Forrest, recently we released our feature trailer for Alpha 3.0, and the work on that feature trailer has now led to you working on another tool. So tell us how that went.

Well, originally, we spent some time getting some footage together for Chris. And by we, I mean QA was capturing, we had some developers in-house capturing. And then it came back, and then Chris asked me to take a pass at it, look at it, review it, and then revise it with some additional footage.

When you say capture footage, just so everybody knows, we're doing it the same way you guys do it. We load the game up, we open up OBS. When we record, we record using the same engine, the same game client our players are using.

In the past, the way the rendering worked a lot for the cutscenes, like in our original fundraiser trailer and then a lot of our commercials, so to speak, was we have a way to render out. We can set everything up in the editor, and then we run the game through the editor, which was the ultimate what you see is what you get from our engine. And then it would render that out into a video format, which would then upload to YouTube and then people would see. But we would do everything by hand. Let's say if I wanted to have a ship fly past, I would have to make a quick particle effect that I would attach to the thruster. And then in the software I'd have to say, okay, at this moment in time, I need to keyframe a boost to the thruster so it flares out, and everything was very manually done, like you were doing a movie type thing. And then our tools got more and more complex. Ships' landing gear started retracting automatically, and the tools started surpassing our cinematic methods, and it became very difficult to start doing these types of trailers and cutscenes. It really came down to, wait a minute, we were just showing off the art, but now we need to start showing off the gameplay mechanics along with the art. And so these cutscenes had evolved from just showing off art to showing off the game, right? Because everything's as important as the art. This was one of the first times that the goal was very clear: capture in the game. Chris was very clear, he wants in-game captures. So we started getting the footage back, and a lot of the footage was fairly rough right off the bat. And it was very clear, very early, why it was very rough, and that was because we have a very rudimentary tool, spectator cam, director cam, whatever you want to call it. So I was like, okay, well, let me give this thing a try. So I give it a try, I use it. Let's talk about the shortcuts of it. It's rough. I'm like, how do I move the camera? It's crazy. Hold F4, and then you literally have to put your elbow on a key to make sure you move it up and down, and then you need to put your thumb on the right joystick to rotate the camera. So I grew a third arm for a week and a half, and I randomly would have people come over and I'd say, I need you to hold this while I do this. And then some of the shots, I'm like, okay, well, I don't like the shot because it doesn't have camera movement, or I don't like the shot because it doesn't use any rule of thirds, or it doesn't do all these things, right? All with great potential, just not quite what Chris is used to on the cinematic front.

And all because it was very important for us to make the trailer in the game client, on the same game server as the player is playing, using the same tools the players have access to. Haskaha and Frostmaster and AlexS189 and all you guys out there, we wanted to do it the same way you guys were doing it.

So the trailer that you saw in 3.0 was the live product. A lot of people have asked, how did you get those frame rates? A lot of times I did log in when there weren't as many people on the server, right? Because they're making heavy server optimizations right now in regards to the fact that when you play and there's lots of people in the game, the server, the network code is doing lots of things and handling lots of things at once. And so they're making changes, saying, okay, if this character is on the planet, maybe don't update the skeleton, and stuff like that. So it's a very known thing right now, it's just part of game development and part of having an MMO that is now being targeted. However, there was the challenge of how am I going to get these frame rates? So I would log in at 2 o'clock in the morning and I would say, hey guys, who wants to play with me? And I would almost go undercover and I would record my experiences with players. And this is how I got them to play with me. I'd be like, hey, does anyone want to join me? And they'd be like, yeah, what ships do you have? I have all of them. Yeah, sure, all right.

He spawns a Bengal or whatever.

Yeah. And I would play with people, and also I'd get QA in-house to have Star Marine matches with me, and I essentially just learned the toolset, I did the best that I could, and I just played the game and I captured my experience playing the game. So now that we have the trailer, Chris is like, see, you can do this. And I'm like, well, you can, but I think I made it look a little easier than it really is, because it is difficult and it was a challenge, right? But part of my job is to just give him what he wants, get it approved and make it look easy doing it. So he was excited about it and said, I would like this to be revamped. I want this director's cam. I love the director's cam. We all know Chris has a background in film. He understands it, he loves it. And so we want to be able to bring this beautiful universe into cinematic mode, not just in Squadron 42 but also in the MMO PU, because who doesn't want to capture their experience? Because people are going to be making these types of movies. What is it called, when we were younger and we would make these things? Machinima. And that was fun back in the day, and people are probably still doing that, I'm just older now. But when I was a kid, I always loved doing that. And so I went back to my childhood and thought about what would be cool if I could do this with this. We decided we're going to make a tool. We decided we're going to take the current director's cam, spectator cam that everyone has access to currently, if you hold F4, rub your stomach and your head and push the keypad at the same time, freaking crazy, and then we're going to build upon it. And step one, I think, is to just capture something. So, okay, who's currently doing this now? Because I do believe that you don't just build a wheel from scratch. You have to look at what your competitors are doing, and then you have to see what they're doing well, what they're doing not so well, and then you basically evolve into a better, and it's not stealing, but you evolve and you always have to keep up with modern technology. That's just the way that it goes. You have to know what people around you are doing, because you have to make it that good and you have to make it even better. So I asked Sean and some people, specifically Sean, I said, hey, who else is doing this? Who's the best? And he goes, Mario Odyssey.

And I've been playing a lot of Mario Odyssey with my kids, and on my own at 3 a.m., getting the power moons. But on that point, the barrier to entry for Mario Odyssey, there's no barrier there to snapshot mode. And that's a nice tool. It's a player-facing tool, and that's what Forrest is looking at here. And it was funny to use that as a reference, especially sending it to Chris, where I never expected in my life to be sending Chris Roberts a screenshot of Mario with snapshot mode on and there he is with Cappy just hanging out in Cappy Land.

How did that go over? You sent Chris Roberts a screenshot of Super Mario?

You know what? He was like, no, that looks awesome, that's exactly what I want. So that's where we have to go, as well as NVIDIA Ansel was the other side of this. And the whole goal of this player-facing tool is to remove that barrier to entry and give them the same power that Ansel or a Mario snapshot mode, or even in Zelda you've got a bit of a picture mode, give you. Making it as accessible as those are, I think, is a very worthy endeavor.