Can you tell us about the teams that set up and tear down the tech at live events?
TL;DRThe event teams grew from a handful of people with a few demo machines into a team that builds a traveling on-site studio, with networking, build system and private cloud, and tears it down within hours after the show.
You cannot say enough about these teams. In the earliest days, we just had a couple of us that would go to a show. I think my first one was in 2013. And I think we had four demo machines and a server. Not much. We even had to string our own cabling just to get internet. But it's really grown since then. And so now, it's lots of people. But basically what we do these days, we learned over time that the needs of this game, and really the vision that we're trying to present at these shows, usually exceeds the expectation of any venue. So we have had to invent ways of getting around that. And a good example of this is last year's CitizenCon, where we had certain constraints that meant that we couldn't hit the vision that we wanted to achieve. So we basically, well, I say we, my team of super expert specialists built out pretty much a whole studio, condensed it down into a traveling package so that we could take with us everything we needed, so that we didn't have to lean on anybody else. And by the time we were done, I felt really proud of what the team put together, with 150 PCs, a stack of servers. We had a lot of help though.
You're talking about, and I don't want this to get lost in the conversation, you and Ahmed and all your team, you built a microcosm of the entire Star Citizen development environment and brought it on site to LACC so that we could download right from the data store. So check-ins are replicated, and so all those 150 computers didn't have to hit the internet, a convention center internet; they could all run locally on that.
Essentially, you could think about a CitizenCon as, like you're saying, in a week, we build a sixth studio on site with networking, security, build system, distribution. This year, we had private cloud for game hosting, Wi-Fi, everything you would expect a studio to have. And then, like you said, at the end of the show, we got eight hours to tear it down and get it in a box and get it out of the building. So that's essentially what the week looks like for us.