Star Citizen Live: All About Alpha 3.8

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

It's a server-side issue. So obviously, with SOCS being introduced, that was fundamental technology that touched everything. So every team had work to do for SOCS, and every team will have work to do for Server Meshing. And so right now with the release of SOCS, our server frame rate isn't at the level that we want it to be at. And when it does run at that level, then the AI works the way that you would see in kind of a normal single player game. However, when it's running at six frames a second or somewhere around there, then we start getting into some packet loss and other issues that make the AI look wonky. And since this was our first release and obviously kind of even in a more time-compressed release, meaning with the holidays and holiday break, I think that's basically introducing this technology and seeing that it hasn't completely fallen over and we broke the back on a lot of the issues. I think over the next releases you'll see the improvement that we're all hoping for and we're all looking for right now.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Yeah, it can't be understated. We've touched on this multiple times between Star Citizen Live, Inside Star Citizen, Pillar Talks, stuff like that, that server-side object container streaming required a refactor of every single asset in the game. Nothing carries over from 3.7 in exactly the same way.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Yeah, from a code standpoint. This tech initiative had been going on for quite a while. Now, obviously, once we get it live, we start seeing a lot of the issues that, frankly, we don't see internally because we can't hammer the server all the time with 50 QA people. And then even then, when the server stays up for, let's say, a long time, then we're starting to see either memory leaks or other issues that might be causing the server to slow down.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

But that's one of the great things about having our live test environment, our alpha test environment, is that we can get the numbers with our backers that we can't get with our QA. Plus, we had a huge influx of new players in Q4. So those servers were hammered pretty good. The Issue Council is doing great. We're seeing tons of reports. People have been working on it, even before we left for holidays, and after holidays.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Yes, and we saw it and basically the AI guys are already talking about what they can do. So it is something that's being worked on, being looked at right now. Now, whether those changes come in 3.8.1 or down the line, obviously, if not 3.8.1, then it'll be 3.9.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Half and half. I'm more than satisfied that the team was able to do what they needed to do to get the release out the door and make sure that we broke the back of it. I think that Steve Humphries and the main tech guys did a fantastic job of doing what they needed to do to get it working. Now obviously there's some of the gameplay ramifications that we're seeing right now that I wish were in a better state and we will continue to work towards improving that. So I wish that came out at the same time as the SOCS release and that everything was magical and it worked the way that it was supposed to work. Right now, again, we're just investigating it and trying to see what we can do to get the server frame rate up and running the way it needs to be running. And the way that we had it even before SOCS, there were times where we had the server frame rate running at least 12 to 15. So then at that point in time, we definitely get better performance from the AI as well as ship-to-ship combat.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Where we're at right now is not necessarily a surprise. We knew there would be bugs. When you change the code underlying every single aspect of Star Citizen, there were going to be bugs. You hope for the best, you prepare for the worst. So we've had people on deck working on this. 3.8.1, as you mentioned, is already in progress. I got to watch a lot of gameplay over the holidays, not just from the additions of new content like microTech and stuff like that. It just seemed like the overall experience was better. Yes, there were struggles.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

There are plenty of struggles, but I'm extremely proud of what the team has been able to do. I think even if you look at how much it's changed from 3.0 until now, the game and basically our workflow, the way that we adjust things, the gameplay associated with it, there's still thorns in our side that we know of and that we continue to work towards to fix, but I think that we've definitely gotten over that large hump.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

It's like the AI. We're on it.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Yeah. It really comes down to frame rate. And we do prediction. And sometimes that prediction is wrong. And so then once we get that packet back, then we teleport them to the right spot. But obviously, with it running so slow, then we are going to have those issues. And until we can actually break the back of that, then unfortunately, we will be continuing to deal with that.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Yes, so just too long, didn't read, yes. With auto-gimbal and even then, we've created a team called the Vehicle Experience Team, which will be focusing on some of these issues that we're having. In particular, looking at the combat distances and just the combat experience in general, looking at how the missiles aren't working the way that they need to be working, looking at turrets, how they're not working the way that they need to be working, and then just overall balancing of the features and how the coolers and the quantum drives and all these other gameplay items fit on the ship and how they all play together. So that is their main focus, going through and looking at combat. Right now I would consider us very much a pixel hunter and I would prefer it to be much more intimate as far as the play style. So we're playing around with that and trying to see the combat distances and what we can bring them into and what feels right. I think Chris has his idea of what it is. John has his idea. I have my idea. And so we're just trying to mesh those together and see what comes out.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

No, no, no. In fact, the team includes basically some of our system designers that we had in the UK already and Rob Johnson, who's one of our more senior lead programmers who basically was just a bug machine, just being able to squash all of them. And because he knows all the systems that are being touched there, that's why he's part of that Vehicle Experience Team, and then we also pulled another programmer off of the EU Vehicle Feature Team and put them on there.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Yes, it does. If it doesn't, then that means that they copied and pasted numbers wrong, but the idea is that coolers and basically any items have pros and cons associated with them. So one of them might cool at a faster rate but might pull more power. Now one of the things that we don't have right now and isn't being shown off to the player is basically ways to compare one item to another. That's something that we've talked about, it's something that we know we need to do, and we have an idea of how we want to play that out and build that UI experience or UX experience for that; it's just something that we haven't been able to start on just yet. But there are differences.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Yes, it means that. I mean, basically, if that ship was earned via... well, we need to be able to take a look at how players earn money. We know that there's an exploit there right now, that people are earning crazy amounts of Alpha UEC, and so anything that was earned during that time, yeah, we're going to have to wipe.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

There's the ship duplication bug and stuff like that.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Exactly. So we will have to wipe. That's the whole point: until we go final, we need to work out the kinks of everything. And there are definitely a lot of issues and there are things that we have to be able to reset.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

That is what the purpose of an alpha is for. I think the big takeaway with the addition of platform persistence is that instead of having to wipe every time, now we can selectively wipe only when we deem necessary.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Again, I think a lot of the... What players can earn in one quarter, or let's say we did a release perfectly right on time at the end of March, and between then and June, let's say we have a ship that, from our estimate, our idea, we want it to take six months for the average player, not somebody that's sinking tons and tons of time into it, but the average player to earn in six months. If we don't have this persistence, then we're never going to see if that number's correct. And so once we get that persistence in, then we can start seeing: are these numbers that we're setting for these long-term goals, or these reputation amounts and so on and so forth that we're building for mission givers and trying to unlock, are those working the way that we need them to work? So we're able to test right now a lot of our short-term goals, but we can't test our mid-term or long-term goals. And that's really what this is supposed to be doing, is starting to test those mid-term and long-term goals.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

For this one, we went directly to the platform team to get an answer for you. I'm just going to read what the platform team wrote since they couldn't come here. "30K errors signify that the game client lost connection with the game server. On PTU environments, this can frequently signify a server crash, but on more stable builds, it may be representative of connectivity issues between the computer the client is running on and the game environment." In further discussion, we've talked about this a bit yesterday and stuff, 30K is one of those things that's a catch-all.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

It sits on top.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

It's a catch-all of a huge variety of things underneath. It's not just server crashes or a loss of connectivity. It's almost anything that can't be specifically nailed down gets the 30K, and that's why you see it probably more often than others, and that's why things like the Issue Council are so incredibly important for this. Keep reporting them, keep giving us the specific details of your instance of the 30K; that helps our guys find out, okay, there's this cause and we can smash that, and then there's this cause and we can smash that. But yeah, it is our El Guapo.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Yeah, and it has been in previous releases, and I think it will just continue to be. But, I mean, obviously with the introduction of SOCS, we're going to see this, and then when we introduce Server Meshing, I'm sure we're going to see this as well.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

For 3.8.1, you'll definitely see some quality of life fixes. Basically, we don't want to mess up our feature development time too much. So we have what we consider live must-fixes, or things that are associated with the gameplay experience, that I've already gone through and triaged. And then we'll be focusing on those. And then obviously anything that doesn't make it there will go into 3.9. The way that you guys kind of saw it last year, we weren't so strict on our feature lock date, and what that did is that kind of cascaded into releases not going out on time. Now Aaron and I are very strict on our feature lock date. And that basically comes in the middle of February this year. So then that means that basically from now until mid-February, these are features that will be worked on, and some of them had already been started in 3.8 and even 3.7. And this is when everything comes together and that feature is locked and it's ready to go out and it's ready to go to the Evocati. And since it takes us a certain amount of time to basically go from Evocati to Wave 1 to Wave 2 to live, we can't shortchange that time. And we've seen that's what happened in the past: we tried to shortchange it and it didn't work.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

This is where things like the quarterly release initiative and the staggered development initiative hit. Everybody should be working on things on a six-month cadence with the staggered development when applicable. So when we hit that quarterly release with consistency, we have to have those cutoff days, we have to have those feature lock days and say, you know, we wanted this feature for 3.9 or 4.0 or 3.6 or whatever, but it just didn't make it. So instead of holding the date, it moves.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Yeah. And I mean, we're trying to do that for everything, whether that be features or content, so content is, let's say, levels that are coming out or ships or so on and so forth. We want to make sure that everything that we know is going into that release is hitting that date. Obviously with our schedules right now, we need to kind of adjust things, but we're trying to go through and make sure that everything hits that date. So then that gives everybody the proper time to react to bugs and issues that come up when testing.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

At that point in time, we do have special cases, and we do review it. So we look at it and we're like, okay, this one's super, super close. And as long as it's super, super close, then we're like, okay, you will have to do manual integration into the branch once it's created. But we review it again at that point in time. We had it with no-fly zones, or what we consider restricted areas, where we reviewed it. The feature was pretty much there. It was just that we hadn't tested it and hadn't gotten it into all of the correct content. So therefore, once we started looking at it in Lorville and Area18, because each one of our major landing zones is its own special butterfly, once we started looking in context with those, then it just wasn't ready. So we need to make sure that, okay, hey, feature's done. Now content has actually had its part and done its work. And now we're looking at it in context with everything.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

For clarity, you're talking about the rework of the restricted areas. Restricted areas have been in game for quite some time, but we've been working on a reworking of how they work.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Well, it was that we had this end goal in mind, which is what we have now, but there were kind of patches working towards that end goal, and so now we have what we want and what we feel we need.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Well, yes, we have telemetry on basically the economy, and we look at it constantly. Now, one of the things, if you refer to Tony's talk at CitizenCon, there's Quantum, and I'm lobbying for a different name for that one. But there's the Quantum talk, where that mimics an economy, and so if something over in this area isn't being used that much then the prices will go down, versus if something's being used more over here then the prices go up. Now, what we have to do is we do that by hand every quarter. And I understand that some things will feel somewhat grindy. Now, there are certain things that we do want to feel grindy. So like a lot of the in-game ships, anything of a capital class, I consider that very, very grindy. I can't go out and buy a mansion, and I don't think the average person would be able to, but if we pull together as a unit, then maybe we can.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

There are also interesting challenges in trying to balance for an economy that doesn't have all of the game features that we're intending for. It's trying to balance an economy when you don't have all the ways a player will have to make money.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Correct, and again, if you think something's grindy, with our mission rewards, these are all going to be in flux. We've got basically just so many people looking at this and working on it, and once we start getting some of these other things coming into place, like Quantum, this will actually help those guys adjust things on the fly and be able to say, okay, here it is, but here are the rails that it can go between.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Yes. So again, we're going through and evaluating basically the placements, and we actually adjusted. We have what we consider a feature team and then a content team. As soon as a feature is done, then it needs to be handed over to a content team. And then once that content team is working on it, then the adjustments of where stuff is placed and how much it's worth and so on and so forth will always kind of grind through that economy team and that content team working together. We just did that switch. So in 3.9, we'll basically start seeing adjustments, and that team is also putting stuff on microTech and its moons, basically in, I think, Sprint 2, Sprint 3 of this coming quarter. So with the Aaron Halo and even just the clusters and everything, we know that we need to go through, and a lot of those asteroids are super old and won't necessarily look good with our mining tech and all of that. That's one of the things that Ian and I are thinking about and worrying about. What does an asteroid field feel like in our game? There's what it's like in real life, where you might see one every now and then. And then there's obviously the movie version of it, where it's super, super dense and you want to fly through everything. So we need to figure out what our Star Citizen asteroid field feels like.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

For example, like harvestables. When we start building a location, we have an idea, we have a breakdown. Here's everything that this location will need. It will need missions associated. It will need harvestables associated with it. Here are the different POIs, what we consider points of interest. Here are the mission givers or key NPCs that we need. Here are the stores, so on and so forth. We have that breakdown, and then when we start talking about, okay, is this using a unique harvestable or unique mineable, what is needed there, then we need to make sure that we're building it associated with it. When we're talking about the feature team, they're building, okay, here's how you harvest, here's how you mine, and the full game loop associated with that. So finding it, and then they're working with other feature teams, like radar and scanning is here in LA. So Dan was working with Kirk and Mark Haven and the team here for ping and trying to find it, and he was working with environment artists for actually building it, and then the effects team for actually putting in different effects and putting out different mining heads and so on and so forth. Think of feature teams as kind of like the heart and soul of the feature, and they are the ones responsible for delivering that feature. But they have a lot of dependencies and a lot of requirements that they pull from different support teams, whether those be content teams or other support teams or other feature teams.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I guess the way I was thinking about it, I used to be a swimming pool contractor, and I used to go to vendors and purchase engineering. So I didn't have to know how the engineering worked, the shape of rebar and how to put that. I would buy the engineering and then use that to build a pool.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

From a housing standpoint, you were the general contractor. So the feature team is the general contractor, and then they sublet to an electrical team or to, let's say, a framing team or drywall team or so on and so forth. But the general contractor is responsible for the end product.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

I mean, if they run into something, then I think it really depends on the bug.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Yeah, I think all information in some way or another is valuable because it brings attention. It's one of the reasons we have the duplication on the Issue Council. It lets more people verify it. You may add this much to it, and then somebody else is adding this part to it, and then somebody else is adding this part to it, and through the duplication feature, we can build an entire picture.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Obviously, if they can produce any repro steps and ways for our internal QA to repro it at any point in time, fantastic. But if they're just playing and then they run into this issue, then okay. I would say let's enter a bug if they can, because we want to be aware of everything. If they run into it again or somehow magically find a way of reproing it, then fantastic.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I think ultimately it comes down to do what you feel is comfortable. This isn't your job. Presumably you all have careers and jobs and lives, but as you can help, we appreciate it.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

It's something we've talked about. /stuck. Yeah, it's something that we've talked about, but there hasn't been any movement on that right now.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

We touched on that a little bit earlier. We still reserve the right to do wipes.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

I think with the ship duplication bug, I don't know if it's server-side. If it's our back-end guys, then we should be able to do a hotfix at any point in time, or if it actually needs to be fixed with a patch. So it might be one of those things where it just magically disappears and we message people that we found it, or it'll be in a patch.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

It's something that CR wants done this year.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

This is where I'm going to go ahead and do that thing where I say that doesn't mean it's coming this year; schedules, dependencies, all that stuff, but it is our intention.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Yeah, it is very much our intention just because, again, obviously, we have a lot of parasite craft, and with our introduction of a lot of these larger ships, we want to be able to spawn them. Even then, let's say you have a Freelancer and you want to be able to spawn your Nox in there. We want to be able to do that and reduce a lot of the headache that happens right now.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Well, there's the ship-to-ship docking aspects that we'd obviously have to look at, the UX experience of that, but there's that. There's obviously the Pisces and the Carrack, and some other things, even the Caterpillar and its control module.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Because when New Babbage and everything came in, there's a certain amount of time that it takes to actually drop assets onto planets. So with Planet Tech v4, we had to actually go in and re-drop everything across all planets. And that took a few of our guys a fairly significant amount of time to go through and re-drop everything. Now, with microTech coming on pretty late, we just didn't have enough time to actually go in and drop that stuff. Now for 3.9, with the moons and obviously New Babbage coming into play, all of that stuff should be dropped.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

What we have right now from a tech standpoint, it works. It gives you a description, but I don't think it'll say, okay, well, this thing is X amount better than this thing on cooling. And there's no number stats that people can break down. There's no, even if it's just as simple as a bar for a consumer to understand, okay, hey, this thing is this much better than this, and that's why it warrants this price kind of thing. There's none of that breakdown right now. It's something that the economy team, the people that do stores, as well as the UI team, we've been in constant communication and we've been talking about how we want to do this. It's just finding that time, because the UI team right now is going through and hitting a lot of the major aspects, meaning the visor rework, whether that be in the actual ships and how the ships function and how that looks. And then right now we're looking at the FPS.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

3.8.1 is the first bug fix patch, so there won't be a patch before.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

There might be a hotfix or something like that, but as far as anything else, it'll come out in 3.8.1.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Yes. So there's all the outside factors. If we just looked at basically any of the disconnection errors, or we look at any of the other things that might theoretically go into a mission or just the experience of flying from one area to another area, there's some painful things that happen there. We know about certain ones of them, and then other ones we might not know about, or they might not manifest themselves very often. So, like Jared said before, please let us know in the Issue Council. And then it's something that myself and the player relations guys talk about, I think it's every week or every other week. We go through a lot of the Issue Council stuff. Then from there, there's the actual aspect of trading and understanding, hey, Grim HEX is buying this for a certain amount versus Lorville is buying this for a certain amount. Right now, I think a lot of people go to external apps or external websites to find out, okay, hey, this is what the price is here versus here kind of thing. We want to fix that. It's something that we've talked about, using the Star Map for, and also obviously that also plugs into Quantum. And so with mobiGlas, we need to switch that over to Building Blocks, and then it will be going through and fixing every single app and making sure, okay, with the Star Map, you click on a planet, you get the actual information. You click on Lorville, you actually get the information of Lorville. Maybe you want to find out what trading is there. Then you click on that, and then it gives you the appropriate list, so that you as a player can choose: this is what I want to do. Okay, I want to go here, sell this, and then I want to go here and sell that. So you can actually make an informed decision on where you want to travel.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Training is certainly suffering from a multitude of bugs, but without the bugs, though...

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Yeah, it's the same thing with missions, though. Missions are a culmination of all these other systems, and so if one of them falls down, for example, you drop something and it falls through the floor, okay, well, now your mission's completely screwed.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I think what I was wanting to get at, though, is that it's not just the bugs. We want changes to the trading system through Building Blocks and the mobiGlas.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Correct. And then there's the spicy elements of volatile cargo or cargo that needs refrigeration. But that to me is the interesting... that's where you start getting a lot of interesting gameplay, where you need to do the Kessel Run in 13 parsecs versus 20 parsecs.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

A big part of trading is the cargo system. I'm not happy with cargo.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

This isn't one of the questions, I just know he wasn't happy, so I want you to know what I know.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Basically, we have a cargo grid, and then we have what we want to do for cargo, and we have what we consider kind of a first implementation. So we have the one SCU version of cargo. We have a 0.5 version just so that the players can actually carry it, just because we didn't have the cargo jack yet or the multi-tool working to actually move the one SCU boxes around. So then there's iCache, and basically myself and John have a whole bunch of work that we want to do on cargo to improve it, to make it fun and interesting and make it relevant for a lot of these bigger ships. However, we need iCache to come online first, because if we do any of this work before iCache, there will be a certain amount of rework that will need to be done after iCache. So we're waiting for the iCache boot to drop, which is basically allowing us to have that persistence associated with it. And then at that point in time, we hit this, because cargo and trading to me is a major, major staple of the game. We've got resource acquisition; you've kind of seen what we've done with mining. Obviously, there's other resource acquisitions that we can do, whether that be salvage, farming, so on and so forth. And then cargo is another one, whether that be freight, people, or data. So there's work there, and we know that there's work there, and we've been chomping at the bit to do that work, but basically our tech directors are saying, don't do it until iCache comes in.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

For those who follow the project for a while, it can always seem like there's the next thing, because you're following along in development. You can't do this until object container streaming comes in. Server-side object container streaming comes in. Can't do this until Server Meshing comes in. Can't do this until platform persistence comes in. Development is always about dependencies.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Right, but there's certain things. For example, with cargo, for us to do extremely volatile cargo, or a box that you pick up and you move around and if you don't get rid of it in a certain period of time, it explodes, in order for us to do that work, it's going to take us, let's say, two, three sprints to do that work. iCache right now, I think, internally is scheduled in another quarter or two, internally. So for us to do that work and then basically redo that work is not a good use of time.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And for anybody that's not familiar with the term iCache, I recommend you check out the keynote during CitizenCon, or I think there was some of it in the last Pillar Talk. In layman's terms, it's the ability for me to drop my ship there or my Lando Pony there and log out and have it still be there for somebody else to come and find it later on, in its simplest form.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

No, but I'm more than willing to take a look into that now, because one of the things that at least the mission content team and I are going to be focusing on is the bounty hunter missions as well as the delivery missions, and making sure that those get up to what we consider a gold standard. So I'll speak with Luke about that and see what we can do.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Yeah, it's something we want. And I think part of it is, again, with Flash, the way that the mobiGlas is currently built. The idea would be that this happens via mobiGlas. It's something that we figured was going to be part of the contract manager itself. We know the work needs to happen. I think there's some back-end aspects that need to happen first, but then it's something that Tony and I are well aware of, and we want this to happen, because let's say this person isn't grouped up with you for some reason, so when you do the mission sharing it's not working. Then we want them to at least be able to pay for that service.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

If somebody comes along and does you a mitzvah, you want to be able to tip the person.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Exactly. Thank you for your help. The issue is right now the mobiGlas and Building Blocks. I think it's us focusing on the visor first and mobiGlas and getting that reworked.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

That's what we want. So we want the players to be able to loot each other or loot NPCs and then at that point in time be able to sell their goods.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Yes, we have. This, to me, is, again, why we created the Vehicle Experience Team. Because the issue that we have a lot of times is our feature teams work on this, now they move on to the next feature, then they move on to the next feature, and sometimes the content teams don't have enough time to go through and set something up, because maybe they're not always necessarily in lockstep. However, this is the Experience Team. And so we know the combat distances, the missiles, and basically anything that has to deal with projectiles that have explosions on the end of it, whether that be distortion weapons or even missiles right now, we know are not working. You get that desync between the server and client on turrets.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

One of the reasons we formed the new Vehicle Experience Team.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Yes. To basically be able to focus on it and work on it and iterate on it multiple times.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So there'll probably be at least one more ISC segment on turrets before we're all said and done.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

I want it to be put to bed. All of us want it to be put to bed.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

I don't think we've necessarily talked about it just yet. I think that's something that, with John out here next week, we can obviously start having that discussion with Chris about what is needed and what is wanted. I want to see how it serves the gameplay and then from there what it actually takes, and with some of the low visibility stuff I actually want the players to think about: should they be taking a ship in there? And maybe a ground vehicle is better, or maybe just not going in there is. How many people are going to be flying into the red storm of Jupiter? I'm sure people will do that. But maybe you fly a drone in first.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

So with the ASOP terminal, what we planned to do was just a store button, so a way to store a ship and get it off the landing pad or even out of a hangar. So then at that point in time, the systems just work, because a lot of times it might be that maybe the zone around the landing pad or around the hangar isn't working exactly the way it should. So we wanted to at least have this store option on the ASOP terminal. So then that actually fixes a lot of the issues that we have.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

They're not, maybe.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

It goes back to the thing you can't compare.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Yeah, I think it really goes back to the comparing. But there are differences.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

That will be fixed soon. And sorry, that will also be played into cargo.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Because right now our habs are not persistent to the players.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

It's just something in flux, and sometimes we were seeing that the players were earning too much there, so we lower it and we try to increase something else.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

Because of the way that we procedurally build them. So we have what we consider an anchor point, which is our view room. And then from there, everything else is generated based off of there, just because our internal and external object containers for this modular system are built a different way. So we have what we consider these anchor points that unify the internal and external. And obviously when you start talking about habs, if we're talking about, let's say, 100 habs in there, having those 100 anchor points just isn't going to work the way that we want it to work.

Todd Papy · Star Citizen Live Game Director

I want them.