Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - Happy Hour Bonanza

They rotate. They don't orbit right now. Orbiting is going to take a lot of physics power and then it might require us to think how we do IFCS or things a little bit differently. It will bring in a fair amount of headaches that we will need to tackle. I know CR wants it, but obviously, if you think about traditional game design, traditional maps, it's not all of a sudden Germany's right next to the States and therefore makes a two-minute quantum jump versus a nine-minute quantum jump. But these are things that we'd have to take into account and balance. And then also what happens when players are flying into these things and then it's picking up. This planet's coming in and you're flying this way. Or you took off way back there, well, that planet has probably already passed. It presents a lot of challenges, not challenges that we're afraid of by any means. It's a lot of technical challenges. I mean, NASA's been dealing with this for quite a while and eventually we will.

Well, I think at least in, let's say, Lorville, we have the support system to... We have what we call a spaceport associated with it. And then at that point in time, your turnaround time and the amount of time that it takes for you to get into your ship and get out of the hangar, you have a certain amount of time to do that. And then if you don't, then there's some sort of penalty. Whether you get kicked to the back of the queue, despawned, ship gets despawned, somebody else spawns in there and then takes off. But as far as, let's say it was Olisar, and Olisar all of a sudden becomes the hot pocket that everybody wants to go to, then for us, there's a certain amount of docking fees or landing fees that would be associated with that. And based off the popularity, that's kind of how we will deal with it.

It's something we've discussed. John Crewe and I have a matrix of ships and we go through and we talk about it. Different ideas, different things that we feel would help fill out that matrix, whether that be a starter, mid-level, end-game kind of ship. And Chris firmly believes we don't need a starter ship for everything. We don't need a mid-game ship for everything. We don't need an end-game ship for everything. So it really just depends on our interests at the time, what kind of role it's going to play. Because I think with our ships, at least I push for very, very hard theming. These are our heroes in the game, just like the Millennium Falcon is a hero in Star Wars. So for us, we just want to make sure that it has a role, it fits a purpose, it fits that theme, so then everybody kind of gets it and understands what the gameplay will be about with that thing.

I think we need more of the universe to explore before we get gameplay.

Yes and no. Meaning I truly think that we could do exploration gameplay in finding things right now. And obviously, yes, we need to have a bigger playfield. But even now, our playfield is bigger than any other game. First things first is scanning and getting the ping, getting the short-range scanning, and then from there talking about how we're going to do long-range scanning, and then even with our probability cubes being able to sit down and say, okay, if I'm here and I want to scan this way, I open up my lens and I'm looking that way. What are different things in the probability cubes that are in front of me that will show up? And so those are discussions that Tony and I have had, but there's nothing from a tech standpoint that we've been able to put in yet. But we need a full team to do that and to realize that. But that one to me is kind of like resource gathering as well as transit or transportation, meaning freight, people or data. Those to me are very basic careers that I feel that we need in the game.

We have the public roadmap right now where you can see our entire development slate for a year out, and jump points is not on that. When we start to get past that point, we start to get in the realm of speculation and intention. It would be cool to consider this and stuff, but we're not going to have much in the way of hard answers for that kind of stuff.

Even 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, depending on the team's velocity and trajectory, there's changes that happen to those based off of us either not finishing a feature or the feature needs more polish or we came up with an idea of how we can make that feature better. Or even CR is like, look, this is the highest priority for the company now, like object container streaming. Therefore, that's going to have knock-on effects on things. Basically, our goal is whenever we're in that quarter, that thing's fleshed out. We know what we're doing. And then everything else from there is our best guesswork.

And that's the nature of game development. There's a misperception out there that all the answers are figured out ahead of time, because that's how construction works. You have to plot out every single intricate element in blueprints before you send guys to a site and start building.

Right, but there's still building issues that people come up against. In Frankfurt or in all of Germany, they still find bombs that they've got to go and dispose of and deal with that stuff.

It's going to continue to develop and iterate just as it always had. Our own David Colson has taken over work from John Pritchett. John Pritchett has been training him for the last couple months, actually. So it's been a handoff that's been...

Yeah, maybe to add a little bit to that, the tools they develop now for IFCS, in the newer systems, are so much better. Better in terms of the iteration speed. So David Colson and his team have set up the in-editor thruster tweaking. So basically they can really sit there and iterate super fast on the actual thruster tweaking. Just to give you an idea of what they had to do before, we have these standalone XML files that they're typing in values, reloading, trying, typing in values, reloading, trying. It was just the loop; even though it's a two-minute thing, it's something different when it's just two seconds for them to actually tweak it. So it's pretty cool. I think the tools make it so that they can really hone in the flight better.

And I think right now, actually, as we speak, I think we should be going to PTU today with some ESP changes that Colson has been doing. Same with Andy Nicholson. They've been going through and setting that stuff up.

It's also important to remember that we have a development team that's over 500 people now. And even though you see more developers in our broadcast than you will anywhere else, you're still only seeing a small selection of them. It tends to build the perception that these are the only people that work on these things, or these are the most important people that work on these things. And in some cases, like Todd, that's the case, not so much with Sean. But oftentimes it's just important to remember that there's a team. There's a team of folks that are working on any given feature. So when you see a departure like John Pritchett, because he's the only person you've talked to or you've seen, it tends to build that perception that, oh no, it's up in arms. There's a team of folks.

Only some of us want to subject ourselves to being on video and stuff like that. That is definitely not the norm for a typical programmer. And to get Nico Schultz or someone like this on video would be just an amazing feat. But some of us are more comfortable than others going up on video and getting subjected to the chat roll of either Twitch or YouTube, or Reddit to a lesser extent.

Yeah, the face over IP stuff. So just so everybody's aware, it's intrinsically linked to voice over IP.

Because the face comes from the voice.

That's correct, actually. And the way we actually couple the data together, it's the way we synchronize the face and the voice together. So let me give the classic, I guess, Sean explanation where I want to give you all that stuff beforehand. So VoIP itself has a certain amount of data throughput. But to give you an idea, the actual face data on top of that is about one-tenth of what the actual VoIP data is, because when we're sending the face stuff, we're embedding it on the same data stream as the VoIP stuff. And it's nice because it's not that much overhead that actually connects into the VoIP transfer protocol. So we don't send JPEGs or video or images or anything like that to the client. We approach it under the same mentality as we approach procedural planets or anything like that, which is we send the instructions to the client for how to rebuild what's happened on your client, basically. So we send a whole bunch of data over, the client rebuilds it. But it's all connected to that VoIP data. So what's more important for FOIP is that VoIP works. And what's important for VoIP to work is that the group system works. And that basically is chat, group system, and all the rules that go around that. So the FOIP stuff is more or less complete in terms of me sitting here with a webcam driving my face. That works, hooking up to the character creator or whatever. We'll have some fun with it. But we're just waiting on some group system stuff, which is happening for this release. So as group and VoIP come online, FOIP comes in with it at the same time.

I went to AT&T Shape, which was an expo held at the Warner Brothers Studios about three or four weeks ago. And Faceware was there, and they had the demo going, where you're in the bar. It was cool to watch other people, not Star Citizen in any way, shape, or form, sit there and just be amazed at how well it tracks.

And there's new stuff coming up right now. I'm getting a new build from Faceware later this month, and one of the big things that they solved was the calibration issue. The calibration issue, what I'm talking about, is you have to manually calibrate. So that means you've got to stop for a frame, look to the center of the screen and hit a button to calibrate yourself to the neutral. So they're bringing online this new system that auto-calibrates. So basically, you set up your calibration once, you just say calibrate. And as you're talking, it's going to find your neutral and then it's going to map that to the face. This was kind of the biggest quality problem that we ever had, because you could lose your calibration as you were sitting there talking. If you lost your face and then came back in, sometimes the neutral wasn't the same. So this is a super nice thing that'll come in before it actually rolls out to the player. But the next step is just having some good settings and these kind of things. But I don't want to beat that to death too bad.

Are people going to find ways to get them to say calibrate, so it fucks up?

Yeah, and you could calibrate yourself, like cross your eyes and do a silly face or something like that and calibrate yourself to that. So that's why it's nice to have the auto calibration. Because then we don't have to rely on the neutral state of the face.

Nope. Not right now. And I'm not sure that would be the greatest idea. What I'd like to see is that the NPCs have an idea where you're looking, which could totally be done because we've got the pupil tracking. I always thought it'd be a funny demo to have possibly a female standing there. You're sitting there talking to her, and if she detected your eyes were drifting south a little bit, she would just explain, my eyes are up here. It would have a really interesting immersion factor, I think, if you had to think twice about how you're looking at your MISC or whatever. But yeah, we can know where your eyes are looking. I would love it if we can get the floating reticle actually mapped to where you're looking. So the floating crosshair, if we can map that to the pupils. But it sounds better than it actually is, because I've tried it a little bit. The problem is you look around a lot and sometimes you don't want to look exactly where you're clicking. A lot of the times, gamers are too fast. We just look around very quickly and they click, click, click. So, I don't know. We're trying it out, but it doesn't feel right right now.

So, well, right now, I think we have a decent first pass on everything. First pass. The things that we're missing are basically the kiosks where you can actually rent ships, the REC front end where you can rent ships that way, the FPS map, so that being a 3D map versus the map that's currently in there. And then from there we have a laundry list of improvements that we want to do. And I view those improvements as higher priority. I want to make sure that the HUD is legible. I want to make sure that the HUD is... that star maps work in the way that we want them to work. The MFDs are actually working the way that we want them to work.

From a troubleshooting standpoint, while you're developing, you also don't want to necessarily introduce a bunch of variables that your testing community can then start messing around with. Because if they say, like the question before, the HUD disappeared or whatnot, if we introduce the ability to change the color or change the way it displays now, now we don't know where the source of that issue is.

Fun fact is that the original implementation of this, actually, that was all exposed for the designers in DataForge. They could change it at runtime even, actually. And I think for a while, even in one of the really, really early releases of Arena Commander, like pre-1.0 type stuff, they were changing the colors, but exactly to your point, it just became a problem of constantly iterating against the possible color that the guy has. So it's going to have to be a more clever solution than just colors.

The short answer is that it's not done. We're still working on it.

It's actually two different systems. It's part of FOIP, but yes, there is head tracking. It is not a replacement for TrackIR, though. There is latency that exists in the webcam implementation that wouldn't exist in the TrackIR situation. Is it cool for flying around and just kind of looking around? Yeah, totally. Is it good for combat? Hell no. I've tried to aim with it, and there's a little too much latency in it. It's a nice experience. It's still really good for head tracking, but it's not for combat by any stretch of the imagination. So, yes, that will absolutely be supported. It already is. It's on a shortcut for us right now in the editor. But generally, it's going to be an enable in the options. It's going to be up to you whether you want that on or not. And we're talking right now about what actual features you're enabling or not. And the big differential is that we're going to make the face tracking one thing and then the head tracking another thing. So basically, you can enable one or the other or both if you want. And that's that. But yeah, you'll be able to have the head tracking. And I was just playing around with it, and we've just got to tweak the multipliers because right now it feels noisy. So it's a little too amped up.

Delayed is a bit of a misnomer. We had a schedule for all of our ships at one point, and then we revised the schedule for all of our ships, and then we revised the schedule for one of our ships. It wasn't anything specific for the Harbinger and Sentinel. It's a matter of priorities. As something like mining comes online, obviously a Prospector is going to get a higher priority. As needs for Squadron 42 arise, those ships get priority, which is why you have something like the Reclaimer playable now, because it was necessary for Squadron 42, as you saw in the vertical slice last year. It's just a priorities change. It's not a decision generally related to one specific ship or another. It's an overall global thing. It also has to do with availabilities. Not every ship artist is appropriate to work on every ship. Some artists have a style more akin to Origin, and some artists have a style more akin to Drake. And as those artists become available, you tend to rearrange things. Okay, this person's available, so we move that to them. But this person will be available, so we give them a ship that's appropriate for them to work on. There's a lot of factors going in. Like most things in game development, there's not just one reason for anything.

Generally, you don't try to change out your artist halfway through a painting. So it's kind of the same mentality.

It's like for any kind of art. Robert De Niro is a great actor, but you wouldn't ask him to play Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. So you have to look at your team, you have to look at the strengths of your team, you have to look at the availabilities of your team, then you have to look at the needs of the game, and then you have to find the places where those match. Put those together when it comes to scheduling spaceships.