- 17 minuti fa
Un nuovo video della serie Around the Verse per Star Citizen, concentrato su Squadron 42.
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00:00a
00:23hello
00:23and welcome to around the verse
00:25our weekly look at the development of star citizen
00:27I'm sandi gardner
00:29And I'm Chris Roberts.
00:31So, as you can see, we have a nice little gift on our table here.
00:35So we had Jeremy visit us from New Zealand with his daughter Chloe.
00:39And they left us this gift, so we'll open it on camera.
00:42So let's see what happens here.
00:44Okay, maybe I won't open it that easily on camera.
00:47But impressively enough, Chloe actually knew much more about Star Citizen than her father.
00:53So that's pretty cool.
00:56And bodes well for the future of Star Citizen.
00:58So let's have a look apparently.
01:01I believe this is something that is very cool in New Zealand.
01:07Wow, look at that.
01:09Okay, so let me take it out.
01:12Exciting.
01:14There you go.
01:15All right.
01:18Ooh, look at that.
01:21It is the Kuru, a symbol of life, new beginnings, growth and harmony, support and loving protection.
01:28Exciting.
01:29Thank you very much.
01:30That is awesome, Jeremy and Chloe.
01:32Brilliant.
01:33Okay.
01:33Get that off the table then.
01:35I will get that off the table.
01:37Go back to reading your paper if you want.
01:38No, no.
01:39I'm good.
01:40All right, so we have some great news to share today.
01:44So later this month, Star Citizen will be the featured story in 3D World magazine.
01:49The magazine spoke with a number of our art directors about how they became game artists.
01:53Yes, they did.
01:54So if you're interested in a career as a game artist, this will be a must read when it comes
01:58out on May 17th.
02:00Yeah, so Josh, our character art director, has spent some time updating our various alien character designs.
02:05You know, you've seen recently the Banu and we did a sneak peek of the Vandal this past week.
02:12And what we'd like to do right now is share you sort of the updated Jaan sculpt, which will be
02:20shown in the 3D World magazine.
02:22But I wanted to give you guys a sort of heads up.
02:25Here you go.
02:34The Jaan has undergone some changes since we last saw them. Pretty cool.
02:38Yeah, no, they certainly have.
02:39Now let's go to Austin and Turbulent for their studio updates.
02:44Hey guys, Jake Ross here, producer here in Austin.
02:46There have been some exciting developments in the Austin studio this month and we're excited to share them with you
02:50for this week's studio update.
02:52With 263 out the door, we are finally moving forward with our major features for the big 3-0 patch.
02:56The Austin design team will be responsible for several things in the upcoming release.
03:00First, and most notably, is that we've made progress on adding commodity trading in the game.
03:05Since several things need to come together on the tech side for this first,
03:08the LA programmers have been furiously working on the shopping code, rewrite, the commodity kiosk, and ship persistence so that
03:14commodity trading can be possible.
03:16Not much to show you guys visually on this just yet, but our next update should be in a great
03:20spot to give you a first look.
03:21Second, we have been finishing up several of our first batch of usable requests for our first round of shops.
03:27These are created so we can get the four required disciplines design, animation, tech art, and system design on the
03:33same page about each usable's intended purpose and functionality.
03:37Once all the required assets are created, it will come back from a design to do the final hookup.
03:42Next, we're plotting out our first mission giver experience for 3-0.
03:46Getting Miles Eckhart into the game is the primary focus.
03:49There are necessary building blocks to make this happen.
03:51As you can see in this conversation tree, there is quite a bit that he will be able to do,
03:55like give a constant stream of missions and enable players to earn reputation and higher tier mission options.
04:01As we're still in our planning phase, this sprint hasn't quite started just yet.
04:04We'll hopefully have more to show in our next update.
04:08Finally, we're in the middle of breaking down the Levski Landing Zone.
04:11This write-up details all the things you'll be able to do in this location.
04:14Some of these include how players will smuggle into this city and which content will go into side tunnels.
04:19This placement of the mission givers and their content, the factions within Levski, and the political aims of these factions.
04:26We don't want to get into too much detail and spoil the end result for you, but we've got some
04:30awesome things planned for this landing zone
04:31and can't wait for you to see it evolve into the vision we've currently got in the works.
04:36On the art side, ship artist Josh Koons has been busy completing the damage model pass on the Cutlass Black.
04:41By far, the most time-consuming part during this phase is creating the intricate trellis work on the parts that
04:46get blown off, like the wings and the body.
04:49He works closely with TechArt to make sure the ship breaks apart and receives surface hull damage in the correct
04:54areas.
04:55Once damage is completed, it also marks the stage in the pipeline where the ship is pretty much ready to
04:59go.
05:00All that's left is to make the LODs.
05:02The PU animation team is currently updating all the existing usable animations to use the new robust usable system.
05:09This will save us on our memory footprint and allow us to create a large number of unique animations more
05:13quickly.
05:14We took advantage of our desks getting rearranged to set up our mocap system.
05:18We needed to do a quick pickup shoot to capture a few things that has popped up since the last
05:22shoot.
05:23We captured picking up crates of different sizes from different heights and operating door controls and various other transition animations.
05:29We are also working on picking up two handed objects as part of our looting system.
05:33With this functionality, we will be able to interact with more objects in-game.
05:37This opens the possibility for more missions and activities.
05:40If you see a box on the ground and you want to pick it up, you'll be able to walk
05:44up to it, pick it up, carry it back to your ship, and put it in your cargo hold for
05:47transport back to your hangar.
05:49The Austin Ship animation team is wrapping up the reworked version of the Drake Cutlass, as well as creating new
05:54zero-g in-exits animations for the Drake Dragonfly.
05:58We are also in the midst of improving our cockpit experience by adding hit reactions, button presses, and updating our
06:03cockpit layouts to maximize the overall cockpit experience.
06:06More on this to come.
06:07This month has been a busy one for the backend services engineering team, as well.
06:10We've been focused on bringing Diffusion, our new backend services architecture, online and ready for primetime.
06:16We're converting some of the more trivial services, such as friends, analytics, authentication, and presence from legacy architecture to fully
06:24diffusionized services running with our ooze language.
06:26We are moving next into the larger and more complex services like Persistence Cache, Game Server Management and Matchmaker, and
06:33Persistence Database.
06:35These services will be broken up into smaller microservices to meet our performance, scalability, and availability needs.
06:40The game server and client are very close to being diffusionized as well, which will close the communication gap between
06:45the backend and the frontend.
06:47In addition, we're making various optimizations to the system, such as a technique we call router biasing.
06:53This allows us to apply advanced bandwidth control bandwidth techniques between services, types, and the diffusion network.
07:00Austin QA's focus over the very earliest parts of April was testing to get 263 out to the players, with
07:05multiple PTU pushes leading to 263 going live.
07:08The team spent a lot of time supporting the live build over the first week of April.
07:11Most of our new hires finished their basic early training in the month and have all begun testing alongside their
07:18mentors full-time on both Persistence Universe and Squadron 42.
07:21After 263 went live, Austin QA shifted full-time to game dev branch for testing.
07:26This has been both to continue work on stabilizing the branch and to begin more rigorous testing in preparation towards
07:313.0.
07:31Some of the items we've actively been testing are several new ships, in-depth sweeps of some of our procedural
07:36planet environments for bugs,
07:37testing mega map improvements, new implementations for player interactions, item 2.0 conversions, movement system refactors, and new field of
07:45view controls, to name a few.
07:47The development teams have been lining up new documentation and data for QA to polish up our test cases to
07:52ensure we are ready to jump on new content as it comes online.
07:55One of our testers has begun working directly with the Austin animation team to clean up new mocap files for
07:59the development teams.
08:01Several other team members have also been engaged with in-depth testing of new and updated engine tools alongside the
08:06Frankfurt QA team,
08:07ensuring that the new tools will function as designed so our designers can better implement and create content.
08:13The player relations team spent a full week with Benoit and the Turbulent team working on spectrum improvements.
08:18They also added a couple new team members and are excited to continue to serve our growing community needs.
08:22Of particular relevance to 3.0, the player relations team has started adding new evocati and updating our PTU waves,
08:29as we know everyone will be excited to test out the new content when it's available.
08:33That's all I have for you this month guys, thanks for watching and for your support, we'll see you in
08:37the verse.
08:41Hey guys, here's the April update from Turbulent and the platform team.
08:45So this month we've released Spectrum version 0.3.3, which contains a new type of discussion called nested threads,
08:54which is basically when you reply to another reply, it will go into a nested format.
08:59So you can see a discussion trail out from a specific reply.
09:04And the first level of these replies are sorted by default by votes.
09:07So most upvoted subtrees get upvoted to the top.
09:10This is very Reddit style type of discussion.
09:13And so when you start a new discussion on Spectrum 0.3.3 and up,
09:17you can decide which type of discussion you want to start,
09:21whether you want to start a chronological classic thread, which goes in order, or a nested thread.
09:27Now this new type of discussion we hope will allow more dynamic, faster threads.
09:34And obviously the upvote feature is going to be useful for a lot of the community teams
09:38for many of the features that they want to do, like gathering questions.
09:43Now this project goes so fast that in a month we've been able to release 0.3.3 and get
09:48feedback on it.
09:49So we know that not everybody likes nested threads.
09:52And so we plan on trying to transform this from a discussion type to a view option,
09:58so that you can decide how you want to view a specific thread or all threads.
10:02So if you like chronological, you'll be able to view them as such.
10:06And nested, you'll be able to choose that as such.
10:09So we're still looking into how we're going to do that, but we're listening to your feedback
10:12and we're thinking that this might be a more powerful feature, so we're going to get it done.
10:16One other change that we're looking for also for nested threads is how unread status works.
10:22Currently it's a bit iffy, so you can find your red marker.
10:26We're going to try to see how we can improve that, as well as do a little staff tracking in
10:31there,
10:32so you can know from the top of the thread list which have had a staff response.
10:37This is going to be particularly useful for the ask-a-dev forums.
10:40Also included in 0.3.3 is the ability to flag posts for moderation.
10:45So this also works within your orgs and obviously in the public community where you can flag a reply, a
10:51thread, or a message for moderation.
10:55And so public moderators, in the case of the public star citizen community, can come and intervene in your private
11:02orgs.
11:02Then all your officers or people who have the moderation permission will receive a notification and then they co-investigate.
11:09And so that's how we handle the flagging in Spectrum.
11:12Also one more update in 0.3.3 is progress on mobile support for the keyboard system that we use.
11:20And so it's way more usable than it used to be.
11:23It's still not perfect, but at least we've done massive progress there and we're hoping to get it fixed in
11:28the next release for all types of cases.
11:32So look forward to that.
11:34Currently the team is working on the next release, which is 0.3.4.
11:37The main feature that we're looking to add there is some more refinement on how we use tags as subforums.
11:45And so we're going to surface these tags at the top level on the community index in the channel list
11:51so that you can actually jump directly from a global community index to a specific tag within a channel.
11:59And so the second part of that is that we're going to also allow you guys to bookmark a tag
12:05just like if it was a channel in itself.
12:08And so this will, I think, give us the functionality of a subform while keeping the tagging system in place,
12:15which is a very nice way to just make this very dynamic.
12:18So hopefully we'll see that in 0.3.4.
12:21Also the major undertaking we're doing is adding way more filters and work on the search subsystem, which will basically
12:30power all of view my own post, view somebody else's post.
12:33So search by author, search by role, which will also allow you guys to search for dev posts.
12:39And then all of this feature set from search will power a new mini profile.
12:45So you'll be able to just jump directly to a list of posts from a specific player directly from the
12:51mini profile.
12:52One other feature, which is more of a backend thing that we're working on, is virtual lists.
12:58You might have noticed that we have an issue rendering long presence lists in the chat lobbies.
13:03So that's why the backers group is usually collapsed by default in the general forms.
13:09And so we're working on a technical solution called virtual lists that will allow us to just render what we
13:14see plus a buffer.
13:15And so this will save on performance and allow us to have everybody present in the lobby list anyway.
13:24And so we're going to be able to use virtual lists for that, but also for other features like in
13:29the chat lobby.
13:30One of the most reported issues that we have is you can't jump directly to a message and then go
13:35back in time.
13:36Virtual lists will allow us to do that because we're going to change the history mechanism for lobbies to be
13:40able to do that.
13:40So we're working on this in 0.3.4.
13:44In the meantime, the research team from Spectrum is working on the overlay,
13:49which is basically for Spectrum desktop and integration between the game and Spectrum.
13:54And so this is basically taking our Redux application store and moving it to an area where two processes can
14:02basically benefit from it.
14:04And so this way we can have an overlay that's over the game and your desktop client synchronized without having
14:09to double the resources for it.
14:11So that's what the guys have been working on.
14:14The work has begun as well on PM groups.
14:18So the ability to basically refactor the current one-on-one PM system to have more than one person in
14:23a group.
14:24So you can have basically some kind of a party system for a specific lobby.
14:28So this is what we're doing on the research side on top of what we're already doing.
14:32So I'm just back from Austin with a few discussions with the team at CIG over there where we presented
14:37the new design for some of the art that we're doing for the site revamp.
14:42So that went really well.
14:44And so we're hoping we can't show it just yet, but we're hoping we'll be able to showcase some of
14:48those changes to you guys before we actually get to do them.
14:52One thing that between now and our next monthly report that you'll see is that we're going to be doing
14:57some pretty major infrastructure changes by moving the platform to a new set of hardware.
15:05Hopefully this will not cause any disruption, but there should be a small downtime since we're lifting and shifting everything.
15:10But that's going to be one of our major tasks upcoming when I'm done filming this video, which is pretty
15:15cool.
15:16And so otherwise, we'll see you guys in the verse.
15:20So just looking at Eckhart's conversation tree really shows the complexity we're putting into our mission givers.
15:25Building the logic system that drives these interactions is very complex due to the size and demands of our universe
15:31and mission system.
15:32But I think when it all comes together, it will be pretty cool.
15:36Pretty cool.
15:36And when it comes to building that universe, there's a department essential for keeping it all running.
15:41Take a look.
15:51I'm Mike Jones and I'm Director of Corporate and Publishing Technology for Cloud Imperium Games.
15:57And right now, I think that's the longest title we have in the company.
16:01And it's based because of the merging of our DevOps and our IT departments.
16:08And so my responsibility for IT covers the hardware side of things and the infrastructure side of things.
16:17But the network and the security and the server deployments and all the automation and all the orchestration that goes
16:25into that is all built here with our DevOps team.
16:29So there's not a single piece of that that is something that we got from someone else.
16:34So there are a few services that we make use of that are commonplace.
16:40But for the most part, our systems are all custom designed specifically for our needs.
16:46And the reason for that, of course, is this is a very unique game and we have very unique needs.
16:51And so one of my main focuses this month has been our build system and the need for more build
17:00resources.
17:00Our current build system is made up of six high density servers with a grand total of 240 V cores
17:10and 2.3 terabytes of RAM.
17:14And this is chock full of build VMs.
17:18And we recently introduced the tri-build system, which is just as many more build systems that are designed to
17:29do a pre-compile when there's a code check in.
17:33This helps maintain the stability of our build system and the builds as they come out.
17:39As we continue to grow our system, we're seeing more and more traffic coming through and more competition for resources.
17:49Part of what's happening is we're dealing with problems that we haven't had to deal with before.
17:54On previous game projects I've been on, we thought we were doing something big and it's nothing compared to what
17:59we're building here.
18:00And so just the amount of assets alone, the art, the pre-compressed data that's coming in, is a tremendous
18:09amount.
18:10If I do a transfer of just one version of the build over a 10 gig network, it can take
18:17a half hour to 45 minutes.
18:19And this is why we have to break these jobs up.
18:22And it's the same with the rest of the game.
18:24We break things into pieces so that we can do more in parallel.
18:28That's how we get it going fast and that's the only way we can make this work.
18:32Under our current deployment, our primary build system consumes six hosts spread across a VMware clustered environment.
18:38This configuration allowed us to add tri-build to the existing environment.
18:43But as we grew, we saw increasing resource contention.
18:46This pretty much leads to longer wait times on a tri-build job.
18:50By adding three more hosts, we're able to completely isolate tri-build from the primary build system.
18:56And this is important particularly for the engineers who use tri-build constantly.
19:00A lot of people don't really realize why it takes so much more to build these builds inside the build
19:09system
19:09rather than the kind of compile that we do on our desktop computer.
19:15And in the traditional sense, when you're compiling on your desktop, you're doing one thing.
19:20You're bringing down source code and you're making that compilation of a client or a server, whatever you happen to
19:27be working on.
19:28But in the build system, we have many needs and we have to do all of it.
19:32So in addition to building both the client and the server, I'm building release and profile on multiple branches, sometimes
19:41as many as three.
19:43So this means that any time a build request comes in, we're spinning up a large number of virtual machines.
19:53And we found that with the size of this game, the build times can really spread out.
19:59So we break those jobs into many smaller pieces.
20:03And this is why we can accordion the build process out into this much more server hardware.
20:10The reason that we choose to host our services externally rather than internally, there are just a myriad of reasons,
20:21but it gives us a tremendous scalability and flexibility.
20:25I can pay for just exactly what I need instead of having to make this large capital investment on a
20:32whole bunch of gear
20:33and then all the bandwidth so that people could access it.
20:36And if you think about the multi-region launch that we did recently, we wouldn't be able to as easily
20:42do that
20:42if we had stuff located and physically stuck in one data center.
20:47And this leads us to the need to expand our build system.
20:50So today, we're expanding our current rack of six hosts by three more hosts.
20:57We'll be including a total of 72 more virtual cores and a whole lot of networking, and it's going to
21:03be really fun.
21:05Since our current enclosure was at capacity, we added a second enclosure and wired it in.
21:11Ultimately, we planned to move all hosts to the first enclosure and all storage to the second enclosure for simplicity,
21:17but we have to take that in phases.
21:20We then racked the servers from the bottom to the top in order to leave room for future expansion.
21:26Once we got them installed, we realized our fiber cables weren't the right length,
21:30so we moved the servers up a bit to account for that temporarily.
21:34Once connected, we installed and configured the software for use.
21:38We can do that pretty fast now since everything is virtualized in our own little cloud environment.
21:43From there, it's a simple process to migrate the virtual machines over with vMotion.
21:49This means we can completely migrate a running system over the network with zero downtime.
21:55Each time we do one of these jobs, we end up with a mess of cables.
21:59It happens all the time, and I feel like I'm constantly fixing it.
22:02In fact, it's kind of a thing now, and everyone likes to see how long it'll take before I find
22:06it and fix it,
22:07which usually isn't that long.
22:09I do this pretty much at every studio I go to now.
22:13Once we had all the parts, we were able to get the whole thing up and running in just under
22:17three hours.
22:19As a result, we're now seeing much less contention in the build system,
22:23and now we've got some room to grow again, and I'm sure we're going to need it.
22:29There you go. So that's pretty cool.
22:30And as Mike said, we're developing a very unique game with very unique needs.
22:34This tends to throw unforeseen obstacles at all our departments
22:37while developing a game like this is exciting.
22:40It also takes time to overcome some of these obstacles, as you guys know.
22:44And one thing that makes us unique is the variety of ships you can fly in the PU.
22:48So if you're a subscriber, you can fly the Drake Buccaneer as part of the Ship of the Month.
22:52Also, subscribers get the Gladius Valiant as part of a flash sale this weekend.
22:57So if you're interested in learning more about this, check out the link in the description.
23:01Yep, and so that's it for today's episode.
23:03Please join us tomorrow for Happy Hour Friday at 8 a.m. Pacific.
23:06Jared Huckabee will interview Brian Chambers about everything that's happening at the Frankfurt Studio.
23:11So that will be a pretty cool episode.
23:13And after this week, Happy Hour will air bi-weekly.
23:17So don't miss tomorrow's episode.
23:19But before we go, I want to thank all the subscribers who make this show possible,
23:23and also other shows like Happy Hour.
23:25Yeah, and we're also grateful to all the backers for supporting development of Star Citizen and Squadron 42.
23:30We wouldn't be able to make this game without you.
23:32So thanks for watching, and in the spirit of May the 4th,
23:34we thought it would be fun to show you a little glimpse of Mark Hamill in the cockpit of Squadron
23:3842.
23:40Awesome.
23:40We'll see you around the verse.
23:45Come on, Lieutenant.
23:46First we clear our assigned patrol, then we'll rendezvous with Trejo.
23:50And, Lieutenant, make sure Trejo understands this is your op.
23:54She goes off again like what happened at the sting.
23:56I'm pulling you.
23:58I'm not going to be your dad, if that's what you're asking.
24:01Kid is just a nickname.
24:31Tell me about the computer behind me.
24:33A few of us in the IT department started building custom computers and getting them a little bit fancier and
24:40fancier,
24:41and so finally we started having a bit of a competition.
24:44It's kind of a thing for us that we continually compete with these projects.
24:52So this is my build, and then one of our other guys, Paul, is working on one which should be
24:59ready in a few weeks,
25:00and he's probably like usual, he's going to beat me, and then I'll turn around and beat him right back.
25:07Thank you for watching.
25:08So if you want to keep up with the latest and greatest in Star Citizen and Squadron 42's development,
25:12please follow us on our social media channels.
25:14See you soon.
25:30You ever get punched in the throat?
25:32Go!
25:33So if you want to get punched in the throat?
25:33Once you are locked.
25:33Sorry for your mask here!
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