Gadgetory

hey Ron i'm steve from gamers taxes dotnet we're joined again by chris Roberts I'm cloud imperium games and we just spoke about that PS module that should already be on the channel now we're talking about multi crew and the the previous roadmap I saw a sort of FPS module and multi crew were a little bit after each other multi cruise later what's what's that looking like in terms of feature set how complete our things well we're actively in the multi crew something will look down right now you hear where well most all the studios around the world are working on multi crew we're going to show sort of the next generation of it off at Gamescom so that's in about three weeks time or so and it's a there's a bunch of stuff that's really exciting so we you know I think we've talked before that we moving the engine over to 64-bit so yeah notnot like 60 so less about 64-bit compile more about 64-bit positional space so pretty much every 3d engine works in 32-bit which is great for a normal FPS because you usually don't have maps that are bigger than say I know eight kilometres by eight kilometres but for us we've got you know star systems that are millions of kilometres across in the position on 32-bit stresses and I know so we spent about eight months now it's done moving the engine over to 64-bit world space coordinates so the last kind of part of it was moving the rendering over so it became camera relative because the GPUs themselves most of them don't work in significant they work 32 bit but since you generally won't be able to see millions of kilometres away you know the visible range is inside 32 bits but the actual overall system spaces is much bigger and then we'll have some special handling for big celestial objects that's something we just type out in our fury ax review as well the bit size of the different interfaces and architectures so it's definitely a hot topic right now yeah yeah no no I'm sorry and it took a lot of work because busy like I said most engines are sort of built with the two in 64 bit and back when I think they were written because you know CryEngine you know was you know first of all from Far Cry and the crisis and so on you know they didn't even think about have a successful bit so and you know there's tens of thousands of files so it took a lot luckily we've had some of the original engineers and architects of the engine join us and so they helped a lot with it so at Gamescom we are going to be showing a large world map just actually a small portion of it but if you were to fly from the starting location to the ending location would take you two and a half hours at top sort of current dogfight speeds you know I think it's several hundred thousand kilometres of the distance well of course do a bit of a quantum jump between them but it's all on the same map and the same scale and what's really nice is we've got that and the second piece of technology that the engine group is built which is called the zone system so one of the big challenges and this is one of the things we definitely multi crew is the zone system is what enables us to handle sort of sparse / dense data so you know in most FPS games like I said it's a you know eight by eight kilometres you know the density of the levels very consistent you know you're wandering around you know buildings or vegetation and there's a lot of objects and you know interest in small amounts of areas but in space you can have huge areas of nothing in and then you can have areas of high density like a space station or an asteroid field or say a big ship that has you know people inside and stuff like that so what we needed was a sort of method of handling this data and calling it and updating it in organizing in a way that was up to more because typical way engines use is like octrees which is not very good for sort of the sparse data only occasionally have and and so we build this thing called the zone system so essentially you break things into zones and you get into zones and the zones could have more and more fidelity into them so like you can have a big multi cruise ship itself has it is considered everything that's attached to is considered in it so and then inside there's an interior that its own so now that ship can exist inside space and Australian dealer now yeah so it can exist inside says one's own could be round a moon right and that moon zone could be inside the system zone and so it's ways of sort of container izing data or you know things that would render a things your update in a way that the engine can efficiently decide because I'm do I need to render it to anybody and that's tied into a whole bunch of other things like visibility culling so it's the only way we get our really big capital ships and some of our more you know heavy multi cruise ships to work properly so like if you play you're in the hangar one of the reasons why the hangars you know can run slow if you have a lot of big ships and constellations are freelancers is you know each one of those you know the old models are like two and a half million Polly's each you know a good million half is really on the interior right and right so do you know the original the way we're doing originally was very brute force it just gets thrown all in the renderer and then it just decides what's going to call out whereas our newer system has has that all plugged into their zones and so it's intelligently cooling out geometry objects you don't need to update if you can't see a or if you're not near their zone and so that's really what enables the large you know the promise of star citizen these huge massive areas but you have this incredibly high fidelity right you've got like this you know next-gen triple a first-person fidelity you can reach out touch and feel everything use the toilet whatever yeah it's all there in a detail you normally don't get wish you normally only get in sort of a contained small FPS kind of area but now we have that in you know that can you know you can get in and you can walk in and we're going to show in a gamescon you're going to start on the space station you're in a room you'll get out you'll open up the space into you'll see this sort of gas ran outside you'll go out to the landing pad to get into a Cutlass with your friends and they'll all get into the colors which all be its own zone running the local grid which is this is where we have the fizz partitioned for each individual ship so we can fly around you can be moving around the ship irrelevant of where the ship's go as hey there are there any loading screens in between all nope we're loading no loading screens that's the other thing is like so the zone system helps us determine what we stream so when you know where the zone system is you know what's contained in the zone system as you approach it in the background which streams that's the other tech we've been doing is background streaming of the graphics and background creations remove the entities some of us a little bit will be at 1.15 because that's one of the reasons how we got rid of we've got more one of the issues with more players in arena commander words and all the ships are really heavy and so what happens is when you blow a ship up and you recreate it just building that ship takes a whole bunch of time on the main thread and it creates the stall both on the client hand on the server and so that's where you get this lag when you play a match and you see ship skip and so we've been working to sort of beat streaming stuff in the background so even though it's loading lots of data it's not it's not stalling the client or the server so that will reduce lag and there's still a lot more work to be done for it but it's all built to be sort of just dynamically streaming background we need to because the size of our ships and the detail mean you know they're huge we're talking hundreds of megabytes in terms of textures and geometry and all the rest of them so at Gamescom we're sort of demoing the sort of real system that will sort of enable you know that promise of the full star citizen universe's universe where you could you know walk around in this incredible fidelity get into your ship take it off fly somewhere else fly large distances get out of your ship EV a into another ship stop that ship up and then fly around and get to combat with that love it's and we're all so that's sort of what we're all focusing on right here which is sort of our demo of to give you a taste of arena commander 2 point 0 which is the multi cruise ships our goal is to hopefully get arena commander the multi crew stuff out forward as six weeks after FPS drops we have some integration to do because FPS is on a separate code branch right now to the multi crew stuff so once es is out we after we've got to drop that back in to the co branch integrated get it working again get rid of any conflicts of bugs of problems and then finish out sort of multi crew but are a real girl with the multi crew stuff is you know we're going to have this huge like one of the play maps you'll have will be one of these huge maps and when you're going to sort of set it up in a free flight mode and just have places for people to play her out and see what happens because it's really going to be some of the playground for what is universally liked and from there that's why we're going to start to basically release parts of aspects of what will build them sister Universal because the original intention of arena commander and also what we do marine was really they're all sort of testing grounds for the gameplay and the features that are part of the a bigger system which you know Tony and his team in Austin supported by other areas like behavior and the folks in Germany is building some of this bigger persistent universe experience so I'm really pretty excited by where we're at with wanting to I think hopefully people will be impressed by what they see won't show of games karna mean it's it's it's a real system that has extensibility and we're going to show you transitioning you know you're getting into one ship taking our flying getting being across into another ship powering an hour from flying just all those things that you've seen in the match enema videos that people have done that you go okay I could do that in a game will be awesome so i'm i'm i'm super excited because a lot of the technology would be spending a lot of time working on but you know you really can't show because it's you know deep down in the bowels of the engine is now coming to fruition right and we're getting it in and we're actually getting in to show you know what it will allow you to do and of course yes there's going to be bugs and issues and edge cases but the potential of that you know you just haven't had the ability to ever do this and again before and i think that will be a new experience so people get to play it like I the way I sort of you and what happens on our stuff is there and this happened last year is that now we've got an incredible group of supporters and backers are allowing us to make this super ambitious game though I think no publisher would ever back and buy in general they're pretty patient but you know you at some point yeah when they don't feel like they're going a new content they get a bit rowdy and so last year you know you know we hadn't had to Rena commander out and we thought we were going to have it out sort of closer to sort of March April the game like a star Murray and it was getting pretty rowdy on the forums and then we dropped V 0.8 of arena commander and then know the rest of the year you know it sort of went pretty well I mean I'm not saying everything was perfect but you know he dropped out p 0.91 point no and you know people got new ships and play stuff and we they could see there was visible changes and alterations and the gameplay maybe not everything that everyone wants the way they wanted it but you know they definitely could see that we were working on and changing things and responding to what people were saying and so that you know kind of went and then you know on the arena commander side we stopped updating it I think I've covered when our last patch was out maybe a brother may at the time I think it was shortly after pack sees what happened was we thought FPS would be earlier and we didn't want to overload the QA guys and you know at the time we would look like the FPS patch potentially could drop five weeks after the most recent right arena commander patch like yeah you know normally we like a two to three-week cadence but now let's push it so we don't make it too much work for anyone and then of course FPS 21 Romano he never went back and updated a arena commander and fix some of the balance things or adding new ships and so no one's seen any progress on a reader commander for like three months and so this point I think people exciting rowdy and I like I want to be doing something in there's only so much you can dogfight with its own set of ships without changes and so would that's one reason why we're putting 1.15 out there because it will have the mill in which is a smaller fighter and it will have the side there'll be flyable so the people the few people that have a side can fly around in you also have the ability to get that with Iraq which would be fun and get people playing again and then hopefully start stammering will be pretty soon after that and then multi crew and then we're going to have some sister unit so mal seizure is still after star Marines yes after summer yeah it's definitely up some right now it's it's the the multi crew for us is our whole process is its star marine will be so we have 1.15 then we'll probably have 1.16 which is sort of an incremental improvement on 1.15 which will be about two weeks after 1.16 and that plan of that is to go to actually go live with that apps games con and then have star marine which is 1.2 oh because it's all on the same codebase roundabout games con on the PTU or slightly after the game's conscious depending on where we am at it and then after you're on the pdu usually it's a few weeks on the PTU and then you should go live and i hope that would be the case of i don't know that it on the PT we may expose some things that we haven't done before that's one of the cases where like our internal QA you know we've got maybe 30 people around the company in QA which is not small yeah but when you're trying to do a multiplayer game it's really not much so you first go to the pdu or we go like that's when we get real testing so that will go and then after the FPS drops multi crew would would come after that so tentatively you know I would say if you're looking at it you know i would think that multi crew potentially is a citizen khan release so but you know again don't want to do it share MSL yeah but it's going to be very cool I mean it's going to be and I'm and I'm super excited because we're also having working on the different roles for you know the copilot and the pilots so it's not just the gunner and no there'll be a lot more stuff going around like the engineer and all the rest so it will be people playing co-op operating the same ship together and and I actually think it's one of the things that will make a big difference because right now everyone sort of judges sort of the space combat flight experience in the microcosm of single seater ships flying around and single seater ships it's one thing but we've got these big multi cruise ships and then one of these huge capital ships and so we have to have control schemes and systems that handle every and so it's pretty hard to sort of like really judge where everything sits until you get them all in you know like is this really overpowered or not overpowered or how does this ship sit in the overall scranton things because you know there's a lot more gameplay that we're planning on than just single seater dogfight combat so I'm really excited to get multi crew in there because it sort of opens up the palette there'll be things for people to do that won't just be straight about combat and i'll also be able to sort of see some interesting stuff we're like now we'll probably put some things in like a mission where you've got to escort the ship to get from point A to point B is a test which will be sort of a prototype of a cystic universe tight mission and you know then you'll have people cooperatively some people playing the big ship some people in escort and other people trying to take it out and that'll be this whole sort of cooperative gameplay that I think is one of the true promises as well yeah so there's multi crew brings us beyond that previous video as the FPS and check out of course Robert space industries for the the game and then gamertag just an app for updates and receive will see you all next time yeah thanks alright see you guys