You have modified certain software and tech in order to build Star Citizen. Is the machine for building the game complete, or is building and modifying the machine a regular component towards completing Star Citizen?asked by App Proportioner

Any game, you always have more tech to end with than you begin with, and it gets easier all the time, and we're doing things more correctly than we were initially without the current tech. It's always a moving target, game development, so we're always trying to think ahead, but we're doing what we can now.

And there's always going to be tools optimization. Just over the past year, we've really been working on this thing we've talked about, I think, one or two times called DataForge, which helps us rapidly author items, where before we were basically doing a lot of hand-edit work, magically turning an Excel sheet into an actual game item. And this is going to be more of a front-facing, collective spot where it's like, okay, here is all of one type of a component in the game, the high-level view of everything at once, a unified template to build everything out of, as opposed to just sort of patchworking things together. And those kinds of improvements are constantly ongoing. Even just with building the ships, you've made a bunch of the tools that we use just for taking a ship from 3D Studio Max, defining just the basics of what the hardpoints can do, but then actually having a tool that will author out a functioning XML template for us to start hooking everything else up into and actually getting the ship flying.

Yeah. The toolbox that Matt built was a huge improvement on our time. It really was. I have plenty of all-nighters stacked to the time before that.

There were times I'd be coming into the office at 1 o'clock in the morning, and you and Zane, and I'm like, why are you guys still here? It's like, because our work never stops.

Well, Calix is also a wizard. You never know if he's left the office for the day or got in early, and you don't know how he managed to flow graph something, but he managed to flow graph something.

I've seen your flow graphs. Your flow graphs are terrifying. There are no rules. It comes across really at every level. We have an optimization coming from John Pritchett that's going to make it... I think it's almost done. I'm not sure, but I think it was very promising words. But the flight tuning, each ship took about a week because of everything involved. And most of that week was spent having it completely wrong, because if it is not perfectly tuned to start with, it just fails in baffling ways. And once you get it to that point of perfection, now you have to ease it up a bit to get the behavior that you want, because now you have a perfectly flying ship that has no characteristics whatsoever, because you had to iron out all those characteristics just to get it working. So that process was very involved, very technical, and also it was information held by three people total. So if someone got sick, a ship was thrown off, because it was so complicated, so arcane, that it was impossible to work with together, much less to have something that got postponed for any length of time. That has been optimized to the point where, with only a bare level of introduction to how the systems are intended to work, it should take any of our designers a day to do a ship when we get those things online. That's not just an improvement for the game.

A day assuming you know exactly what it is you want to do.

Once you've made those decisions. Before, you would make a decision, and it would be a week of painful toil before it could actually be a thing that happened.

Why don't the numbers support my decision-making process?