusader definitely won't, but sometime next year. But yes, there is actually support for that. We want roads, rivers. We have a whole backlog on the procedural planet stuff of the various features we are going to support. Some of them we saw previews of, like the caves, which could be quite interesting to add additional adventures and content to the game. So it's just an ongoing process. Like I said, every one of our teams has a two year backlog of really cool tasks that I'd love to see in the game now. And it's mostly because we've said, okay, we're building this at this level of fidelity and you pretty much can do anything. And we want to make it systemic and we want to give everyone that experience that everyone fantasizes and talks about. And I feel like every release we get a little closer to it, and it's really just kind of cool.

Yeah, no, it's super useful. So in all our PTU releases, Michael Smith, who heads up that aspect, does a whole player feedback analysis every release internally, and we're listing the top issues and features, and there's linking to discussions of it and the Issue Council reports of it, and we can look at the bugs, and they get passed on to our developers to fix, and they get converted into our internal Jiras. So it's super useful. I mean, it's great. With the PTU, we have this huge group of completely enthusiastic and committed game players that are helping. You can get super insular when you're developing something, and all the testers are used to stuff. They've seen it from all the internal testing they've done. And so it's really nice to get feedback from outside people. And there's plenty of issues that come up that we don't see internally, that we only see in the PTU environment or even the public environment.

Well, so on the multi-crew side, we have a whole bunch of functionality that is on our backlog and that we will be implementing later on this year. That involves the ability like, okay, I'm the captain of the ship. I'm going to give you rights to be the comms officer. And I'm going to give JJ rights to be the weapons officer. And I'll give you access to this part of the ship, but not this other part of the ship. So there's a whole area where the captain can grant access and control to various people, and it would encompass pretty much all the functionality. The problem right now is that we've just got a very basic setup. I think we sort of said, well, we lock the ship unless you're a part of the group, right? But as a captain, I could have an option and say, I'm only giving access to you, not a group. Or I can say this whole group. Or we could even have things where the captain could say, oh, the code to enter the ship on the little keypad is one, two, three, four. And then as everyone knows it's one, two, three, four, they can key it in and enter. So that functionality is planned. It's on our backlog. It just comes in with our multi-crew stuff, which will be showing up on the roadmap that we'll be sharing going forward.

Well, the view from orbit that you see now is actually the proper view of the planet. In the 2017 version, we didn't have a way of distilling that down. So we had a texture, admittedly a cool texture, that was swapped out when you got to a certain level. But right now, if you actually do the fly down, the transitions are much better, and you can actually see Area18 properly from space. And even that level of stuff is some of what we're talking about improving going forward with the ArcCorp stuff. But what you have now is you can go everywhere, and there's nothing brushed over or faked. In the '17 demo, we did a lot of stuff, but there was definitely, if you went off the track of the demo, it wouldn't look as nice. And that aerial shot looking down was a texture with a nice illum thing on it, versus what we have now, which is actually made up of the different procedural areas. Plus you can see Area18 and stuff like that. So the new way is a more accurate way than we had in '17. And okay, it doesn't work as well in the individual screenshot, because everyone loves Coruscant, which is what we modeled that texture after, but Area18 isn't set up like Coruscant. It hasn't got these concentric circles or anything like that.

Yeah, that's on our priority list. That's along the same lines as the stuff I was talking about for multi-crew gameplay. It also factors into the FOIP stuff. Right now we still haven't got the proper full functionality, because say you're doing FOIP or VOIP, you should be able to walk into a bar and everyone in your vicinity can hear you, but you can also be on a comms channel to your buddies, like over radio. But right now you're either in one or the other, and it's kind of a bit clumsy. So these are all things where they have to do some refactoring on the backend services to allow multiple channels at once, but we'll fix that. And on the org side, it's having permissions on a group basis. So we have a whole bunch of plans for that, like, okay, if you're a member of this organization, you'll have access to this location. Or, hey, as an organization we could purchase a place, and then all the other people that are part of the organization are given access to it, which is again not dissimilar to the way I was describing the multi-crew ship captain behavior. So we want to fully bring the org stuff across into the game. That's always been the goal. The first step was getting Spectrum partly integrated with what we did, and we haven't finished it off yet. So that is on our roadmap. It's on our backlog.

And again, it's just we have 540 people and it doesn't seem like it's enough, and they've all got loads of work. And it does become more complicated, because as the game becomes bigger and has more features, just adding new ones becomes more complicated, because you've got to test it with more things and you've already got an existing game. So in some ways, the trajectory of how long it takes to get a feature in is longer now than it would have been, say, four or five years ago, when you didn't have this whole inertia and momentum of the current code base and the current functionality. Just think about it: if we change one aspect, say on a ship, right? Like we say, oh, you know what? We want to make the thruster effects better. Let's redo our effects manager for the thrusters. There are 80 plus functioning ships right now. So that effects team has to go into every one of those ships and change it out. It's the same if we change how landing gear works. That's what happens as the game gets bigger: you change a system over or you improve a system or add a new system, you have to also make sure it works with this huge amount of stuff that's already there. And so the testing takes longer. A lot of the work takes longer than you would think because of the sheer scale. So in some ways, we're prisoner to our own, I don't know whether you'd call it success, but our own ambition there. But I feel like all these things we're talking about, we have them on our roadmap, they're in our backlog, and we're just knocking them out. I wish we could knock them out a little quicker, but at this point the trajectory is the trajectory.

I mean, you can even see now that 3.5 has actually a lot of stuff in it. We have a female player, which had a huge... I know you could say, oh, well, it's just a different character, but it's not, because the dimensions are different. Usually in a lot of games, the female character and the male character are exactly the same size. It's the same skeleton. It's just a different skin. That's not the same for us. We changed the proportions and everything to be more accurate to the differences between male and female. And so that had a whole bunch of knock-on effects. So we had to deal with cockpits, or sitting down and using things, because it's a matter of reach. And that's why you have sliding seats in cars and stuff like that. And so that took a lot. And then, of course, there was all the equipment or the armor you had that all had to be changed to have a version that would fit on a female character versus a male character. That's a massive amount. And then there's ArcCorp, which is obviously a whole new planet, and there was a bunch of new tech for the buildings, and we're still not even close to how we want to end up on that. And then the DNA, which is a massive thing, the face customizer, completely different. You may think, oh, I've seen that in other MMOs, but the system underneath it is a completely different approach than almost any other MMO uses at the moment. And it has one process where it's all blended together. And so you don't have the crazy monster creatures that you sometimes see people throw up on YouTube and stuff. And we've actually got some improvements, like we can do asymmetry with it. You can't do it right now, but in 3.6, very likely we can make you do asymmetry. So you can make some ugly people, but they would be plausibly ugly people. Sloth in The Goonies. But yeah, so you have that. So that's massive. The flight model, that was a huge engineering effort. And then speaking of ships, a lot of the fallout on some of the flight model stuff is that we've changed the flight model and everything has to be redone and rebalanced. And then of course, the heat management and all these systems and all these items. So you're talking hundreds, if not thousands of items and almost a hundred different ships. So not only do you change it, but then you have to redo it and rebalance it. So that's a lot to deliver. So I'm really proud of how much everyone's delivered for this quarter. It's really impressive. And they've added a bunch of extra mission stuff. I think maybe today's PTU even has new spoofing bounty hunting mission stuff that wasn't in any other PTU. There's a lot of gameplay, there's a lot of functionality that's going into this. And of course, we're also making quality of life and visual improvements. So I feel like we have a good team and we've got a good pace. We're still trying to bring more people on board to help shore up some of the areas where we know we need some help. But it's kind of exciting. Honestly, I would say look at other games that are doing live release updates, and are they really doing as much as we're doing every patch in terms of content and features? And I would say probably not. Of course, not many other people have 500 people working on it, but it's good. So we've got a pace. Like I said, I wish it was a bit quicker, but I think it's what it is considering the scale and the complexity and the detail of what we're working on. And everyone loves what they're doing and they're working really hard to deliver it. So hopefully you guys enjoy it.