[11:11] Geforce asks: The monthly studio reports have been a fantastic resource for company wide developments across the spectrum of Star Citizen as a project. Other than persistence and the recent focus on Squadron 42 development; what is the biggest development challenge preventing rudimentary versions of the exploration, cargo, mining and economy mechanics to be implemented into the PU/PTU builds and would it be possible to see targeted or focused updates on these specific mechanics in the future?
Yes.
So these are all things that we are focusing on. So 2.4 has just come out so that has persistence which is a pretty big thing because that just means that the items that you buy, or potentially find, will stay around; and then longer term health and damage, and wear and tear to your items and all the rest of stuff, will also persist; and you can buy and sell things like clothes now. And we’re just going to be opening up and expanding more and more of that.
And then the other big thing that we are doing is we’re working quite hard on having … what we .. Stanton system, that we’re going to put in an a system … massive scale, I think the system itself is going to be, in our scaled down version, about a billion kilometres across which is pretty insanely big. And we will be ... in the … not immediate future but definitely this year we will have the Stanton system there with procedural planets and that’s one of our focuses.
So right now what we are doing is we are focusing on the procedural planet tech and work. And also the fundamental things that we have to do to the underlying engine tech to allow us simulate a system that is that big. So we’re already simulating a pretty massive play area, but the full star system is much, much, much, much, much bigger than you get even now in Crusader. And is going to have .. it has vast amounts of objects or entities if you want to call them.
So you probably would have noticed that performance from 2.3 to 2.4 has degraded a little bit. And that has been an ongoing trend because we’ve been adding more things in: more AI; more things, so like if you go to Port Olisar you can buy items in the shops and you also have various pick up … wreck … like things you can pick up at wrecks around Yella and all that. And so essentially the core of CryEngine was never built to simulate this many items and objects, and we’ve had a long term refactor that we’ve been working on, the Item 2.0 that keeps on getting mentioned is one of the core ones … part of it, but we’re basically refactoring the way the whole entity system updates; we’re refactoring the fundamental …
So we’ve done a lot of top level changes on top of the CryNetwork but it’s just not going to be good enough handle systems this big and this much data going back and forth. So we’ve long had a full rewrite of everything in CryNetwork on the table and we’ve been working on it and now with what happened, and what you could see on 2.4 and the framerates and everything it’s just clear we’re at the limit of what the current engine will handle without these new systems that we’ve been working on for quite a while coming online.
So the Engineering team on the overall project, across all the studios, have a good portion of it being what we call “ring fenced”. And so rather than spending a lot of time iterating, fixing issues or bugs on 2.4 or 2.4.1 or 2.5, we’ve been working towards getting everything in place for when we bring out the bigger system and procedural planets. Which internally in our release schedule that will be 2.7 but I’m not giving you an exact date on that because as you can see with 2.4 some of the bigger things take longer some of the more simple content updates.
But we’re working it … pulling all of it together and when that’s in place, with some of the systems and some of the messaging and organisation stuff we’ve got in the works, which is also pretty cool that longer term we’ll be rolling out later this year that will also make the game much better in terms of coordinating with your friends and groups and organisations; we will have the foundation in place to really accelerate on things like the cargo and the mining and going about and hiring other people to escort you or defend you or take someone out.
So that’s all working at pace and then in the short term we’re working it, adding some content in terms of new locations. So in the next big drop we have … we were going to have a separate area which when you’re an outlaw, someone on the wrong side of the law, you have your own place where you spawn and you … So it’s almost like we’re going to have two factions in the 2.5 release which is the outlaw base and then Port Olisar will be the two main spawning places. And we’re going to start to build that up and there’s some extra stuff that gets added there and we’re going to have some other gameplay that rolls out that’s on the smaller side but then the huge system expansion starts with 2.7 … won’t have all the locations because there’s a lot of stuff to be there but everything will be in placeholder set up in 2.7 and then we start working it like fleshing and finishing out Stanton system.
So that’s our goal. Our goal is to get the Stanton system fleshed out to the fidelity that we want in Star Citizen for playing the game the way we imagined it at the amount of like insane detail you can go from … basically it’s that “Pupil to Planet” detail where you can get right down there and you can walking around on this huge planet and the detail on the ground is like something you’ve never … I promise you it’s something you have not seen on a proper fully procedural planet that’s fully three … like a proper sphere. Like you’ll see the planet, you’ll keep going, it’s all completely seamless you get down, you get right down, you get down, you see the little rocks on the … on the ground. And I haven’t seen anyone else been able to do that. So we are going to do that. That’s going to be very cool, I think you guys will like it. So that coming on down the road. Again can’t really give exact dates because some of these things take longer than we would all like but this year is the plan so stay tuned and, you know, that’s another reason to come to Gamescom because we may have some stuff to show.
