Reverse the Verse: November 6th, 2015

Because it was a lot easier production-wise to do a non-personalized version.

Speaking as the one person who was here for the Citizen card creation, that's why I backed out of it. There is no hell deep enough for anyone who ever makes me work on customized cards again.

So yeah, we will be doing personalized dog tags again in the new year, but the cards just proved to be too much.

We still get cards in the mail from early 2013 when we sent them out.

Yes, I have a stack of returned cards in my drawer. Please don't contact me if your card was never sent.

We reached out to everyone whose cards were sent back to us.

In fact, I did that with the first round of dog tags as well.

Now, if I'm not mistaken, the new dog tags won't be Star Citizen.

No, they will be Squadron 42, so those will be available for pre-order in January.

Mocap. The studio in the office is a shared space. We're building three standing sets for our community productions, one for ATV, one for Meet the Devs, one for, I don't know what the other one is, but there's three of them. Our sets are going to be on wheels, so when we need to do pickup mocap, we can wheel our stuff out of there and use the mocap equipment we already have. There are many, many times when the folks are going to think, oh wait a minute, we don't have an arm that flexes this way, or a guy holding a gun shaped like this, so they can pick up mocap with that. The performance capture, which is a different grade of motion capture, will still happen at proper performance capture studios.

Yeah, the sets: there's an ATV set, there's kind of an all-purpose set for the interviews, and we'll use that one for RTV and stuff like that. And then there'll be a third one for our upcoming Dev vs. Dev show that we're hoping to have going after the new year.

And I think you'd be surprised by how much mocap we need for any particular thing and what generates additional mocap needs. One thing we do when we're creating new ships is we have to look at very specific things like what angle a walkway ramp is at or how a door opens. There's a crazy number of motions you need, and once you've concepted a new ship there's inevitably more of them. Sitting down in an Avenger is not the same thing as sitting down in a Cutlass. So there's always more cap needs and always will be.

But they're making a lot of strides in unifying a lot of the base shapes of the cockpit so that we can reuse animations and retarget them. So they're coming at it from every end.

If you check out Sandi's Facebook from yesterday, I believe, she snapped a picture of Gurmukh upstairs working on the kind of Anvil standard chair. The particular one you saw is for the Crucible also. It's actually the first Crucible art out there. So just imagine the rest of the ship around that chair.

Not intentional in any way. 2.0 is what everybody here is working on right now. It's just at a point where there's not a lot to say about it. It's content complete, we'll put that in air quotes because Star Citizen is never as content complete as something for a publisher, because inevitably there will be something we decide to add in a couple days even though we theoretically lock everything down. So it's essentially content complete and it's just in the long and boring, sorry QA guys, long and boring QA process where we build, we send that build to QA and they take a look and say, okay, it crashes when you try to take off in a Retaliator, we can't release this. Then our coders and our technical designers come back and say, okay, that's because of this and this and this, we'll make these changes. Build again. The build process takes a couple of hours. Goes to QA again. QA says, ah, you fixed the Retaliator bug, but now all the Hornets are backwards. And it's a long, long process. Now with a publisher game, you have to ship at a certain point, so there will be a point where you say, okay, this has to be released right now even though it has 900 outstanding blockers. The big benefit of crowdfunding is we don't have to do that. We can do this right, as right as we think it is. So it's going through this iterative process, which I liken to baking cakes. Hopefully no one else is as bad at baking cakes as I am, because it would take me many, many cakes to get it right. I made one that was just like a block of salt. I have no idea how I did that.

If you want to know more about the QA process and how the builds come together, you can watch the interview with Tyler Witkin on yesterday's ATV.

So basically we are eagerly watching QA reports and we are responding to things as needed. For our part it's not so much right now, because they pretty much have their marching orders. We'll get some questions like which Avengers should players have as a default? But other than that it's pretty much out of our hands right now. And we'll talk more about it once it's out. And of course, there'll be a monthly report, this is what everyone's doing, and a weekly report, this is what everyone's doing. If only we could merge those in some way.

I did talk to Tyler this morning. They had a big, big playtest on 2.0 yesterday that went very well. They uncovered a lot of cool things that are only uncovered when you have a bunch of people in. So they've got their new tasks that they need to resolve, and it was a very productive playtest.

He was very happy with it. I think if you're interested, I could probably read a couple of the blockers that came up from this. So these are blockers reported from the last playtest. If Retaliators spawn on a server, players will be unable to connect to that server. That's a problem. Constellation cannot be spawned from the ship spawner. But these are all situations. I mean, in a particular situation, this happens. Retaliator engineering control panel has no effect on ship functionality when a player interacts with it. That's a problem. Actually, now this is a blocker. That's the next level down. Another issue with spawning the Andromeda. Spawn issue in Vanduul Swarm. Crash handler when wrapping a particular animation. Tutorial: Gilly stops talking for some reason. It's a crazy list of things that you don't always expect, and they have to go in and fix all these. There's one part on the map where damage isn't being reported correctly, use prompt isn't appearing at Bravo stations. It's so many very, very particular little things that you then have to fix and then iterate. But it's fun. It's fun following it for us anyway. I'm sure it's hell for QA. Sorry, QA.

There was an issue... It was a fun issue that only happened after they got 16 people into the map. So the playtest was really good for discovering it yesterday, because it only existed after 16 people were on the map.

And that's one of the reasons why we kick it out to you guys on the PTU, because there will then be issues when there's 32 people and 120 people and when there's 50 servers at once and when there's 100 servers spun up at once. So for everybody who doubts that players are helping us test the game, you guys are absolutely essential.

Unmelting ships prior to 2.0: probably not. I don't see that system being up and running before that.

No, we actually just talked to Turbulent about that this week. It is in the works, or it's about to be in the works. But I'm not sure. I'd say soon, but I don't have an exact idea of when it will be.

There's a lot of pitfalls. We've got plans to address them all. We just have to be sure it doesn't destroy your game packages. That's really the number one thing. We want to make sure it doesn't destroy something else.

It takes time. We have to go through all of the various what-if situations when we work these sorts of things out. And then they actually have to build the system. It does take time.

And whenever we work with an outsourcer for something like this, there's a cost and a scheduling associated with it. We go to Turbulent and we say, hey, can you do this? They say, yes, it's going to take at least 200 hours of whatever time. And that's time that's taken away from some other project they're working on, or time they need to bring in extra people for. So it's a complicated matrix of making this stuff happen. But the good news is that one has been approved. It's happening. It's just a matter of making it happen now.

It will not be ready in time for the anniversary sale. I know that. So anybody wondering that? The answer is no.

So basically, with the hold with CS and whatnot, and given that the anniversary sale is in less than two weeks, I would not plan on being able to unmelt ships through the automated system or trying to get it through CS. They're very busy right now.

It's still in the process. They want things to look as good as possible for you guys. I can't blame them. We've got quality, top-tier people here, and they want everything to look as good as humanly possible. So they want to make sure it's up to our standards before we put out a fancy press version. It'll be when it is. I like that our guys are so quality-focused.

Frustrating as hell sometimes.

Yes, it's frustrating, because it's always like, I like this thing, and we want to show this. It's like, no, but it's got these bugs, and I'm like, come on. It's like, no, we want it to be good. It's like, yeah, I want it to be good too. We want to show you guys things as soon as possible, but we do want it to look as good as possible too. It's always a balance.

Yeah, actually, we have. We just sent a lanyard sample over to our manufacturer. That is something we're looking at for future events, but if you guys are interested, that's probably something we could also sell. I mean, it would be something we would have to give out at an event or something, but I'm not sure if people are interested in buying those.

I like a lanyard. I use a lanyard on my keys. Lanyard fans, we want to hear you.

But we are looking at hoodies. We're just trying to figure out when to schedule those, because we don't want to manufacture those and start selling them in the winter. If we did a pre-order now, it wouldn't be ready until the springtime. We will have hoodies in 2016, I can tell you that. Same fabric as the Drake hoodies, because that was very, very popular. They will not be Drake hoodies again, though. They will be a different design.

I don't remember what we said last week, but it's probably the same as last week, which is that the folks at Foundry 42 have accepted the Freelancer into their collective. They looked at the inside and they said, oh, hell no, and have done a little bit of additional concepting work, which we are trying to push through the approval pipeline right now to show to you. So the internal changes, nothing world-shattering, but there's some pretty pictures we want to release, so pray for us. It's the ship that the Eye of Sauron has now. It's the next one, so we're Freelancing it up in the UK right now.

I think the Connie was a priority because it was the closest parallel to the Retaliator.

The Connie was a lot of proof of concept. First of all, there's a whole lot of Connie players out there. But it was a very, very important proof of concept because it does a little bit of everything. It has the modular system. It has the multiple crew seating points. Once you get the Connie right, it's very easy to take that tech to more specialized ships.

Not necessarily. I feel like anyone who wants to buy ships at the anniversary sale knows about it and cares already. We do not plan our releases in such a way that this is going to bring the most people into my ships. It's very much the opposite. We plan releases when dev says they're ready. We would absolutely love that moment at the event where Chris Roberts could flick the switch and the cool new update goes up. But if you look back at the history of Star Citizen, you'll find that it's never happened. Despite the fact that every time we ever have an event, there are always angry trolls who go on about how we're just holding back this release to put it out at the event. And somehow after three years of never releasing anything at an event, that still happens. So it would be fantabulous. It would be fantabulously fantabulous if we had it go live for the event. But we are not whipping developers until that happens. We are not releasing a shoddy product to make sure that happens. It happens when it happens.

I think the closest we ever got to that was the Glaive the day before Gamescom. But that was such a small thing. It was a very tiny thing, so it wasn't a major content patch. We sold the Sabre at an event; we did not patch it into the game. That's not the same. The Sabre's not in yet. But it's coming soon. We sell things at events all the time.

Yeah, for something like an artwork of a ship, or even a 3D model of a ship, you can plan that out pretty well. Well, sometimes there have been points where we've said, okay, the ship is not ready for prime time, we want it to sell, but we can't. That's happened many, many times. But in general, we can say, okay, it takes six weeks to do a concept ship, we can have that delivered in time for this event. So that's easy. But when you're working with the whole universe of a game, where any tiny change can break six other things, it's a lot harder to predict.

The Tally and Connie are both in the hangar already, I believe.

They meant the new ones.

Oh. The new Connie. That would be a separate build. We'd be paying to push it to everybody. We would have to test it separately from 2.0. It would divide the QA team. There's lots of reasons not to do that. And it's dead-end work, which we try to avoid. A lot of people see things we do and they're like, oh, they redid this ship six times, that's such a waste of money. That's how all game development works. Every character model or horse cart in Assassin's Creed has gone through the same number of iterations; you just never got to see them. But it is additional money and effort and splitting time to release things that aren't viable.

Yeah, that are just going to sit there and do nothing.

It would be a waste of QA's time, essentially.