10 for the Chairman: Episode 11 (2014.03.10)

That's a good one, so I thought that would be a good opportunity to have a side conversation with David about politics and how we thought about how it would work, and also how we thought it would affect the Persistent Universe.So, David, will we be able to vote on the bills the senate tries to pass?

Well I don't think you'll be able to vote directly on the bills, but we have talked about the idea that, the characters in the Congress Now Comm-Links and stuff like that are the actual senators who have been elected.Chris: One thing that I want to let everyone know is that I do see it sometimes where people think that some of the fiction is filler on our site, but that's actually not true. 'Cause I've had some people say "I want to know more about how the game's getting made," and that's cool, because we want to tell you about how the game's getting made, but we actually are very deliberately spoon feeding out the world and creating the universe with our fiction.Like we have an update on Tuesday, we have an update on Thursday, we're actually using it as an in-fiction way of revealing things, ideas, concepts, and intentions that we want to have in the universe, and also in some cases player mechanics.So we've had pieces where we talk about the trucker show, then we talk about the mechanics, or piracy. So the idea of some of the pieces is to, in an in-fiction way, highlight what we think some of the game mechanics are.So I would say that it's probably a good idea to read those, even if you feel like it's a lot of text.Anyway, back onto the point.David: Yeah, one of the things we talked about was having elections basically. The senators that you're reading about now have to run for office again. So we would write up these characters for them to run against, do ads, say what is their belief platform, and all those sorts of things, then let the players vote for who they want to have in office.That would be a fun way for the community to throw us a curve ball, 'cause if we write up a character who, internally, we say is going to become a despot if they elect him, and you guys elect him, we have to accommodate for it.Chris: Like live storytelling, right, so one of our goals is that, once the game is live, we want a lot of the player actions to shape how it goes.We've got a general, big, overall plan, which is inspired by the decline and fall of the Roman empire, but there's a lot of directions it can go inside that large framework that we want to have player-fed. So this is a great example where you have the citizens vote on a senator, and then if they vote for a particularly aggressive, militant, senator--David: Right, or isolationist or something else.Chris: It would effect how we would start to update the content after that. And there's other things we're gonna do.So if there's a battle involving two big groups of players, we're essentially gonna have, think of it as a game master who plays a reporter role. We're actually gonna have some people who's jobs are, when the Persistent Universe is live, to go around recording stuff, then we collect news around the universe and if you go into a bar, they'll be playing it:"Off in the Vega sector, the Terran Federation got into a brawl with the Goonwrathi,"and there's a report. So hopefully if you're playing the game, you'll feel like your actions actually start to become part of lore. It's all part of the whole idea of "Death of a Spaceman" where you've actually got a timeline, our spaceships themselves get wear and tear, the characters get wear and tear, time passes, things change in politics, players effect it.That's all part of the spirit of how we think the universe itself will be, a really fun, cool place. And we're kind of excited because, I mean this is a ways away, 'cause we've obviously got a lot of other things to do before we get to this final state where the full game is all fully done, but we're pretty excited about getting to that point and just seeing what happens. Already just what we see evolve on the forums, on the web, is more than we would have guessed. The Alliances, the groups, and all that kind of stuff.David: Right, well it will be kind of fun 'cause for the average player, it blurs the line and makes it difficult to discern what of what is generated by CIG and what we generated by other players.Chris: Yeah, I think it will be great. It's almost like we will be editorial for player generated content. Which in some ways is also what we're doing with The Next Great Starship. That is gonna be user generated content that is editorialized. We say we think this is good enough to go in the game, we help guide it. I think that will be hopefully a lot of fun when we get to do that, but until then, we've still got a bunch of other things to do.

Well I guess that generally falls in programming and design.I think in some ways programming is design. For me the best game creators, game programmers, have a programming background because essentially, programming is designing a system and how it's all gonna work, and you set the parameters. So yeah, I would guess Lead Programmer or Lead Designer would be mostly what it is.I mean when I started in the industry, projects weren't massive like Star Citizen is, so I was a band of one. I did the programming, I did the design, I did the graphics, I did the sound, I did the writing.But now, on something this massive you can't do all that, so of the stuff I'm doing more, I tend to do some hands-on coding, 'cause I'm kind of enjoying the design of some systems, and then just general overview of design. Art direction's fun too, I kind of like to do that. I guess that's me overseeing the whole project, so that's kind of not answering the question properly.

Well I'm all about awesome first person shooters, so it's not likely to be a third person tab-style targeting shooter. We haven't decided whether you'll be able to pop out to see yourself in third person or not, because sometimes the character's really cool to look at, but in general it's designed as a first person game.Crysis is a first person game, that's the engine that we've built on, and our team that's working on the first person side of the game has a background in first person shooters, really inspired by Unreal Tournament and all of that stuff. But we're not gonna be all quick and arcadey like some of the old style Unreal Tournament and Quake style shooters because of our death mechanic.Our first person combat is slightly more realistic and tactical, and there's more at stake.We're gonna be announcing and sharing more about that probably in, not the next month, but after the dogfighting, we're gonna start to share that, and one of the additions onto the Dogfighting Module will be the boarding.So Dogfighting v1 will be the single seater ships, Dogfigthing v2 will be the multi-crew ships, then we'll move on to boarding, and it will all get tied together which will be pretty cool.

We actually had a meeting earlier today were we were talking about Mobiglas and what it could do. So we're talking about a unified system that will be from Mobiglas, potentially into your ship heads-up-display and if you have a helmet on, your helmet display. The Mobiglas will actually have a mode where you can essentially do what the holotable does, but on the Mobiglas.Then there's some other engineering kind of stuff, you can manage systems, and we were talking about having that happen on your Mobiglas. So you can pull up the different systems on your ship and set them up for different power ratings and stuff like that.I would think that, the way we're doing the Mobiglas is augmented reality, so you would essentially pass the Mobiglas over your ship, then it highlights the hull outline around all the elements that you're thinking about. That would essentially be how you'd see the ship's systems. It will be pretty cool, so there you go.

Yes, there will definitely be a reason to go less than max velocity.First off, if you're in a dogfight, you will be able to turn much tighter at a slower speed, well I should say lower relative velocity to whoever you're dogfighting with or whatever celestial object you're around. You'll be able to turn a much tighter turn because you're gonna be g limited.So your flight control system will essentially keep you inside the limits of what your body can take. If you're going very fast, and you try to pull a tight turn over a very short period of time, you'll experience a huge amount of g's and you'll black out. We're modeling g-lock, and all that kind of stuff. So that will be a reason not to fly at max velocity.Other reasons will be use of fuel, because when you're at max velocity, it's just like a car, you're not gonna be as efficient, and then we have wear on components, and we do model wear and upkeep.So you'll actually see your ship get grime and dirt and age over time as you play. You can take it into a planet and get it scrubbed up, but it will never be pristine showroom quality until you buy a new one. So it will be like a real car, which will be kind of cool I think.

Yeah, I'm very satisfied with CryEngine so far. It's a very powerful engine, one of, it not the, best looking engines out there for the photo-realistic look and and style that I want.Obviously we have some challenges because we're using the engine for something it wasn't primarily built for. I.e. we're having a big open space with our vehicles flying at fast speeds over long distances.Whereas CryEngine is built for first person, on-foot combat, so generally their play areas are more 4km by 4km, or 8x8km whereas ours will be millions of kilometers across. So we have to do modify the engine to enable that, but most of the things that I want to get done are getting done.There is some longer term stuff I want to do, where I want to go seamlessly from space down to the planet--This is very long term, not the initial release--but we're pretty sure that we'll be able to get that worked into the framework of the engine.My guess is down the road, as we get up and running and continue to add more content, the engine itself will be so heavily modified that it won't really resemble the base engine it came from, because we've got such specific needs for what we're doing.But yeah, it's a great engine, we're really happy, we love the look of it.

So we're gonna still flesh that out.Our goal is to have voice over IP, we're also going to try to have this technology called "Live Driver," which we've got up and running, where you can talk and the webcam on your computer is looking at your face and it transcribes it to your avatar so your avatar's mouth moves along the lines of how your mouth is moving.And we'll probably do some level of voice processing on it because there's a lot of real-time filters that we can apply in the sound system that we're gonna use.So it will be cool, it will be sort of like I'm talking to you as a pilot.We're gonna let people hail other people, then if someone accepts the hail, then you can talk to them. You have to accept 'cause you also don't want people always abusing you and spamming you. And if you don't want to use voice chat, you can also be using text chat in a box. So you'll hopefully have both those options.Voice-over IP is definitiely part of our plan, so far we plan to have it in. It probably won't be in for Dogfighting v1, I'm not even sure we'll have text chat for Dogfighting v1, but as it progresses, this stuff will get in there.But I'm sure you'll all find ways to harrass each other without having it built into the system. Probably having Skype open at the same time or whatever.