Todd Papy · Live Game DirectorIt is a planned feature, however, with our current optimization plan and everything like that, I don't think it will be hitting in 3.1.
Todd Papy · Live Game DirectorSo we actually already have that in one of the designs for a service beacon. We understand, if you go out on a mission with multiple characters or multiple players, you want to be able to actually go through and say, hey, I will give you a cut of this. And right now we know you can't do that, but the plan is part of the service beacon design. Whether or not that is the first tier that rolls out, that's something that basically Tony and I are still discussing.
Jared Huckaby · Host, Community Content ManagerWe see MMOs all the time. You go to another character, you click on them, you go trade, it opens up a window, you type money in, you give people money.
Todd Papy · Live Game DirectorThat is basically via mobiGlas. That is kind of the service beacon design of, hey, with the mobiGlas, this is how I basically create contracts, so on and so forth. We call it a service beacon, but it's part of the mobiGlas and how that would work. It's player-initiated contracts. So if you are a hauler and you want to hire a bunch of mercs or if you're a pirate and you want to be able to pay basically people for a day's work, that's what we'll be working towards.
Jeffrey Pease · Live Operations / DevOps, AustinTo answer that question, probably the first thing we need to do is establish what we consider a hotfix, because different software companies and even different video game companies have different definitions for what a hotfix is. For CIG, typically we consider the term hotfix to be for something that we apply to an environment that's already been deployed, but where the fix isn't something that's normally included for the build that the environment's hosting. So in a worst case scenario, if we were to redeploy the exact same [...] The plain fact is that we have already hotfixed a number of problems that were encountered over the holiday break. Ahmed and Bryce, as well as Tony and some of our other engineers and programmers, were looking into several issues that were happening with the Diffusion gateway and our shopping system and the probability volume service, because we had a bunch of problems where game servers weren't recovering their ability to list items in the shops. We had a problem where the probability volume service was spawning a mission that was causing the game servers to deadlock. We had a really strange issue where the game servers were causing ships to become parents and children of other ships, which caused this circular reference. And then when the cache tried to clear the data, because it was a circular reference, the cache would deadlock because it would just keep going round and round and round. And then another one, actually, some of the hotfixes for the persistence cache that we did were to put in additional logging so that we could figure out what was causing it to deadlock, and then Tom Sawyer ended up figuring out that the deadlock was being caused by that cyclical reference. And then we also did a hotfix to the general instance manager, because I discovered that it was trying to matchmake people into matches that weren't supposed to let people in once they had already started. So for Vanduul Swarm and Pirate Swarm and race modes, once the game modes start, people can't join, but it was still trying to put them in, and then it was telling them you can't join that because it's already started. So another one of the hotfixes we put in was to make it so that the GIM would stop doing that. And we also have this new feature for 3.0 for the backend services where we have a dedicated process that will take all of the items that people have purchased on our platform and add them to their account in-game. Originally, the servers that would do that would be the same servers players were on, and if one of those servers crashed, it could cause problems with items being missing and stuff. So now we have a dedicated process for that, and because it's not shared with instances that players are playing on, we don't have to worry about it crashing in the middle of someone getting the items added to their account. One of the GIM hotfixes we added was to exclude those specific processes from rolling restarts that we can do to the game servers. I think that covered most, if not all, of the hotfixes we did.
Jared Huckaby · Host, Community Content ManagerSo if I understand you correctly, the question was, will we see hotfixes? I think there's a misnomer there. There have been plenty of hotfixes and there may even be more hotfixes in the future, but you may not necessarily see them. Am I right?
Jeffrey Pease · Live Operations / DevOps, AustinYeah, it's not always something that people are going to notice unless we make sure that we're communicating to them that they're happening, kind of like how we are doing in this video.
Kirk Tome · ShipsAh, the Freelancer. OK, well, it is one of the original five ships for Star Citizen [...] plan, and we do know that backers have been waiting for them, and so for that we do apologize. I do know that they're currently scheduled to begin work in the latter half of the year by the UK team. This doesn't guarantee that they'll be done by the end of the year, but we are striving to make that happen. And we do know how much the community has been clamoring for them. So we are working on them and we do try to get them started and we'll try to get them completed. Unfortunately, as you know, we do have a lot of ships that we're making and a lot of features that need to go in the game that also require artists and design and engineering work. And so things do get pushed back, but they're on the schedule. So we'll try to get them out by the end of this year. Also, a bit of other news, the 300 series rework is also on the schedule for this year. And that will be done by the team in LA. So we'll be working on it here locally.
Luke Pressley · DesignerThere are definitely further plans for development. So the notion of going to a terminal probably won't change. The terminal will definitely change. I mean, the UI on there will get major improvements, and the kind of flow of it. But as for popping in and out, I guess the reason you're seeing so much popping in and out is because places like Olisar and Grim HEX only have the landing pads right now and don't have the hangars. You see these things pop in and out on those landing pads. It should be a hangar. Olisar is a legacy kind of thing. We just build on and build on until we finally get the truck stop, and we'll get a final hotel eventually and it'll have some hangars. And that means that all of this popping in and out will happen away from the player. He won't be able to go in that hangar before he's asked for the ship, and then he'll be granted access to the hangar and he'll go in. Now, that's not to say that we can ever completely get rid of popping in and out. For instance, when a player logs out, his ship hangs around for an amount of time and then it has to go somewhere. And a player logging in, obviously that ship has to come in somewhere, where he parked it before.
Jared Huckaby · Host, Community Content ManagerIf you left it not stored.
Luke Pressley · DesignerYeah, exactly. So I don't think we'll get rid of it entirely. We are a game after all, but you won't be seeing them popping in and out on the landing pads as often as you do now.
Luke Pressley · DesignerDefinitely, definitely. Olisar is a monstrosity. You're about to see something that is about to get even worse because the Reclaimer is huge. It's almost the size of the Idris, and that's coming soon. So the large landing pad that is already like a football field is now going to be like two football fields on there. So it's good because we don't waste final art or anything like that. We just expand upon this thing until we know all the things that it needs to do. And then once we've got that, we can build this thing properly, knowing all the pieces.