This post is a transcript of 10 For The Chairman: Episode 73, material that is the intellectual property of Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) and it’s subsidiaries. INN is a Star Citizen fansite and is not officially affiliated with CIG, but we reprint their materials with permission as a service to the community. INN edits our transcripts for the purpose of making the various show participants easier to understand in writing. Enjoy!



10 For The Chairman: Episode 73 – Full Transcript

Intro:

Hello everyone! Welcome to another episode of 10 for the chairman. Actually the last episode we will do in 2015 and it’s been a pretty eventful year. We’ve done a lot of stuff, we had the Squadron 42 performance capture shoot earlier this year which went fantastically and I’m actually really looking forward to putting that together and having you guys take that story or journey next year. We launched 2.0 not that long ago and still has some stability issues, but I think a lot of people are having fun. It’s great to see people sharing their stories and videos.

It’s a very basic part of what shows you the potential of what Star Citizen will be and how it will feel just having that freedom being in first person and be able to do what you want or wander around space stations, get into ships, fly to places, get out and EVA, run around other stations and of course we’re going to be expanding that obviously to the planetside and seamlessly landing which was what we showed in the livestream which we did last week which were all pretty proud of and seems like you guys liked it too.

We’re pretty excited because the techs actually pretty far along so we’ll be able to using parts of it in the not too distant future and then we got stuff to just go a whole nother level, So this is just the beginning. The Frankfurt team, those guys are great. We got a lot of the original team that built the original crysis and even far cry back in the day. So not everybody, but a good number of a key sort of engine architect are also engineered cryengine and so they obviously know it well and these are sort of things they’ve been wanting to do and dreaming about for quite a long time. It was actually one of the reasons why they joined is because the new challenge.

It’s been kind of a skunk work, they’ve also been helping a lot of the other basic engine features that we have in terms of making it scale and be able to work with much bigger universe and much greater distances which is kinda what you can see in 2.0. Next year is going to be pretty exciting, we’re heads down and be continuingly delivering stuff to the Alpha, to add more functionality and content plus obviously finishing off Squadron 42. I’m looking forward to next year, going to be cool, it’s been cool so far. The livestream was… other than my playing incident in 2.0, it was I think pretty fun and good and it was nice to have john phone in from New Zealand. It was great and obviously I’m looking forward to a bit of a Christmas break, but then get right back in the saddle.

For those of you who don’t know. This is where I take 10 questions from the subscribers. The subscribers are the subset of our community that contribute money every month for the enhanced community content we do so the show, around the verse, a bunch of other shows like Bug Smashers or ShipShape and also Jump Point which is… I think will be out by now or should be anyway. Jump Point is a 40-70 page monthly magazine that we do that goes behind the scenes, talks about how we build certain ships, or work on certain game mechanics and has some lore about the universe and also has the story set in the universe. It’s really quite a cool read and we have other features for subscribers like some merchandise and stuff like that, that reward people for supporting all this extra community content which goes a long way to inform you and keep everyone up to date with developing such a hugely ambitious game and we wouldn’t be able to do that without all the backers out there, so thank you all for that! Now I should get on with answering the 10 questions.

4:02 Gramm asks: Do you have plans to introduce additional star systems to the baby PU or are you planning to use the Stanton system as your final test bed?

So we’re going to flesh out the Stanton system and probably take some liberties with the Stanton vis a vis what will be in the final game. Just mainly because we’re going to bring in the Jump Points a little later on so we want to flesh out going down to a planet, landing on different areas and travelling between locations, planets in one system and trading and venturing into combat and then we’ll open an additional system with 2 Jump Points and stuff like that.

There will definitely, I mean the way i look at is you start with Alpha 2.0 and we’ll move along and be building out that system and probably open another system or so with a Jump Point and then at some point we’ll clean it all up and make it all work or be completely or be completely copacetic with the proper universe. We’re already trying to make it like Crusader so as I said we decided just to take a few liberties to compress some of the play things you can do in this one system that will probably be more like, you know we showed going down landing at Levski which is on Delmar which is this large asteroid in the Nyx system and we’re most likely going to put that in our Crusader SC Alpha for everyone to test out the seamless approach and landing and all the rest of the stuff and then when we have Jump Points we’ll now move it over and it will be in Nyx.

So that’s kind of the process we’re going to do with it, we’re looking forward to getting that going looking forward to be able to have people buy and trade things and do more than what, right now it’s just very freeform sandbox but you can see the potential already and getting things like running missions to deliver goods from point A to point B or to protect ships running goods from point A to point B are all very easy low hanging fruit. Building in things like the distress beacons that players can trigger when they need to be helped or saved which will generate a mission that can show up on a player’s mission log.

So we have a plan or what he have the overall things we want in the game and then we’re also looking at some shorter term ‘easy win’ gameplay stuff that already kind of works with the system. Anyway that’s the plan and you know we have a lot of people now, this past year we’ve had a fair amount of people too all working pretty hard on it, but I have to say everyone’s incredibly pumped and excited just because the response for 2.0 and the response for the procedural tech that we showed; have the company on a high, so thank you all for liking all we showed you!

6:46 Blue asks: What is your personal history with the Hornet? What inspired it, and what about it do you like, love, hate, and so forth?

Well obviously the Hornet was the starter ship in Wing Commander and so having a Hornet in Star Citizen was a nod to that. In Wing Commander it was the light ship. It ended up, when I was designing the Hornet and what we were doing, it felt more like a medium fighter because we had the turret on the middle of it and it just felt like it was a much more heavy hitting fighter than a light fighter would be. But that’s essentially the history.

A lot of the ships originally in Wing Commander were inspired by World War 2 ships and planes; war at sea and the all rest of that stuff. So you definitely see some nods to present day fighters or older fighters, whether it is the Hornet or other various ships that we have. There was a Sabre obviously, there hasn’t been a Gladius, but generally a lot of times we are doing nods to things that you would know in the past that were historical, a ship or a plane or something, that you can then project into the future.

So anyway that’s the Hornet for you. Right next question.

8:11 Citizen 2900 asks: I am not sure if this question has been asked before but will there be physics – rigged props and objects in the general universe and on planets that we can interact with? Such as glasses and cups that can be knocked over, rubbish bins that can be knocked over and moved or cleaned up again … etc

So that’s definitely the case. You can go around Covalex Shipping Hub now, there are definitely floating items that are all region entities that you can push around. There’s been some pretty cool videos made, but one video was taking the noodle dispenser machine and pushing it out loading it into a Constellation and flying back to Port Olisar which was pretty awesome! So essentially yes absolutely. We actually had more in Crusader originally when we were developing and we took some of them out. Mainly because we still got to work on the, now working for all these rigid entities to be efficient so they’re not always sending messages.

Basically if a cup is sitting on this table and it’s not moving there’s no reason for it say “update” there’s no reason for it to do anything over the network. CryEngine doesn’t really work that way so we’ve been spending a lot of time and we still are spending a lot of time trying to fix and refactor that. You’re sort of seeing problems that come with the CryEngine old way of doing things. Cause really it was built as a single player game so a lot of the updating is player centric but the problem we have is so for instance if there’s sixteen players on the Crusader map and they all go to different comms arrays well they’re all triggering different AI in different spots on the server and it’s running all these AI and then it’s also telling every single client what all these AI are doing but i’m flying around and i’m at comm array A over here and someone’s at comm array B over there, I don’t really need to know what’s happening in comm array B, I just need to know what’s happening in my area.

So we have to refactor the updating of the object and also the network messaging to it’s more specific to what people’s view is and that’s ongoing sort of network task we have and part of that is going to have a more efficient network version for simple rigid bodies so you can have the cups on the table and you can have more props around. The idea would be to physicalise chairs, props like that so you can push them around or whatever. If you’re flying in your ship and the gravity goes off and you haven’t bolted things down they could float and all the rest of the stuff. That is definitely our goal and you will see more of that as time goes on.

10:40 Krema asks: Concerning merchandise, can we expect new stuff? For instance, replicas of posters used during the live events such as the CitizenCon? Or artwork such as those currently available as wallpapers?

We definitely have new merchandise that is coming next year, obviously we made a bit of a highlight or to-do about the Saitek joystick, and keyboard and mouse combo so look for us to be announcing that and price points and sorting all out in the New Year. That’s a big one, Jump Point the second volume just went on sale, I think we announced it during our Livestream.

Looking at ways to do posters and prints for subscribers as well. So we just need to work out how to do that efficiently and fulfill it properly because you want to do those sorts of things on demand. The whole Community team is actually working pretty actively on that.

So there’s going to be a bunch of stuff for that down the road but that something we want to push a bit more and double down on because I think people really like it.

Okay, next question comes from Ostron who asks …

11:43 Ostron asks: Many of the mechanics with specialized ships (e.g. repair, mining, salvage) also seem to have equivalent space stations in the ‘verse based on lore or designs (Shubin mining station, for example). Will there be opportunity for players to work the same jobs on planet or station-based locations?

That’s a good question, I don’t know whether we will be doing that off the bat. So we’re definitely going to have NPC locations that go about doing like mining on a big scale like Shuban would be a good example, but on the early side of implementation I don’t think we’re going to sort of allow a player to become a worker on the big Shubin mining station. Now I do think what could happen is a player in a small mining ship, not even a big one like the orion because we’ve also been talking about doing smaller mining stuff, could get a contract from Shubin to start mining in an asteroid field and bring it back and they’ll pay a certain amount for those minerals. You will get employed by NPC’s corps well as player corps in the game, but whether you could be the security guard on a Shubin station.

I don’t think that’s going to be something we’re going to be implementing anytime soon. Although we do have conversations about sort of career paths like “Hey, what happens if you want to be an advocacy agent or what happens when you want to be in the military.” So that’s a long term thing that we want to sort of address because we think it would be kind of cool, but on a short term thing what we would do on a player’s side of it is we would allow you to do jobs or missions for those kind of bigger NPC organizations.

13:19 Mocklantors asks: Are there any plans to build in a system/enhancement to anchor a ship to an asteroid while landed on it? This is an important issue for miners!

I don’t know whether you’re going to need to anchor a ship to an asteroid. If you are out in space and there are no external forces then your ship should just stay there while you are working on the asteroid, and a lot of the times you’ll also be in your ship while you are mining the asteroid. So I’m not sure we definitely need the anchor thing.

Potentially if there was issues with that then perhaps we can: it’s not technically that difficult to do. But in the first iteration of the mining design that’s not something we were considering because we were basically thinking that the ship was going to stay there right next to rock and you’ll mostly be on your ship doing the mining then if you EVA’ed out to go after a really small diamond seam or something the ship will be floating there in space which you can see now. If you park your ship next to an asteroid, EVA out and fly around: it’s still there. So in terms of anchoring it to it I don’t know. I mean there could be a concern about someone stealing it but we’re going to put in enhanced key-lock stuff in for the game so people can’t just walk in and start up your ship without doing something.

Next question comes from Otleaz, who asks …

14:43 Otleaz asks: Can you explain what kind of behaviour would be seen as griefing in Star Citizen? You mentioned putting griefers into instances together, but what behaviour would flag you for that, and would that behaviour eventually get you banned?

Well I mean it’s kind of hard to say. The typical griefing is what you don’t want to have happen is spending their whole time harassing the new players that don’t quite understand how to play yet or the system and taking advantage of them. So like for instance if someone was hanging right on the edge of the Green Zone and when a new player flies out say of Crusader and they blast them to bits and they keep doing that, that would be kind of griefing. If someone deliberately starts crashing their ships into other people when they’re on the landing pad in the Green Zone in Crusader that would be kind of griefing. In the bigger game in the final game we’re going to set up this whole idea of bounties and when you’ve been doing anti-social behaviour in certain areas so like UEE controlled space if you just attack someone especially if you continue to do it, it’s likely your ID code is going to get broadcast and then at that point you, there’s a bounty on your head and not only will NPC’s but now there is authorised PvP on you. So what will happen is if you engage that you’ll be fighting NPC’s and other players that will not have a penalty for now going after you.

So we’re hoping a few system like that will help with making the whole system not encourage people to troll beginning players we’re still going to work on that, it’s obviously stuff we got idea’s we’re going to put in or we’re going to try to I guess adjust depending on what’s happening and just go from there. As far as behaviour getting banned if we note someone that continually grief then that would probably be something that would be part of their player record and then part of the match making could be potentially “well let’s just put people that grief in the same instance with each other so they can just grief each other” and I think there’s other elements we can do in that case to not encourage the behaviour let me put it that way. We definitely want people to be pirates we do not want to prevent PvP in the places where PvP can or should happen, but we don’t want people just harassing other people to hurt their game experience for the lols so to speak and that’s always difficult cause this happens in every MMO so we’re going to try out best and not sure that we necessarily always got the right solutions but we’ve got some ideas that I think are pretty good and we’ll go from there.

17:18 Silver fox asks: What are your thoughts on having the ability to stream what’s being seen on another player’s Star Citizen screen via a “helmet” or “ship nose” in game camera module? This could be used for scouting, exploring, data Hack/ interception, & FPS CQB video streams.

So I’m not quite sure of if you mean like streams as in stream twitch stream, I mean in the game one of the features that we have on our roadmap that I’m actually fairly keen on is the ability to if you want to stream ingame and turn it off and on. So think of it like playstation sharing where the ultimate idea is I’m flying around and I’ll stream this and if I was on the website and I was looking at the user icon or ID for me, you could have like a little red dot next to him and go “Oh look, he’s streaming” and you can click on him and *Pssh* open up and see what he’s streaming which would be pretty cool.

Also I wanted to have cameras set around the universe so you can sort of almost see traffic cams on what’s happening. So we’ll put some sort of spectator cams that we’ll stream in the universe that you will be on the web and you can go to our site and go “Oh look, what’s happening in Tera right now? What’s happening around Crusader?.” Those are sort of pretty cool streaming options. We have the Reliant News Van which we just announced during the livestream and one of the sort of kind of more fun smaller professions is the streamer, the new reporter or whatever, where you could stream action that’s happening and go around and that’s kind of what the Reliant News Van is for. The idea would be to sort of film action and you can stream it and obviously you can see it on the website, but maybe some of it could be streamed ingame so to speak.

So if you were in a bar on the T.V. maybe that kind of thing is streaming is. Additionally we want to do the same for races. We really do want to make the Murray Cup something that is fiction and happens and has a whole series of races that gets competed over a season and there’s qualifying rounds and all the rest of the stuff and yeah we have a competition for it in Star Citizen that’s in fiction that you can watch in a bar or you can also watch on the sight for the races. People can compete and train for it and ultimately we want to do the same with Arena Commander in Star Citizen because “The Men of the in fiction game”. We’re sort of going to do in Esports, Game within a game kind of thing.

Hope that answered the question, I’m not quite sure if you wanted to see the view of another player in your view in the actual game itself, so potentially we may allow that because that’s not that difficult, you just switch their viewpoint, but that would depend on the equipment. We already have a mini version of that because if you’re in the sort of rear operator seat of the Super Hornet and you operate the turret, you are now seeing the turrets point of view, not actually your point of view sitting in the cockpit. There’s already sort of this looking at some other viewpoint in the game via that. Alright, hope that answers your question.

20:33 FeenixRising asks: Will we be able to have kill boards in Star Citizen? Will we be able to have organization mates compete on the kill board and track their stats in game?

So we’ll definitely be tracking things like the amount of kills that you have and general stats like that that would make sense in fiction and they would be available, say if you were part of an organisation people would be able to see what you had done. I think you’d have the ability to be able to broadcast or not broadcast it if you want. So you could say “no, I don’t want people to see my number of kills” or “kill to death ratio”, or “kill to revive ratio” it really would be. But if you do then people could see it and they could be part of the organisation.

So I would say yes as far as that goes.

Right, the last question comes from Voidhunter, who asks …

21:22 Voidhunter asks: Star Citizen is shaping up to be a deep and ever expanding game. What systems are in place for the drop in play style? What is the average play time, you are working with, when you are designing the game play?

I’m not one hundred percent sure what the question means in terms of “what systems are in place for the drop in play style”. May be the question is revolving around if I sit down for a session, how long is that session? Is it five minutes, thirty minutes, an hour, five hours?

In terms of play I think we would design missions, or things that you can do, to be thirty minutes to an hour of sort of game time and then it’s up to you. I mean I don’t think you can get in for five minutes do much that’s meaningful. I think it’s a minimum of thirty minutes but I think you should be able to do missions or get stuff done in thirty minutes to an hour and then it’s up to you about how much stuff you want to get done. It all depends. There could be some stuff that’s fairly quick and there’s obviously some stuff, like if you are delivering cargo from one side of the universe to the other one, which will be more of a commitment. You don’t have to do it all in one play session, you could be jumping your way across the galaxy getting out of scrapes with pirates, or whatever, landing on a planet, saving it and then coming the next day and continuing the journey.

We’re not particularly metric driven “oh, it needs to be a five minute play session or a thirty minute play sessions” which I know that on mobile people are very focused on “well they have to get something out of it in five minutes” but for us I think it is at least thirty minutes to an hour, and more obviously, would be the minimum time we think that if you just get in, get your stuff sorted, go out in space and do something it will take you.

Outro:

Those are the last ten questions for 2015. I wanted to thank everybody for backing the game, supporting us, we’re now over a hundred and one million which is an unbelievable number! In my wildest dreams when I first started this I thought ten million was a crazy number that like no-one would get to so I mean a hundred and one is a whole different thing I will say and i’ve said this many times before.

The money we bring, is what we are investing back in the game you can see it in terms of how we grow in staff and investing in some longer term technology that I think will really pay off and be able to really set Star Citizen apart from a lot of other games you possibly can play. Takes a bit of time to do it at that level but we have to engineer things right and to scale and I fully believe at the end of the day the experience will be something incredibly special. I’m already super excited just seeing some of the basic nuggets that we’ve got and I know a lot more stuff that we’re bringing in.

There just aren’t enough days in the week and not enough hours in the day to get everything done but it’s certainly not because anyone’s slacking around here everyone works. This is for all my years in game development we have an incredible, talented bunch of developers here that are really really dedicated and really work and are very thankful as I am for your guys support. So I just want to sign off wishing you Happy Holidays, hope you all have a great time and see you next year.