10 for the Chairman: Episode 32 (2014.08.04)

Yes! I will! Heheh... no, it's really important for me. I mean I think if you know the games I did in the past - you know, Wing Commander onwards - they were always trying to set a visual bar, and sometimes they probably went beyond what most of the machines could do at the time. Strike Commander is a pretty good example of one that, on a 486 66MHz it was a pretty amazing experience, but if you didn't have something like that then frame rate wasn't so great and all the rest of the stuff. But it was the very first PC game that had real-time proper 3D texture mapping, Gouraud shading... so it had a whole bunch of stuff that didn't show up in other games in the PC gaming world until quite a few years later. And that was mainly because we were sort of pushing it, and we read up a whole bunch of white papers from places like SIGGRAPH and tried to adapt that into the old days of software rendering - which luckily we don't have to deal with now with all the hardware rendering.But yes, so I'm very keep on pushing it. One of the reasons why I picked CryEngine was that it's visually a very advanced engine. CryEngine is the engine which did Crysis 1, which I think probably to this day is still sort the game you would think about that pushed the PC hardware platform, and was probably the last one that really had that ambition. I really would like Star Citizen to continue doing that. So CryEngine was a good base but we actually have a fair amount of graphics engineers and some core engine people, so besides the stuff we get from Crytek which actually trying to do some really cool stuff ourselves and enhance it, and we will continue to try and push it. So whatever is available in 2015, and beyond (2016, etc) we will always be trying to upgrade the visuals and push it. You can sort of see it as the game goes along. The Hornet has now been through 3 iterations; so there was the iteration from my original prototype that I showed in 2012, then we did an up-res of it for it's first debut in the hangar, and then we did yet another up-res of it for the dogfighting module, where it got fully PBRed and stuff. And you've seen the 300i get an up-res from it's hangar version, and we're doing similar stuff for the Constellation, and the Aurora, and a bunch of the other ships. So we're always constantly trying to look to push it and make it better, and I think that's one of the reasons why you guys are excited by Star Citizen.

Yep, so ship skins are still slightly up in the air. Longer-term we have a process and we discussed some tech that we're gonna do to allow you to sort of paint and customize your ships, and obviously that is also the same sort of tech that we'll be using for the ship skins. So if we can get that tech to be flexible and more generic, then it would be actually quite... it would be easier to have the skins be on multiple ships. If it's not and we have to do a custom skin for each individual ship, then in those cases the skin would only really be applicable to the original ones that we said it would be. But we don't know yet, so we're still doing R&D. I mean our goal is to make it as flexible as possible, but that's sort of in our graphics R&D pipeline so we haven't done it yet. So it could kinda go either way right now.

So, yes, yes, yes, and yes!Yeah, we're actually working... we have a design for the lobby and the matchmaking system. It's obviously going to involve the organizations. So basically organizations will be sort of groups, and we'll fold in a part of the organization system to also support ad hoc groups that you could build - so almost like an ad hoc organization, cos really an organization is just a grouping of people. So like just a friends list, or an ad hoc group, is really just a flat organization that you can create and destroy on the fly. But yeah, we're working on that, so we've been sort of fleshing out the design for that, and our goal is to get that up and running... hopefully by 1.0. So 0.9, which is what we're gonna be releasing just after Gamescom is... we call it interally "release 13" and the next big one will be release 14, and I'm expecting that we should have some kind of lobby and matchmaking stuff by release 14 - which is Arena Commander v1.0. (Which actually will have more features in that we'd originally promised in PAX, but that's us - we like to put more things in!)The process will change slightly with the addition of multi-crew ships, but we've also designed out an aspect where you can invite people to be on your crew and stuff. Obviously that won't roll out with v1.0 because the multi-crew stuff won't be out then, but we're already designing and building towards that.

Yes, good question. I'd like to know how it's going to work too!But no, all seriousness, we do plan for you to be able to loan your ships. We haven't worked out the specific details of the edge cases. What happens when he doesn't want to give it back to you? What happens if he's flown your ship to the other side of the galaxy, and you're on this side and you want your ship back? ... And he's not gonna bring it back for you, or he's just left the game. Do you have to go over there to get it? How do you get it back? Does he bring it back to you? Does it automatically just come back to your hangar, after a period of time? So, we haven't fleshed out that part of the design yet, and that is definitely something that we will need to do for the Persistent Universe. It's just not... there's some other more important things to get out of the way before we get into the loaning-of-ship stuff.We'll definitely have that figured out - how you can loan ships for other people - and we've just got to figure out the issues of the edge cases I brought up. Which is I'm sure why you're writing this question, so "hold on" is the answer on that one.

Hmmm, this question sounds very much like the question from HeadlessChook. But, so, the M50 is going to be right now in the one scheme. Long-term, as I said, we were working on a customization setup so players can determine... you know, can set up specific colors for their ship, put names on their ships, and stuff like that. So we're still in the tech R&D phase for that. We'd like to make it fairly flexible so you can do some more sort of custom stuff, but in the very least you should be able to change out the primary or secondary color. And when that becomes online we'll definitely allow the player to, for something like the M50, you'll be able to buy it in a few different liveries. And then again, the skins that are available for pledging now, essentially how flexible the tech is will dictate how many ships those skins will be available on. If the tech isn't so flexible then it'll be on a lesser amount of them... if it's pretty flexible then we'd make it available to pretty much most of them - that make sense anyway! I mean I doubt the paint job that goes on a small fighter would be applicable for a paint job, say on a Bengal carrier or something.

Okay, so I think you're a water and a fish fan!I don't know, I mean we haven't actually considered underwater hangars. I do know we have some longer-term plans besides the... thing. We're in the process - I think we previewed the asteroid hangar, which I think looks beautiful, but we're doing a full makeover of the base hangars and we're going to be shifting it away from names like "Discount", or "Business", or "Deluxe" because it doesn't really make sense. We have different manufacturers, so we're going more in-fiction. So we have a Self-Land hangar, we've got an Aeroview hangar, and we've got a Revel & York hangar, and they're all actually going to be beautiful in PBR. So that'll be coming out down the road here, along with the asteroid hangar.We would plan to also have maybe some other models or stuff that would be developed over time, so who knows about something that could be underwater - that's actually kind of a cool idea - but it definitely isn't something we're working on right now. And I definitely think we're gonna have some more areas to put flare, decoration, ornaments, props inside the hangars, like bigger fish tanks or... I mean, the new set of hangars we have really have really kinda cool lounge and living areas, so they feel night and day. The last ones feel last-gen to me, and these new ones feel very next-gen. So we're really gonna push that and one of the other things we'll probably do with the hangars is it'll sort of be appropriate to the planet that you're based on or you're flying off, because if you're on a planet in the outer reaches of the galaxy that just has a colony on it, you're not going to have a big flashy hangar that maybe be on Terra, because they just haven't build out their infrastructure to that level.So anyway, I think you'll be excited by the new hangars, and I hope I answered that question as well as I could.

So yeah, that's a great idea. I mean, I've actually... Tony Zurovec and I have been discussing how to really make missions beyond just the standard sort of space missions where, like "okay, let's take this item from planet A to planet B" or "let's escort this ship from planet A to planet B" ... "let's go after this ship" ... you know, the sort of standard space stuff... how we can really take advantage of one of the special things about Star Citizen, which is basically it's all based around a kinda first-person engine. So we walk around in high fidelity, then we get in our ships and fly around, so we have high fidelity down on the planet-side environments, or in environments up in space like a space station. I think we're really thinking about how to sort of take advantage of that, because for us it's fairly low-hanging fruit because we're gonna have all the motion sets, we've got all the combat stuff already there, so it's really more a matter of creating some environments and populating some AI.So we'll definitely have some non-ship-based kind of missions, so potentially that would be stuff that you could potentially try and do. And then obviously if you were in debt and you can't get another loan, you certainly would be able to take jobs - and by the way you can take, like as a pilot, like as a trucker, or as a hired gun to fly someone else's ship. So those would always be available as well, and we'd probably add in some kind of planetary-side stuff because we're sort of thinking about elements to do that pretty well. And I think that's one of the things that's going to really make Star Citizen in the long run sort of shine. So, it's a lot of stuff to get done, right, we're super early, I mean what people are playing is even just a small portion of the space stuff. But all of the stuff we have longer-term coming down the pipe I think is really going to flesh it out in a way that people will be really happy with. It just isn't all happening tomorrow, but that's the nature of the beast when it's such a big ambitious game, but you guys will be along the way with us the whole time on the journey - sharing it, experiencing it as we're getting it to work, and I think it's a great way to make games.