Star Citizen Live: Theaters of War CitizenCon Followup

Hello everyone, welcome to CitizenCon 2949. I'm Sean Tracy... No, I won't go through the whole presentation. So basically what happened was, at CitizenCon we wanted to be able to bring an updated game mode that basically takes all the work that we've done with Arena Commander, all the work that we've done on Star Marine, and put it together. Basically, if you could decide on the best 30 minutes of a PU experience, where you could jump in and it was immediate combat, what would that look like? And this is what we brought to CitizenCon. So we worked on this with a small internal team, and we wanted to bring it to CitizenCon, make it playable, nice and stable, good performance and everything, and get the feedback from the players, see if this was even something people liked or wanted. Because again, to progress on Star Marine or Arena Commander, it really doesn't make a ton of sense to continue to progress in just isolated bits. It makes a lot of sense to put it all together, and again, make it a lot more like what the PU experience vision will be. Because this kind of combat, and again, if you've seen the videos and stuff like this, we expect to get to this level of interaction between players and everything in the PU. When we get there, it's got to be fun. It can't be, great, we've got a thousand people in the server now, all this combat is happening, and oh my goodness, the Cutlass is overpowered, or this weapon takes down a ship, like an FPS weapon, or if you hit a ship with a knife, the ship goes flying off because of physics or anything. So basically, it's got to be fun when we get there. And there's no reason to wait. We've got to start putting that stuff together now. And a big part of Theaters is you're really playing stuff that is already there. That was the whole mentality of this. So yes, did we build a new planet? Not a brand new planet. We put some new compounds and setups within a new bit of lore onto basically pre-existing assets, right? There were a couple new things that we added, but I'm sure we'll get into that as we go throughout this. Not a whole ton. This wasn't like making a whole new game. This was like taking all the content that we've already got, putting it together in a bit of a structured scenario, and getting it fun. And that was easily the most important part of it: bring something fun to CitizenCon that shows all our Star Citizen glory in terms of combat. Because the last thing to say is that every time I talk about fun, it's not that the PU isn't fun, it's that it can take a long time and there's no guarantee; you could play for two and a half hours and not necessarily fire a shot, which is great, that's by design in Star Citizen, but there's a whole part of Star Citizen that would make entire games all by itself, that needs to be balanced, analytically tuned, and played a lot.

We hope that Theaters of War will provide us a concentrated version of that where we can iterate very quickly, where we can get feedback very quickly. Not everybody has an entire day to dedicate to the Persistent Universe, or even two hours. Some people only have 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes between dinner and whatever. That's their time to play in an evening, and we still want the feedback from those people. So Theaters of War is our way to get everybody involved in this process, whether you can dedicate 10 hours to us, 2 hours to us, or just 30 minutes to us.

Yeah, and if you could get basically a 30 minute injection of Star Citizen, what does that look like, right? And my contention is that it looks like Theaters of War. It's a combined arms game mode, and I'm not even sure I mentioned that. It's a combined arms game mode. We put infantry, we put ground vehicles, we put ships all together, and we figure out their roles. These ships and ground vehicles and everything were designed with certain roles in mind, but in a lot of cases, a great example, just to go against where the PU is at, owning a Ballista in the PU right now is not that fun. There are instances where it can become very useful, but in Theaters, it's a powerhouse. It's incredibly important. So the Ballista, for those that don't know, is an anti-air vehicle. But it is a ground vehicle and it's got to be transported around and stuff like this. So having a map basically with multiple phases that span quite a bit of distance, but we're not talking about solar system distances, we're talking about distances on a planet. So the Ballista is very powerful there, whereas in the PU, currently, it just doesn't get used that much. Currently, because, again, we've got about 50 players in that server with these massive, massive planets. You could sit in that Ballista all day.

So that's a perfect example of the microcosm that we hope Theaters of War gets us. While the PU continues to iterate, we can provide scenarios that allow for the testing of our mechanics, of our vehicles now.

And I would also argue that it's a really good way to tell stories from our lore. I love the lore of Star Citizen. There's so much of it. So much history that's been written by the lore team. And it's really great to have a YouTube video where we go over the lore and we talk about a planet or so. But it's a wholly different thing to experience something like that as if you were doing a reenactment, as if you were doing battle reenactments or something like this. I think that's a way more compelling way to tell those stories, because then when you end up in the location in the PU, present day sort of, you're like, oh, I know the story behind this whole thing, right?

Tons, oh my goodness. Not just stories, but very real feedback, not just to Theaters of War or Electronic Access and Arena Commander and Star Marine, but requests from an org standpoint; it's like, what did an org really want to do with this? There were other ones, really, really good feedback and ideas that were coming out for things that we could do within Theaters of War. I wouldn't say it's obvious, necessarily, unless you've played some of these other games that definitely inspire that idea: things like capital ship against capital ship. We've got multiple phases within Theaters where you've got phase one and phase two, phase three, and we can move all those around the planet. It doesn't have to be that we start on ground and we go up to space, or we could start in space, go down to the ground. This template of Theaters can apply to a lot of stuff, whether phase three is a Javelin or Idris, and the whole mode is all designed about taking over that given Idris. You could do that. You could do capital ship against capital ship, right, where you've got phase one is one capital ship, phase three is another capital ship. You can do some fun stuff where you've got to push forward your capital ships. And though that's a final objective, you might want to take that to the front line and maybe that's a little bit dangerous. So there were a lot of ideas coming out of the community, which was super good. But the main piece of feedback was focusing on the fun is what everybody wants us to be doing, right? Don't get me wrong, Star Citizen is incredibly visual and the fidelity of all our assets... Basically, the quality of all the assets, quality of all the visuals is over the top, right? We spare no expense on that. But we really, really have to be focused on the fun, and it's hard when you're making such a large-scale MMO because by nature, we want it to be sandboxed. Play how you want, play what you want, do what you want. But at the same time, I think people sometimes need, and definitely if you come from the generation of gaming that I come from, we need a tiny bit of structure. We need some progression. We need a little bit more immediate engagement in a lot of cases. But that's not everybody, right? A lot of people want to go and be immersed and role play and be part of that universe. But again, focusing on the fun became a very, very common thread between all my conversations at CitizenCon.

I sort of talked a tiny bit about this during the presentation, and to answer the question directly, yes, Theaters would totally suffer from this. Just the same way that the PU suffers from it, the same way that Squadron suffers from it, the same way that Arena Commander suffers from it, the same way that Star Marine suffers from it. And to go to that point, just first before I actually go into what we've done about it: this isn't a special code base or anything, right? We're not separate from the game. That defeats the point. 100%, right? We don't just develop this separately. We are intrinsically linked to the PU, Squadron 42, and any other game within here. The nice part about that is then when we go to prioritize one of these things like hit registration, or more aptly basically just the lag between the responsiveness of a shot and then somebody dying, it's going to affect everything. So the nice thing about working on something like Theaters is that that becomes front and center very, very quickly. And I would argue that in the PU it's not immediately obvious sometimes. Yes, once you get into those combat scenarios, you absolutely feel that. But just to go to my point about why we need a more analytical environment, that happens within the first 10 seconds of play. And if that happens in the first 10 seconds of play, you're going to want to do something about it immediately.

Theaters will also let us, with these shortened, condensed game experiences, recreate that experience over and over again. It lets us reproduce them, which is the best way to track down the source of any bug, of any performance issue. Reproduction, reproduction over and over until you find the cause. So again, in the PU, those things exist, but they happen a bit more spread out, so it doesn't feel like it's as big of a problem. We condense it, it becomes a greater problem, we can better find the source of those things.

And then we know if we've made a difference. That's the other thing, right? And again, sure, in the PU, you could go get four QA guys together against four other QA guys, and they'll meet on Daymar, and they'll have a little combat or whatnot. But again, it's the least analytical way you could do this. We've got to be a little more scientific about this, especially when you're talking about network latency. And you can't just do it with AI either. So a lot of people go, well, just jump on a planet, spawn 60 AI, and start shooting them, and you'll see how unresponsive that is. It's not immediately obvious when you do it that way. What you really need is a full server of players using all our assets. Because, again, the way the grenades work is a little bit different than the way a rifle works, a little bit different than the way a ship works, a little bit different than the way the ground vehicles work. So, having said all that, we actually made some significant improvements. And as I do, I like to take people through the history of the problem up into the actual fix. So about the 2.0 timeframe, we had upwards of a 500 millisecond delay, and this was injected into the system. There were some reasons for this, and it can be argued whether those were great reasons or not great reasons, but it was really about smoothing out actor movement as well as prediction for the AI ships in the verse. So people that were playing in the 2.0 branch, let's say, will remember times when, heck, we even had it in 3.0 one time, where the AI ships were jittering a lot. So again, they would be along a path and it looked like they were rubber banding, right? They would go forward, back, and then forward and back and jitter through. That injection of that 500 millisecond delay was what was meant to actually smooth that out. But it was never meant to be a permanent fix. It was kind of a temporary thing. But like every bad hack, it becomes permanent, right? When you do a quick hack, you'll fix the problem and then you forget about the problem and you move on to something else. So we had this 500 millisecond delay about the 2.0 timeframe. Then in 3.0, one of our gameplay programmers coupled with one of our network engineers, this is Gordon and Jens, reduced this down to 250 milliseconds. So now we're getting a little bit better, but 250 milliseconds comparatively to other games, just to give you an example, popular EA game Battlefield, they're usually running at 100 milliseconds. And this isn't necessarily when you look at your ping, this isn't what we're talking about so much. This is your latency between you, server, client, and then back, right? So there's this thing called rewind time that we've worked on. The first thing we did, though, because 250 milliseconds is what everybody's been playing for the last little while, and just that amount of time is a lot, when you're talking about, again, the immediate feedback of a shot or throwing a grenade or something like this. So we were sitting at the 250 millisecond delay at CitizenCon, and people did experience that, but because we were keeping it to 40 players and not a whole ton of ships, it wasn't super duper obvious, but I think that it was definitely felt. So having said that, the first thing we did when we got back is that the same network engineer actually went to go look at the upstream refactor, and this is actually on the roadmap, and we've been working on this for a little while. So what it does is that it massively benefits a server that is running at a high frame rate now. So what we've done is that he's reworked the way the upstream stuff works, so that's when you're sending up to the server. And when the server's running at a decent frame rate, 30 plus anyways, that latency is going to be much, much less. So you're going to feel really good responsiveness there. However, it won't really help the PU massively yet just because the server frame rates need to go higher. And as server OCS is rolling out, that should be helping that. The next level of this was a huge win, and this is the one that we're really now playing with internally, and this is what's going to make the biggest difference, because now we've reworked the, we call it rewind time, basically, so this prediction kind of stuff, and we've got it down to that 100 milliseconds, but it's not just 100 milliseconds and we try to keep it there, it's actually dynamic now. So what we've done is we've exposed it so that it can actually change, so we can go plus 120, or we can get as long as 50 in some cases, depending on your connection to the server. And then further to that, we can actually tune it now in real time. So as we're playing within the servers, we can actually change this rewind time. So that's what myself and Rich Tyra and Jens and Gordon and everybody are actually looking at pretty much weekly right now: what are our values looking at? What's the range of this? Where should this be? But it's to get it down to the feel that everybody's used to from other games anyways, which is generally around that 50 to 100 milliseconds. And that's where we're getting it to. So basically, when they get hands-on on this, and when it rolls out all together, Arena Commander is going to feel better. Star Marine is going to feel better. PU is going to feel better. Everything is going to be much more responsive. And we've already got that work, not completely done, it's not super tuned, but we've already put all this stuff in. So the next release should actually have a bunch of this in it.

When you say the next release, you mean 3.9?

Yeah, I want to be sure about that. I'm going to say 3.9, but it's also sitting in a branch right now, so it's not yet in the main branch. When Theaters goes into their hands, they're going to have it.

Yes, it would make lots of sense. We've already got one, right, in terms of the ships? So we've got two, technically. We've got Pirate Swarm and we've got Vanduul Swarm for the ships, so it would stand to reason that we would get an FPS one. Would it benefit Theaters? Yes, but indirectly, because yes, we can help on weapon balance and things, but PvP is a little bit different than PvE. I wouldn't want to make any hard decisions based on PvE setups or environment. The PvE setup is much, much more for the players.

I might have mentioned this anyways, but we rolled out a new Star Marine map called The Good Doctor, and this was the same team actually that was working on Theaters of War, and we wanted to do exactly a PvE survival FPS on The Good Doctor. Not quite where we wanted it to be yet, but we already had all the content and everything done for The Good Doctor, so we're like, okay, cool, we'll put it into Star Marine, let people play it, we can get all our environmental physics and bugs worked out, and once we're ready for the AI spawners to go in there, we'll put them in and call it a day. So yeah, we're not far from that at all, but we're really, really focusing on Theaters right now, and then shortly thereafter, it shouldn't be too far to do that.

What I said at CitizenCon still stands true, right? I wanted to get it in the first half of this year. I want to get it in the hands of the backers for testing. That's the whole thing. And we're very much on track for this. We're not behind at all because, again, we're not coming up with a whole ton of new stuff. We're putting a lot of structure around it. There's a couple of features here and there, things that are really specific to the game mode, like, again, mobile spawn points and unlockable spawns and objective and destroy spawns and these things. But they're relatively isolated. They aren't huge system things. They're very, very much game mode things. So, I want to get it into the backers' hands in the first half of this year because, again, we want the feedback, because what we're doing right now is we're working off of all the feedback from CitizenCon already. For those that don't know, we actually had a whole survey that the guys did. And the response was incredible. People actually did the survey, which was great. Because we had something like, I might get the number wrong, but 280-some-odd people play through. And out of the 280, we had 220 survey responses, so it's a pretty good response rate. And the questions on there were all related to, hey, and actually my favorite one was, was the game fun? It's such a simple question, but the vast majority and the highest percentage of responses was a five for fun, where one was no fun and five was super fun. And that was the highest response. And that was our goal. So being able to just see that was a massive amount of validation. I was quite happy to see that. But it got very granular, that survey. So it was like, out of the ground vehicles that were on the map, which one did you use the most? Which one did you like the most? Which one did you hate the most? These kinds of things. So there was tons of feedback that we had already gotten. And then on top of that, there's great feedback on Spectrum, on Reddit. And that comes from whether they were hands-on with it or not. And some people just have some pretty solid ideas or bring up problems that we might not have considered. So that's all the stuff that we're operating on right now. And I did talk in the presentation about some of the future things that we wanted to do, which includes friends. It included some cinematics and briefing things. It included a big, big chunk of work, which is not the most exciting, but it was consuming some integrations from main branch, which were huge. So, yeah, that's the stuff that we've been doing. We're still on track. We're not behind by any stretch of the imagination, but I want to get some testing from the backers in the first half of this year a couple times.

Yes. So the first step of that is going in Good Doctor. Actually, it's a perfect setup for it because most of it's glass. So we're bringing back our 2D destructibility. So as I do, I will give you the full history of what destructibles really mean for the engine and for technology anyways. So yes, we want our environments to be interactive, right? Not just destructible, but you want to be able to pick up stuff and interact with the environment, basically. So we've got three different types of destructibles that we work with. And as we get our performance really in line, that's when we'll start dropping all those things in. Because basically, as we just talked about, we were talking about network delays and server performance and things like this. And when you're in that state, you don't want to be dropping a bunch more destructibles that need to be synchronized, and pieces of it and everything. The couple different types that we have, and already work within the game anyways: we have, I call it 2D destruction basically, so it's like if you have a piece of wood, you have glass, you have something like this that is pierceable and needs to leave holes, and then after you've left a couple holes, eventually it breaks off, right? So this is one of our 2D destructibles, so that's in place in a lot of spots around the verse anyways. But you'll see it really, really obviously within the Star Marine maps; Echo 11, I think, definitely has one. And then on top of that, Good Doctor is almost entirely glass. So you'll see a lot of 2D destructible with that. Now, 2D destructible is nice because it's not a massive network synchronization problem. We don't actually synchronize every single little piece of the glass. Instead, what we do is a state-driven thing where it's like, once that glass is destroyed, we know it's gone. Play the particle effect, but it's not important that this piece and this piece is perfectly synchronized across clients. The next one we have is a, we call it pre-broken, basically, destructible. And what it is, it's like if you had a building that was actually sectioned off so that we know exactly how it's going to fall apart. And we've already pre-authored all the pieces of it, and we just have some constraints that actually keep them together. So that's another destructible that we have. And then a further destructible is a little more complex one, and we call it a Boolean destructible. You would have a cutter object that can actually cut either a 3D shape or a 2D shape. It's kind of combining the two, where it's like the 2D destructible and the pre-broken one, but you create the pre-broken pieces at runtime. But that one's real expensive, so that one we want to avoid over the network or anything like that. But you'd definitely see something like that in Squadron, though. So, short answer, yeah, we want to put destructibles in.

A lot. So, again, I walked through that in the presentation, what we were about to do, but I can tell you already what we already have done. So we changed the planet. The planet that we had was a V3 planet, and I talked about it, and it sounds funny, right? We changed the planet. But it was really important. Because V4 planets came up right at the time that we were launching this, but we needed to be sure that we could bring a stable build to CitizenCon. And I'm not saying V4 necessarily destabilized it, but we knew that it was going to come about a month before we were going to go to CitizenCon. So we actually locked ourselves off in a branch for about two months, so that we weren't taking the main branch updates. But what happened during that time was three major systems that went in, and we had to consume those into the branch. One of the major systems was Planet V4, as I mentioned. So now that we've come back into the main branch anyways, we put a new planet in place, and it looks a lot different now too. Visually it's much better. I'm so much happier with it in terms of the art. The actual visuals of it look a lot better. I'm very happy with that. But again, the mentality was make it fun, and then we make it pretty later.

And I don't know how much the community necessarily knows about it. I know we've mentioned it. I'm not going to go too in-depth on that one. But Chris had done some work on a physics proxy refactor, which was fantastic. But it was big; we had to consume that, too. So we consumed that. And then on top of it, we also took server OCS, which, I think it's a question later on, doesn't directly affect us in Theaters, but we had to consume that code base anyway. So those three things have already happened. We're done. So that's good. The other thing that we did, it was kind of interesting, and it was a bit of feedback that we got at the same time as something that we just realized as we were doing it. So when we were doing these sessions at CitizenCon of the Theaters play session, we had the 20 on 20 in a room. And myself and Rich Tyra and JJ and a couple other guys, Lee from our QA department, were walking around the room as people were playing. But what we found we started doing was like drill sergeants or something. We would call out encouragement, or I'd like to set up a little bit of rivalry for guys. But no, we were calling out, hey, make sure you go unlock that spawn point. Make sure that's your main focus. Go to that location. Hey, don't run here, run here. And what we talked about afterwards was that they're not going to ship a Sean Tracy or a Rich Tyra with Theaters of War, so we better be sure that all these callouts are triggered in the map. So again, it's like little reminders from your commander of what you should be doing or what you shouldn't be doing, or a re-encouragement of a thing, or trying to stop you from doing a certain thing. It's really important, actually. And we found that once we were doing that in these Theaters maps, it played a lot better, especially when you're doing your first round of it; you're still figuring out how this whole mode itself works and what you're meant to do. So that was a big part of it. So we've actually captured all those VO lines now. And we're basically implementing them all. It's not difficult, but it's time consuming, because we have to set up events for all of them. It's like, okay, when do we actually trigger that? And how do we know that the guy's running the wrong way? And things like this. So that'll be an important bit of it.

You're going the wrong way.

Yeah, that's actually a good example. It's like feedback for the out of bounds. We had a little bit of stuff that would come up on the screen, but it wasn't super obvious. You had an idea you were going out of bounds, but you didn't know how long you had. There was nobody really telling you how to get back or that it was really important that you get back. So that's an important component of it. The other thing we did was completely rework the spawn screen. So we're also dependent on this Building Blocks technology, this UI system. And as it was coming online, it's only got so many features every time, so we had to lock off a little bit early, and it only had so many of the features that we needed for the spawn screen, which is really, really central to the mode. This is giving you a top-down representation of the map: where everybody is, where's the mobile spawns, where's my spawn points, where's an unlockable spawn, where's the enemies right now. It's a really important screen, basically, and it's your landing page. So we've completely reworked that, and it looks great now. I'm very, very happy with how that thing looks. So that's done too. What else have we done? I've got a big list anyways. Oh, transitions between phases. So this was, again, about player feedback. One of the bits of feedback was that it wasn't immediately apparent, especially the first time you were playing, that sometimes the transition between, well, phase one and phase two on the old map, it was like two and a half, three kilometers. And a lot of times people would finish phase one, they got it all captured, everything's ready to go, and they would just beeline it. They would just start walking, right? Now, okay, yes, the objective thing says this is really far away, but eh. It wasn't immediately obvious. As we were walking around, we could see people that were just running out into the woods type thing.

Anyways, transition between phases. We don't want everybody running the Daymar Rally between phases or anything like this. So what do we do about it? And I don't want to reveal everything that we did about it, because it's really cool, and as soon as you guys get hands on, you'll see it and you'll know exactly what it is. Okay, so first of all, we put a couple vehicles right outside the front, and these are not spawnable ones, they're just buggies and things like that that are sitting right outside the phases now. So basically, as you're walking, you're going to realize very quickly that you've got a long way to walk, and rather than turning around and going back, you'll have a vehicle right in front of you. There's some real creative ones in terms of grouping up the team together to make that transition of phases, and this is something that I really always wanted. I've always imagined the experience of the battle for Hoth, where the defenders are really waiting, right? And there's that moment where all of a sudden you see them coming over the thing and it's the whole team. Or even better, when everybody's sitting and all of a sudden a whole fleet jumps out of hyperspace together, you know? It's those moments that I was really going for. So we put some transitional tools within that. And again, I just don't want to say exactly what that one is. But as soon as the community gets hands on, they'll see exactly what it is. But we make that transition much easier. So again, you're not going to get stuck running there on foot. And again, whether that's AI helping you out, whether that's other things, I don't want to go too into detail on it.

No, and this is one that we're doing a bit of feedback on, and this is why I have to get the community hands-on with this. We need to get the metrics from it. We need to get some telemetry to know basically how long people are waiting. Right now, it's at a minimum of eight. And we play it a lot when we're doing play tests. With a four on four thing, it's not as hectic, definitely, as the 20 on 20, and we get a little less combat going on. But yeah, it can play just fine at eight players. So we do a minimum right now of eight, and then as soon as the eighth one joins, the round starts. The other thing, and we made massive changes to this, and that's definitely coming in 3.9, was the join in progress stuff. So this was, again, another fix that went in to fix a problem that's no longer a problem, and then it just stayed there. Which was this join in progress. So back in the days of just Star Marine, we had very time-dependent rounds. It was like a 15 minute round or a 20 minute round or something. And the issue is that when you play through Star Marine, it actually punts you back out to the front end when you're done. And one of the issues with that is that it takes a new load, and we didn't want people joining with only like two or three minutes left in the round. And what ended up happening was the logic got a little broken over time, because the way that we actually tracked the amount of time in a round changed. So we had a bug, basically, that once the round had started, and I think it was only a minute or two in, nobody would be able to join anymore. So what that created was this perception that nobody was playing. You would get into a server with maybe two or three people that joined in the same, let's say, five minutes or something. But anybody that went to go join after was actually spinning up a new server, which not only is a little bit expensive on our part, is pretty bad in terms of where the players are, because we're not putting the players together; they keep starting new servers. So again, in working on Theaters, this became so obvious right away, and because it's so important that we have as many players as possible within those rounds, we had to fix this, so now you can join in progress. Now, I think we left it so that the last two or three minutes or something you can't join, and this is just to avoid the fact that you've joined, you've just loaded, and the round ends. And that's not fun.

And just for clarity's sake, when you say that that feature is in 3.9, you mean that's applying to Star Marine in 3.9?

Yeah, correct. The join-in-progress stuff is all, again, across Star Marine. And then when this game mode comes out, it'll use that too.

Well, they won't be first introduced to Theaters of War, because it's not really meant... So it's a driver for the combat, but it's not a driver for new systems or features necessarily. So basically, as it comes on for the PU, we'll be able to then use it, because, again, we use the exact same stuff. So if it applies to Theaters, and of course medical gameplay does, we of course want to have revives. We of course want to have, well, I hope anyway, some sort of body dragging or some sort of mechanic to get your buddy out of the way of fire before you revive him, and things like this. But it won't first go into Theaters and then later into the PU. It really, if anything, is the other way around. It'll first go into the PU, and then if it makes sense for the Theaters scenario, or if that core gameplay has to be tuned at all, it'll get tuned with Theaters in mind.

I think that's indicative of something that can't be said enough. Theaters of War development does not take away from development of the PU. All the same systems being developed for the PU are still being driven by the PU. Theaters of War is additional testing with it. It's a petri dish. I think that was the analogy you used before. It's a microcosm of this thing, so it doesn't start there. It starts here with the big thing, like it should. That's our priority. And this is this ancillary thing that we do to make the bigger thing better.

It just gives a good focus on just the combat and, again, the interchange of air vehicle to ground vehicle to infantry and how they all interact with each other in an aggressive fashion.

Not at all, because the balance for the ships is still not going to be so dissimilar when physically-based damage comes online. They'll just be more within the role that they're meant to be. Will it affect Theaters? To a degree, yeah. But will it massively change the balance? We don't want it to. The gameplay, though, might shift, because, again, physically-based damage is not the opposite, but it's different than what we have right now, because right now it's just a big health pool on a ship, right? Each component has a certain amount of health or whatnot. So instead, you're not shooting a ship until it explodes, basically. You're going to be shooting a ship until it's disabled in some way, and whether it explodes will be a systemic part of that. If you've damaged the power plant and the power plant goes critical and then the ship explodes, great. But physical damage is meant to give a range of ways to disable the ship, I guess, rather than just blowing it up, if that makes any sense. And it's more like what it would be like in reality, I suppose. Sure, if you fire a couple missiles at a jet, it will explode, but maybe it explodes on the wing, maybe it explodes on the back. It's going to go differently, rather than the thing just being vaporized within a second and then that's job done. It's going to go very differently in that sense. But the, I don't want to say the meta, but the main balance for that given ship should not change dramatically. That's all.

We can. There's no direct plans for it right now, because, as we're seeing, if we could have 100 players in the server, we'd be doing that on the PU right now. Now with server OCS, and we hope that all opens up, we'll be happily testing something like this. But even to test 100 players in the server, I imagine we've got to get 100 people in here ready to play. So once it's running really well with 40, with ships, with ground vehicles, with everybody, then yeah, of course we can increase this.

So when you're saying 'can', you're talking about a technical possibility.

Yeah, and that's the thing. We're going to have to test it. We just have to test it. We have to play with it. And this given map and scenario probably doesn't lend itself to that many people, because, again, of the difference we find from doing just a 4 on 4 or a 5 on 5 versus a 20 on 20. I could only imagine what a 50 on 50 looks like right now. So do we want to get to those numbers? If it makes sense for the game mode, absolutely. But yeah, I'd want to have a different scenario, something a little wider. Give it a little bit more room.

But not a backdoor confirmation of any Battle Royale mode or anything?

No. Actually, at first we called this Not Battle Royale, when we didn't have the Theaters of War name.

Well, it's just, again, and to reiterate, right, it's a much more analytical, quote-unquote scientific kind of environment that we can test this stuff in. There's also no barrier to entry in terms of testing, right? You boot up the mode, you get 20 people or 40 people in, and you're going. I mean, it's like two clicks, and you're playing. Again, to do this in the PU, yes, we can pull analytics from all the stuff going on, and we do. It's really hard to establish whether or not a change you've made is actually making a significant difference without the focus of a given thing, right?

Anybody who's been part of our Evocati test flight knows when they get in there, they're often directed to test specific things for an extended period of time. This is just another tool in that. It lets us focus on combat without having to direct everybody to do it.

Yeah, and as you mentioned, the petri dish, it's exactly like Arena Commander was before 2.0 launched, or before the PU was there. We were testing all the ships in a very, very focused method. Same thing with Star Marine, and this is just the, I don't want to say obvious, but the obvious evolution of those two coming together.

Yes, if the scenario makes sense for it. Again, if there's a moment where breaching a ship makes a lot of sense within the scenario, if that's part of the story that we're telling, yeah, absolutely. But again, it's got to appear in the PU first. We have to rely on the big feature teams that are working on the PU to get their features online. And if it so makes sense that we could have a very, very focused moment of that happening, it'll become really essential to the testing and stuff for that. So if we've got a mode with it, and we've got the PU actually doing it, then sure, we can do that. Are there plans for that right this second? Absolutely not. No. I want to get the scenario done that we're doing, move on to another scenario, but really make sure that it's fun. This is number one. And there's a lot of stuff that goes into that. It's not just, is it fun because it goes pew pew bang? Yeah, cool, but does it feel good, right? The fun comes as part of that, right? If it feels crappy, you can have the most fun game in the world, but again, if it's laggy, if the responsiveness is bad or whatever, it ruins it. It just ruins that entire experience. So I want to make sure that that's all worked out first, and then we can do some of the cooler stuff.

Yeah, and I think I mentioned this in the presentation, we tried a lot of different ones, so we'll continue to do that. As different loadouts for different ships make sense, as different balance has been done with certain ships, they might make more sense. As the scenario changes. So for example, I spoke about it, I believe, during the presentation as well, but we had to remove the Valkyrie. The Valkyrie is like purpose-built for this mode. It's just real unfortunate that, in terms of performance of an asset, it is astronomically heavy. In terms of the art, the draw calls on it, the poly count on it, and we really didn't have time to fix that up. So we're like, okay, we can remove that, but what do we replace it with? And we said, okay, well, we still need a dropship, so let's get the Hoplite in there. So we put the Hoplite in instead, which was a little bit better performance. And I think at this point, we've gotten some of that Valkyrie work done, which is good. But I'd love to bring that back. So again, this is the kind of stuff that we're doing with the vehicles. And the eventuality is I'd love to get class-based spawns and things like this, which would be really nice.

You just brought something up that I didn't quite realize. Another benefit of Theaters of War is that we were able to recognize the performance hit in the Valkyrie. And you said that's being worked on right now, so it's being optimized. So again, the ship and its performance in the PU will benefit.

Because it was so obvious, right? And again, one Valkyrie in the PU, not a big deal. It won't hit any alarm bells by any stretch. But as soon as you put, again, 40 people in, a whole bunch of ground vehicles, a whole bunch of other things, you can see the outliers. I mean, we have telemetry analytics coming out of our eyeballs. And it stands out. And you know, okay, we've got to do something about that right away. And people will ask the obvious question, why don't you just drop a whole bunch of ships in the PU and then compare them? Well, we do. But again, we've got to put our priority, we've got to put our focus on the ones that are being used, on the scenarios that are actually happening, and not just theoretically changing a thing for the sake of performance.

So while the Valkyrie may not be in the first iteration, it's still something we want?

Specifically the Valkyrie? Yeah, oh man. When we came up with the mode in the first place, that was pretty much the first ship I said I wanted. Because again, what's the whole purpose of it? It's a dropship. You've got a bunch of infantry, you've got a bunch of turrets on the side. I wanted the infantry being able to fire railguns out the side of it. I want those turrets to be able to zoom. Again, it's the Black Hawk of Star Citizen, if you want to allude to something from present day. It's got two turrets out to the side, got a bunch of turrets on it.

Well, there was really only a subset of, what, eight? But the best vehicle in there was the Buccaneer, by far. And a lot of that came down to the scatter guns that it has on it. So because we put it with a loadout with scatter weapons, it makes it a lot easier to hit something, and you do a ton of damage onto the shields. And right now you get a lot of points for that. So as you were doing damage to those shields, you were getting a lot of points. So the Buccaneers kind of beat out the Hornets a little bit. But I think that has to do, and again, this is going into the focus kind of thing: we had the Super Hornets in there. And the Super Hornet is an awesome ship. It's actually my favorite. Well, it's my second favorite. Constellation, Super Hornet, I'm kind of between the two. But it's a two-man ship. That's when it's the most powerful, when there's two people in it. But right now, sitting in the gunner seat, you can't be as powerful as you should be, right? There's some frustrations to do with the turret. There's some frustrations to do with missile lock-on. That ship should be a lot more powerful when there's two people in it. And that's the stuff that we're finding out right away. Again, a Super Hornet with two people probably needs to win against a Buccaneer with one dude.

I'm going to say a Constellation with three people.

And again, think about what the role of that Constellation is. I won't try to get the actual name right, but the Constellation is generally a missile boat. I mean, it's got a lot of missiles. That's kind of the thing. And it's long range. Does that make sense in that scenario?

It may not in that scenario. I was trying to prompt you to talk about the Ursa. From my anecdotal evidence, the Ursa seemed to tear that up, which was the biggest surprise to me.

But again, this is one of these things that only comes up when you're playing it. And again, how many Ursas did you see in the verse? You probably see a bunch driving around Levski or being transported, and everybody's trying to fit them into Caterpillars and stuff like this, which is super cool, but what does it tell you about the gameplay of the Ursa? And you can look at the numbers. You can go, okay, well, really, it's only got this one super small turret on it. It doesn't seem that powerful. But in Theaters, the first thing we did was make them spawnable. So they're a mobile spawn point, which is awesome. Makes them super powerful already, just because they can be a central point for all the infantry to come from. So if you park an Ursa in the right place, you can get a bunch of people spawning in there and coming out. But even though the turret isn't that powerful, because the Ursa is practically such a stable firing platform, it was shredding infantry. It was super shredding infantry, because not only can the driver go remote, but the secondary passenger can also go into the remote turret. So it's one thing to be the driver and have struts in front of you and stuff like this while you're looking around at people. You can't really see behind you. But being able to go into the remote turret and have the view actually from the turret there, super stable if you aren't driving around too much anyways, and all of a sudden you are an infantry shredder. So again, this isn't super obvious if you were to play it in the PU. But again, in Theaters it becomes very important. And these are scenarios that we fully expect are going to happen in the PU. And again, it's got to be fun when we get there.

We should, actually, because there's a couple other ones. You know what? I'm going to talk about the thing I wasn't going to talk about, a little bit. So we weaponized... This is super cool. This was Rich Tyra's idea, and I'll give you a tiny bit of it anyways. So we talked about phase transitions. So the obvious thing that we use in the landing zones is transit, right? So we thought, why not Mad Max and weaponize the transit thing? So it's pretty cool. We're still trying it. Rich Tyra had this great idea, because we did have this tram line in there, but to make it usable: get some weapons on it, put some infantry on it, see what happens. Why not?

Some of the other stuff that we changed: the railgun. The railgun was really bugging me. We did some changes to the railgun as well. I don't believe they'll see those until they get hands-on with the mode, which again is in the first half of this year, as I said at CitizenCon. We changed the railgun, because it's super disappointing to shoot. The only thing I don't like about it is the impacts are not obvious. It doesn't really have a trail, and I'd like to have that trail, like a Gauss rifle or a maglev rifle or something like that, that would have some sort of trail of air movement. Honestly, it's like the Quake railgun, right? I want to be able to see where I shot and why it hit where it hit. And right now the railgun doesn't really tell you that. The other thing that we ran into, and again, this is why having the focus of Theaters is so awesome, because we get this stuff right in our faces immediately and we fix it: the railgun becomes very powerful, very, very noob tube for infantry. So you could run around with a charge, and it was a one-shotter to infantry easily, right? So it kind of became the noob tube of infantry combat. You would go anti-vehicle, and even though the anti-vehicle guys move around a little bit slower, they're a little bit heavier, the two guys, JJ and Tom Johnson, one of the producers, they were like these snipers with a railgun. And it was impossible to fight them. So we made some slight changes that make it a little less easy to one-shot the infantry, but make it much more powerful against the vehicles, and that's what we wanted to do. And these are the balance things that we need to do, but because the railgun didn't get used that much in the PU, if you check the telemetry on it, there's only so many scenarios where people even used it, so how do we know what it's doing without that proper game mode in there? So we made some adjustments there. We also massively improved the layouts based on telemetry. So one of the things we got out of CitizenCon was heat maps. Basically, we got some heartbeats from the guys. We knew exactly where they were, where they were stacking up, where they were getting stuck. So we changed the layout. Not massively. It's very recognizable, but we made some adjustments to that layout. The game feed was updated. So that's, as things are happening, it's, you know, Jared killed Sean. So the game feed is updated. I talked about the join in progress. Death cams. Mobile spawns are all fixed up, so that's really good, too. The transitions. Man, the list goes on. So I'll stop there.

Well, yes, right now there's presets. There's presets, and we're going to keep those in there. So the presets are going to be, actually, I don't want to talk too in detail about what we're going to do with it. But there's roles, and again, I wouldn't see it so much as classes as, yeah, it's a loadout. That's all it is, right? There's no obvious huge difference between how the character works anyways. But you'll get lighter armor or heavier armor, different weapon loadouts. If you want to be assault, or if you want to be a foot soldier, you might get a little bit of a longer range weapon versus a shotgun or something like this. It just makes it so that certain roles of gameplay that people enjoy playing, whether that's a sniper or an anti-vehicle or something, are there. And then additionally, they fulfill really important balance roles within the map.