Star Citizen: Pillar Talk - Alpha 3.9

Well, you've got to understand what unified friends list really means, because we had separate friends databases. There was a couple different ones, basically, that didn't necessarily talk to each other. So, for example, on Spectrum, I might have added Paul as a friend on Spectrum. I would never see that in the gameplay. The same vice versa. If I added him in the game as what we call the platform friend, I wouldn't see him on Spectrum. So that was kind of the first thing to work out. And that took some backend services to make sure that this was all talking to each other and coming from the same place. Now on top of that, we wanted to make that all real time. So as somebody on Spectrum is adding you, we wanted to see that in the game immediately.

Whether it's on your web platform or in the game, it's all the same. You can see it. It's live. Continue to finish it off, which would be like the VoIP and the VoIP communication between the platform and in-game, as well as a more rich presence. You kind of would know, oh, yeah, look, Sean's on Hurston. I can actually be in Spectrum seeing Sean and I can see he's in the PU right now.

He's in Stanton on Hurston. So it's just stuff that honestly just needed to get worked out. And this is the inevitable starting mark for what is really social management tools. So it's not full rich presence yet. We can't tell you exactly where in the verse they are. I can say you're online and you're in the PU. And there was one thing as well that I really hope forward we move into, and it's something that you had mentioned a long time ago, and I think the orgs really want this, but it's being able to, within some sort of social panel, social control, be able to work on, the military calls it radio etiquette. Where the commander can talk to the captain, the captain can talk to the pilot, but let the orgs sort of organize that stuff. So all those controls, whether it's org alliances and all these kind of things, that's where this will all go to. It gives the players the ability, well, they had the ability, but an easier way to play together. Which really should just be a no-brainer. Should just be that easy. I wish we could do it with our emails.

I mean, I guess you can answer that question. I mean, we go to 3.9, the stuff that you've heard so far on 3.8.2.

Me, personally, I think it's a big step in the right direction. We can lose some in-game persistence, but we can't really lose people's earned UEC or their items they bought and the ship they bought in-game, right?

And hopefully we've cleaned up some of the initial glitches of it. I mean, of course, if there's an exploit and someone's figured out a way to get a couple billion credits, we reserve the right to either individually edit those people's accounts so we can just take the money or the items away from them.

Or apply a general cap.

Or just do a general cap, as Paul says, or even occasionally we may decide, well, we need to just reset the database and do a general wipe, which we're going to try not to do if possible, but you never know because we're constantly adding new structures. The next stage on the persistence, which Paul can probably talk about, is the iCache side of it, which is more fidelity in the persistence. So what we have right now is saying, well, these are the items you have, and we're storing those in a way that can survive the patches, but we're not necessarily storing every item. We need iCache for the foundational, that sort of micro persistence, to do the physical inventory, and that's a big thing. And the other thing that opens up, which is sort of the next stage, which is sort of bigger things, but it would be now because we can persist anything. You can be a player or an organization, you can go down onto a, like all those beautiful shots that people share of microTech and go, I'm going to set my homestead up here. Well, with that technology, that is what we need to be able to do there and that is our plan. So when that's online, we're working on the aspects that would include sort of what you would call base building. So you would go there, you'd have to bring in the right resources and sort of create your little homestead or your base. So organizations or players can create their own areas of interest and essentially will help sort of build out and populate the universe as much as we on the game design side. So as we get these things on, as we get closer to that, we get closer to this sort of completely dynamic universe that you can sort of go anywhere, leave things, build things, destroy things, pick things up. And I think when we get to that, it's going to be pretty amazing.

Exactly. And iCache is obviously one piece of the puzzle, which is our internal high-speed database to store all that data, because obviously that's a lot of data, right? Every single bottle can be persisted and restored. iCache is just one piece where server OCS is a big part of that too, right? So something needs to take the data and stream it in and stream it out and restore it properly. There's a lot of tech under the hood developed right now, which obviously people won't see, like all the features you talk about, they come eventually, people won't see them in 3.9 just yet, but we built a lot of the foundation. And like the server OCS on the server, for example, when we rolled it out in 3.8, which was a big win for us. I think people out there, they were like, oh, we expect it to be like better performance or whatever. But in reality, it is one giant building block to get to this full persistent universe. Right now, without other tech, which is not there yet, you don't really see the benefits yet. But for us internally, it's a real big milestone to get to exactly that vision where we can store every single object and we can stream that area out and we push all the changes the player did to that. We push that up into the database and then when someone else comes back to that area, we stream it all back and it comes back in the exact same state.

If you have the iCache and you have the server streaming, which we have, they work together. Those two are necessary for the server meshing. In the server meshing, because we can have tens, hundreds of servers all communicating with each other, we just need to be able to save out any arbitrary area with its full state, which means whatever items were there or not there or whatever, to some back end so that when we come in, we can stream it back in, whether we stream it out on this server or this server or this server, the state is the same between all of us. And then you also should get much more of the performance impact. So yes, like Paul says, while you don't see the front end feature yet, getting these things in are actually quite exciting for us technically because once they're in, we know, okay, now that enables this next stage. And once we get these several stages in, then all of a sudden all this great, sort of dynamic, tactile universe with state that you can go to with many, many players all together in the same areas becomes possible.

There's just so many layers of it. And we talked about it in the last Pillar Talk exactly, and it was all theoretical. But I did mention one other benefit during that last Pillar Talk that absolutely was in place. And Paul mentioned it, but the load times. Generally now, by default for a developer, it's about seven gigs when it loads up. It's so light in comparison to the 45 that it was.

Before, it was loading the entire universe. And now, as a developer, you usually have one server and one client, and I'm the only client. And I see a lot of benefits. The server starts immediately.

Big, big benefits behind the scenes for us.

Quality of life can mean a lot of things as far as the player is concerned. So from my standpoint, a big focus has been, and it's mandated from Chris and Erin, the player experience, the quality of life of playing the game. So there's no frustrations, there's no annoyances. They can do the things, they can play the way they want to play when they want to do it, basically. In an intuitive way. But I think it also goes down to a more technical level, which is sort of build stability.

We're definitely trying to have a stable build and try to at least be as stable as the previous build or even more stable. And we're willing to hold the build before it goes live for a little longer to get to that stage. So we'd rather not push it out and say, oh, we've made exactly this date, but it's crashing all the time.

There's always the balance between, obviously you can't spend too much time on it because that takes away development time. But it also needs to be enough time so people can actually enjoy the game and start playing the game.

Sometimes it sort of goes up and down a little bit because, for instance, server OCS, that actually was a massive fundamental change in the back end because parts of the universe just would not exist in the server anymore and they used to. And so we would see issues with that that we would never see before. And so I think when server OCS came in at the beginning, we took a little hit on the stability, but we've been fixing and moving those things on. In general, we're doing lots of little things. I think also, by the way, in this 3.9, we've reduced the latency, the rewind time for the FPS stuff. So Star Marine will be much better. It's going to be way snappier. And so will the PU.

And the PU, but the PU benefits a little, and I think, when did I talk about this last on ISC? I can't remember when, but the PU benefits a tiny bit less than Arena Commander because it's really good when the server performance is perfect, right?

30 frames a second on Arena Commander, great. Everything's great.

Once it gets a little cratery, to the fives or so, I guess it does still happen sometimes when the players get all spread out, but anyways. Yes, it's in there, and yes, there is an improvement, especially for a fresh server when it's running really fast.

Sure. So when the players are playing, very commonly, they'll have to go to the button mappings. And you've seen this on live streams or anything, and it hits escape, goes to the controls. Okay, how do I pull out the flashlight? Okay, how do I do the dance emote? Okay, how do I...

It is the worst when you're standing there as a director or I'm sure as the CEO going, how do I go third person again?

That's an easy one. It's like a quality of life improvement was needed on this side. And we used to joke that the button baron has struck, and it just got changed. But anyways, to do away with that completely, not only having good default mappings anyways, is to be able to give the players some ability to not just remap that, but to have access to all their actions in-game contextually and quickly.

And it also opens up, for instance, one of my pet peeves is we've got all these great emotes. But before, to access them, you had to go into the chat and slash dance or whatever.

And that's if you know they're there.

And if you know they're there. And then the whole idea of the personal thought system was to sort of open up different stances or actions, like whether you want to be dancing or sitting down or whatever it would be. Or all the various emotes, salute. And so it's just one place you can go select it. And the concept is sort of, because I've talked about this for a while, the StarCraft method, right? Which is you go there and you can play StarCraft with just the mouse. But once you start to learn the hotkeys and you become the pro player, you can do things much quicker. 200 actions per minute. But what we need is someone where all they know is the simple FPS, WASD, running around, your interaction key, your mouse. And with that, you should be able to do everything, figure out how to use a ship, how to use weapons, how to do all these things, access all these actions. And that really was the idea.

And that was the intent. That was the exact intent that he gave to us, which was make playing the game a little bit easier. That's really what that comes down to, is playing it easier out of the gate. That was the thing because the controls haven't really changed, but your access to those is. So now you don't have to go into our key mapping stuff, which actually isn't connected to our Illustrator. You have to go into a big list and figure out where your key is going to be or where your button is going to be. Within the inner thought, within the radial, you can just assign the key right there and it even tells you what it is. So you can adapt your style of play in situ to different shortcut commands if you want or just kind of remap it all right there where you want it to be. So that's really nice. But then further to that, we've got shortcuts to different categories. So the idea here is that your interaction system or your inner thought system is a lighter version of the mobiGlas. It's what you're doing in situ. So you're not in barracks preparing your weapon and taking it all apart and cleaning it and doing everything. But you're reloading it or you're changing out the ammo real quick.

And I mean, you kind of touched on it a bit, but the other thing that I think is really cool with it is the fact that you can bind any key to any of the actions and you can rebind dynamically right there in the personal thought. So there's no going to an option screen. Like most games, you always go to an option screen; here, you literally, it's kind of like as you're doing it. Car radio, you just hold number one for a second, and then it's programmed to the station you're on, right? Well, this is the same thing, which is you're going to hold the key down for a period of time, and then it binds to that action that you're highlighting in the personal thought. And so you can sort of rebind on the fly the things that you're commonly doing. So you go, oh, you know what? I'm playing with my group, and I want to be able to give them some hand signals because we're playing FPS, and I want to be able to go like this.

So you can bind that to whatever you want.

To whatever keys you want, and you can move it around. So if you don't like, for instance, me, I hate holding R to holster, I would rather have, I don't know, H would have probably been fine for holster, right? H, holster, who knows? So I could do H. But I think that's a big UX usability positive for the game. Those are all the kind of little things that we need to get into the game.

We're kind of taking some of this stuff into the new role where we're pushing some design in some of the feature teams. Same idea that we used to do our developer tools with, just for our players, because it's push the player experience, make it easy for the player to play our game a little bit. And I'm really liking how that's going and I think it's working.

So the attachments UI, it's pretty straightforward. You go into a mode through the personal inner thought system. You can go there or there is also a shortcut to it where your weapon comes up. It's basically like the inspect mode that we had when you were going shopping for the weapon. So you could take a look at it and you've got attachment points on it. And within those attachment points, you've got a barrel one, you've got an underbarrel one, then you've got the scope one. As you mouse over each one of them, you'll get a list, or actually not a list, it's going to be a grid. So within that grid, you can select the actual options and then you just go.

Of the things you have that would fit on that weapon.

And it was, we went from a list and now the grid looks great. That works a lot better because you can kind of see what it is rather than seeing NV-TAC 18X whatever. So you can see the scopes. You can add them right on there. You can swap them out as you go. And you can also stow your weapon, which will keep those on it, with an option for later that if you pull out another weapon, you can pull that attachment off that weapon and put it on the other one.

And also, like I said, when we shift to physical inventory and just be more tactile, this is a necessary interface because pulling up your character as a thing, that's like a paper doll, like an RPG paper doll thing. We want Star Citizen to be much more sort of in-situ, tactile. I see things, I interact with them. Hey, I need to put a scope on. I put a scope on. And so we want to shift towards that. And so like you've been talking about in this session, a lot of the stuff are building blocks towards cooler and bigger stuff that's coming down the road. It's got benefit and it's cool, but it also enables some of the other stuff. Without this sort of functionality and features, we wouldn't be able to do some of the other stuff that we want to do that I think ultimately will give you a pretty cool experience.

And it's a great point because all the features that we just talked about, all three of these things, the unified friends, player interaction system, personal inner thought, as well as the attachments UI, it's all done through building blocks. We couldn't have done it without building blocks. Actually, there was one little thing that came out of the attachments. When you're holding the weapon like this, it doesn't do it as much justice as it should. When you have inspect mode, it was cool enough, but really the pose of it, oh man, the guns are cool. It gave me a new appreciation for the way the weapons look because you get so used to seeing them. And also to understand the modularity of it.

They spent all the time to break them up properly, to fit all the sniper scopes properly and all the stuff. And now you can actually see that swap in real time.

I hate admitting it, but I stopped seeing it so much. But then, oh, yeah, that looks so good. I'm really happy with how they all turned out.

I really think on the environmental side, I think some people just think, oh yeah, New Babbage Landing Zone, what's special about that? But I think a lot of what makes Star Citizen special is that our locations, even though we use procedural tools to help sort of create at scale, they're very specifically authored. We have a lore, we have a universe, we have a history, and you can feel it. And so when you visit the places, you feel that. And I feel like that's kind of one of the things that makes Star Citizen special, even though we don't have a billion planets or anything yet, you do feel like when you go to microTech, it is different than going to Hurston, for instance, or when you go to the moons. And as we build tools to allow us to sort of create that stuff a little bit quicker, but still with that same level of quality, it'll be great. But I really love that, and I feel like the environment team did an amazing job on New Babbage, and it's going to be fun to go around there and get your burger or get your coffee or just hang out. And there's another nice thing, which we also showed off on ISC: we have the ability now to sort of change our light states based on the time of day. So it's also the interior of New Babbage. One of the really cool things about it is it's one of the first implementations of that. And also there's a whole area, there's a whole bar with a DJ and at nighttime, there's laser lights and it's the party scene. And during the daytime, it's a bit more of a sort of chill day drinking scene. And it's equally cool. Both equally cool. The three moons, which I think we've also done some ISC on, they actually created those in, I think it was like two weeks per moon for one person. So it was three moons, each one took two weeks, basically. And those look great. I mean, they're some of our best looking ones. And now that team's off doing some stuff in another star system, which is looking quite good, but that's another story. But I think there's going to be a lot of fun. Definitely keep people busy for a while. So I think that's really cool.

The other big thing in 3.9 is the prisons, which I mentioned kind of at the top, which I think is a unique consequence when you have something like a law system. And so you now end up in a prison and you've got to do your time. And so there's a consequence to it. And we got some fun stuff, like you can potentially find a way to escape from the prison. You can also go down and sort of reduce your time spent by mining down in the caves there and basically getting what we call merits that will sort of reduce your time. And it's kind of a fun element. And it's also a very beginning building block of fully fleshing out sort of the law enforcement, which would include the bounty hunting side. So we've got a lot more stuff planned for the prison stuff going beyond this V1 implementation we've got, where we'll have the ability to have prison fights and all sorts of fun stuff. And on the other side, the bounty hunting side, we've got some stuff long-term where we want you to be able to track down other players, secure them, put them in your ship, take them, drop them off at the local Advocacy office, and then that person wakes up in the prison, and you'd be able to hopefully track them long-term. So we want you to basically play that Mandalorian-style game. When you watch The Mandalorian, it feels very much like the sort of Star Citizen experience. But anyway, the idea of bounty hunting and tracking someone is stuff that we're working towards. So the prison is one of the elements that's, again, we talk about putting bits of the gameplay there. And of course, we're going to build on top of it. And I think by the time we've finished all this stuff, it will be really cool. The prison system is one element that would add towards making your piracy and bounty hunting and sort of law enforcement cycles all work, and that's one of the elements, but it still needs other stuff and we will get there, and that's kind of our sort of plan. But it's this iterative point where we put another, it's like putting another brick in the wall, another brick in the wall and finally it's there.

It's always the last 10% which brings it from, okay, there's a base system here, to actually now it's a polished feature and you can use it intuitively and it's fun to use.

I think that's the challenge. In normal game development, you wouldn't be doing this out there publicly, but because of the nature of the way the game is, we develop it with the community out there who support us; it's a totally different way. And I actually quite enjoy it because you get the feedback and the early feedback. And we can also make things better and more stable longer term this way. But in the short term, it does present challenges because we always have to make sure that, for instance, we have as stable a build as possible. So we do spend a fair amount of time stabilizing a build that we may not necessarily do if we weren't having to release something every quarter. I think long term, it ends up with a better product because we're iteratively testing it and we're iteratively getting feedback. But on a short-term basis, it means that you always have to spend some time making sure you're triaging your current build and making sure it's working. So that's time that you couldn't be spending on a feature or polishing it. If you're expecting everything to be fully polished and working brilliantly the very first time you load it up, then you shouldn't be playing Star Citizen just yet. But then you would have to wait. That's the flip side.

That's the big advantage: people can play right away. They test out a feature. Not just, oh, I'm part of the last 10% where we polish everything, or I'm a beta tester. You're a part of it from day one almost.

I would say a project of this scale. There's definitely some smaller indie projects where it's very like that, and that's very cool, but a project of this size and this scale, there's not many people doing them, and the people that are, are the big publishers, and the big publishers would never do what we're doing because they just wouldn't want to have to be open to that much feedback early. Star Citizen is never getting canceled. We're just going to keep working on this thing until it is the best space sim, or universe simulator, I should just say, not really space simulator, because it's a complete universe sci-fi simulation game, possible, and that's kind of cool, and it's fun to be working on it, because I feel like Willy Wonka, and it's imagination, whatever you can dream is possible.