Gadgetory

hey Ron this is Steve from gamers Nexus dotnet and I am NOT yelling for once which is kind of strange you're probably used to hearing my voice being very scratchy and annoying but we are in a quieter area with Chris Roberts from star citizen and he is he's got some great updates for us on star citizen's development of course which we spoke about originally not too long ago on the technical side today we're talking more about gameplay and overall progression Chris can you tell us a little bit about progress so far with star citizen okay well so we have essentially stepped up our austin studio and our Los Angeles office is going to be finished in the first of aid like the first week of April so we'll be in there in the second week of April onwards and we're busily working away so we're actually upgrading to a new version of the CryEngine which is they've there's a whole new update that has all the features of Crysis 3 and then some new stuff that we're working on so we've been doing that and getting our asset pipeline going so it's a lot of getting people on board getting them up to speed getting them familiar with the engine we've got some people that are actually joined us from Crytek and so they obviously know the the engine and been training some of their other people and but we're like I feel like the team's really gelling and it's it's feeling good so we're gonna have some cool stuff to be showing in the coming months sounds very promising have you had to me any compromises so far on your original vision have there been any technical or design challenges you've faced no we haven't actually compromised anything I would say in a few cases we may have even expanded on what we were originally thinking so it's still early day so maybe later on down the line we'll have to pull back a bit but right now it's actually I think gonna be even cooler than what I was originally thinking when I was pitching it I'm not sure how possible that is but I will happily look forward to it PvP can we talk about player account of players in PvP and will there be any major incentives for players to stage larger battles do you have any idea on that stuff yet well okay so they'll definitely be incentives to have some bigger battles so in terms the amount of players in one any one sort of battle so in our instance we're calling it we don't quite know kind of what the limit of the count is part of the reason we're going to do the dogfighting alpha at the end of this year that's you know and this is just to allow you to fly and dogfight in the in the ships that you've pledged for it won't have a persistent universe it won't have the story but it's for us to sort of do balancing on the ships and the weapons and also to see how many ships we can get in one area and have that be fun and have you know the feedback and the performance work really well so we're not quite sure yet so we're hoping to get closer to a hundred if we can but you know it could be as low as 40 or 50 or it could be as high as 200 we don't know that's part of the reason to run the test which we'll do at the very end of of this year but there are important things to make it as cool a fun as possible as far as things to do with other people I mean we have elements areas in the persistent universe that will be persistent in space that you can fight over so for instance like maybe there's an asteroid base inside an asteroid field and that's a really good hideout for like a pirate and it's right near the merchants trading run so that will be a place that like a pirate gang would one a hole to take over so another parrot gang may want to come and take it from them or even the merchant Gill could hire the mercenary Gill to go and clean out the nest of pirates so they'll be fed there'll be areas or things around space that will you'll be able to fight over for sort of territory so to speak and the big capital ships are a little like that they just can move instead of being static like an asteroid base sure sounds sounds very crazy for PvP I'm kind of looking forward to it what about latency issues with players in you know Australia versus Americans or Europeans can you tell us a little bit about how you're handling that well so that's part of the sort of online in the backend system we're in the middle of building and designing right now so my goal is to try and and take care of everyone around so you know as we're sort of leaning towards a cloud solution for the sort of last server part of the equation which is the battle instant stuff so in that and that in that case that if we can do the cloud solution and get it to have performance that works really well that will allow us to be able to deploy servers throughout the world pretty easily scale up and down depending on demand so you know that would be a server in Australia or you know east west coast of America or maybe a couple in Europe and so that's that's that's the goal so a combination of sort of cloud deployed and some dedicated but we haven't fully gone through that so you know that may not be the case in the final day but my my goal is to try and have everyone that's around the star citizen universe no matter where you are in geography get a good a good experience so you don't want to have a lot of latency or lag awesome great one of the more random sounding questions is from a guy on reddit I think he's a mod actually of the star citizen subreddit and he wanted to know if your sound will be dynamic and how you're handling sound with respect specifically to the the damage of the ship will they be able to hear the damage through sounds in the game stuff like that no it's definitely so you'll be able to hear damage on part so the parts that move will sound one way and then if they're damaged they'll sound different and so you know you should be able to hear creaking and stuff when your ship gets more damaged and the sounds themselves are set up in a way that they can be dynamic in 3d if you've got you know surround speakers and stuff like that we actually position everything in 3d when we're playing the sounds it's part of the sound system that runs already inside CryEngine cool any anything you really want to put out to your fans your backers that you know you want to say to them and really get them hyped more about star citizen if that's possible well first of all I'll say thank you to everyone because it's a you know amazing that we're managing to make the game and with the level of ambition and the level of backing because it's you know we're not making something small or making something pretty big so thank you very much for for backing what we're doing and it's amazing we have a brilliant community and I'll just say that you know this even though the games two years away we're building and doing things so everyone can interact this year and next year so you know the hanger module is going to come out in August which will allow you to check the ships out you've pledged and look around it and maybe have your friends come and check your ships out and we're going to try and get some of the customization options available for it I don't know if I'll have it right at the very beginning but definitely towards the end and then you're the dogfighting we'll be in in December so it's it's going to be a fun ride and you know check the the website that we run Roberts space industries comm for updates and and thank you all there you go excellent thank you Chris for that for your time and good luck on your panel today check out our coverage of the panel online after PAX East and that's it for the show this is our last interview so I will see you guys next time peace