Star Citizen Thread v6

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lysan

lysan
Dooguk said:
Something Jones at SA has worked hard to bring us this transcription....

WARNING Verbal diarrhea incoming
This is the single most surreal transcript I have done to date.


Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Sep 21, 2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV2qhhtsMA0

@ 09:58

Mike Jones (Director of Corporate and Publishing Technology):
My team is responsible for DIGITAL PUBLISHING, and with 3.0 imminent we've been doing a lot of work to, uh... ENHANCE OUR SYSTEMS AND EXPAND OUR CAPABILITIES, and so I feel like we're ready to PUBLISH, uh... pretty much ANYTIME, uh... we get a selected build that's READY TO GO




@ 15:00

Carlos Pla Pueyo (Gameplay Programmer):
With the air traffic controller we have tried to ah... get a FEELING of a REALISTIC SITUATION, so... when REAL LIFE when you have different PLANES coming to an airport you need some kind of CONTROL, you need RULES, you need a way of making sure that everything is going to PLAN. So we have been trying to get the same behavior in... in a STAR CITIZEN so... up to now when you approaching a station you just have to... LAND and that's it. Now, you have to REQUEST landing which implies a communication with SOMEONE, an NPC which can be a REAL NPC or a AUTOMATIC VOICE...

Automatic Voice:
One hangar comin' up!

Carlos Pla Pueyo:
...telling you where you can LAND, or if there's no space available or anything like that. And there's also a controller were how much you can stay in a landing pad, eh... like security measures and so on.

Benjamin Anders (System Designer):
Right now players can just land everywhere they want, there is nothing controlling them, there is nothing saying, 'oh you should PARK HERE', there's no rules to that, and we needed to find a system that basically co ordinates landing, taking off, and also creating more IMMERSION on what actually like flight controllers are.



Bob Rissolo (Dialogue Supervisor):
The CONCEPT behind our game is to be very REALISTIC in what we do, so we do a lot of research in anything that goes on and especially... that DEFINITELY does not uh... uh... leave out the air traffic controllers, so we've done a lot of RESEARCH into what air traffic controllers DO. When... when we were ON SET in... in... and ah... FILMING and PCAP it... it was... it was really important you know cos the game was... er... really much FILMED LIKE A MOVIE and as we... as we went about TRACKING and trying to manage and maintain the CONTENT it was very clear that we needed to focus on the IMPLEMENTATION side and to use that as a way to track how the... the PCAP should be cut up and the way it should be ORGANIZED so... UTILIZING THAT BACKGROUND OF IMPLEMENTATION I made sure that we TRACKED OUR PCAP in a way that was ultimately feasible to edit... edit the project and... and... and... and uh... actually track how... how it was being cut up and... and uh... and... on... on the uh... on the EDITING BOARD.

It's really a BEHAVIORAL THING and so while we can record all the context and all the different dialogue that we want, it really becomes... you know it really comes down to our SYSTEMS to really be able to handle it, and yeah, our engineering team is just phenomenal, they... they are really pushing the boundary of what AI can really HANDLE, and making it a really systemic... ah... ah... MODULE OF BEHAVIOR so it's not just like, you know, 'oh these guys do this thing or whatever', it's a real AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLER MODULE that... that... that... that's DEFINING all of these BEHAVIORS and... and... and it's not even just ONE VOICE that's defining the whole BALLET of all the different, you know, PEOPLE DOIN' ALL THE SIGNALS and the AI is saying, 'you can GO and you have to TAKE OFF or you can LAND, you go HERE', you know, all those kind of things... it's... it's... it's... it's a WHOLE BALLET of all these uh... uh... CHARACTERS involved.



Benjamin Anders (System Designer):
Well one of the more complicated things is that it's not working like in REAL LIFE where everyone behaves as they should be, right? So it's still a GAME and players so what they WANT sometimes, so we need to make sure to have RULES in place which allow players to actually have an IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE but also don't abuse other players as well and have like, PUNISHMENT almost, um... when they not follow the RULES



Bob Rissolo (Dialogue Supervisor):
You have to account for the silly stupid things like a player strafing the station, or uh, flying too close and you know they have to react in a way it's... it, eh... you know... it ah... ah... it's both HELPFUL to the player haha, let's not do that haha! But, eh... but it's also... it's... it's... it's a GAME you know, it HAPPENS and it's FUN, ENTERTAINING.



Benjamin Anders (System Designer):
So every flight controller is its own AI. When you hailing a tower to request landing or takeoff, you're gonna be in contact with an actual SUBSUMPTION DRIVEN AI which, um, has... depending on the station a unique voiceline or a generic one...

Subsumption AI Flight Controller:
There! Should be waiting for you in the hangar!

Benjamin Anders (System Designer):
...and you will talk only specifically to that AI and that will give the response.

So there is an air traffic controller entity which is a combined version of the SEATS that we already have and the useable system other designers are working on, and the AI will basically sit down and then have SENSORS or FEELERS you could say, um... to... check how many ships are in the radius, what ships request LANDING, what pads are free, what are occupied, what are the DIFFERENT stations of occupation of these pads and then will according to that, will address landing pads to players.

There's a couple of (inaudible) ones for special stations like LEVSKI or GRIM HEX or PORT OLISAR and there's also like a GENERIC one, a GENERIC computer system which also picks up if there's for whatever reason, no flight operator available. Because our flight operators are actually like physically placed in the station, so... you could basically stand in the station, see him talking to someone and whoever is on the ship will see the same thing. So it's a... uh... ONE TO ONE TRANSITION.

Let's say that station gets attacked or that guy is out of an emergency or whatever, he's not there, we have a BACKUP system that picks up with just a generic computer voice and that will handle the flight operation then.




Bob Rissolo (Dialogue Supervisor):
If you think about it we have a big amount of content to get, you know, like a big piece of cake, the SPONGE is the primary... the BIG PART of what we do. But there's also... cake needs some ICING, needs some FLAVOR, and so we... we... like to... ah... um... you know... have a giant, general sort of VOICE SET that is used across the... the... the GALAXY, and we also like to have some nice specific characters that are placed in locations and give a good flavor to certain things like for instance, LEVSKI, we have a general ATC but we also have this flight ops dude in um... in LEVSKI that's kind of like a California dude like me

Flight Ops California Dude AI:
Hey there! On behalf of the People's Alliance, WELCOOOOME to Levksi! The name's (inaudible), I run the hangars here which is GREAT for you 'cos you're prob'ly lookin' to land!

Bob Rissolo (Dialogue Supervisor):
He's a good character and he provides a lot of good character to that... to that LANDING SPACE, and uh... it's FUN for players to enjoy that specific character set rather than having a... just a big universe of... always general, you know characters running around.
Click to expand...

OMG that was hilarious! Mouth diarrhea 101, totally gibberish babbling.
 

Britney

B
Tippis said:
Well yeah. It changes SC from a space flight game to a waiting game. What more could you ever ask for?



Also, for anyone unfamiliar with the term, the reason I struck out “simulation” and opted for “simulacrum” instead is because of good old Baudrillard: a simulation is an attempt to replicate the real; a simulacrum is a replication of something that has no connection to any kind of reality. At best, it can be a replication of something that's already a (flawed) simulation.

Nothing CIG does is simulation. It either simply does not simulate what it's supposed to (eg. the “physics” engine and the flight model, both of which are completely devoid of any kind of real physics), or they simulate some Hollywood conception of how things would work (ATC being “busy elsewhere” or having “real holograms”). Either way, they are simulacra of some wholly, and possibly wilfully, misinformed notions of how things should work. That is, in and of itself, not inherently bad — no matter how much old Mr. B disagrees — as long as it serves some other useful purpose. Game simulacra for the intent of entertainment or or user friendliness or for just not wasting everyone's time are perfectly acceptable substitutes for something more sim oriented. But CIG seems to consistently not do that.

Instead, they pick these solutions for some warped notion of “fidelity” because that's somehow better than gameplay. That would be true if they were taking the simulation route. But they're not. It's all simulacra. It is inherently and by very definition devoid of fidelity because there is no real referent to be fidelitous to. Chris saw something neat in a film once and he wants it in his game because that would make it more “realistic”… somewhere along the line forgetting that films are real and that what he needs to focus on is making a game, not a movie. Gameplay trumps everything. Doubly so since his attempt at making a movie was arguably the low-point in his creative career, whereas his games were… well… passable, at least, even if they're from an ancient era.
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Regarding all the games Roberts made before Star Citizen the focus seems to be to replicate iconic scenes from military and scifi movies, especially top gun. He wants all these scenes from those movies ingame, so you can feel as if you are in a movie. It was always the iconographic Wing Commander aka Top Gun situation, coming back after a super-hard mission where you proved your manliness, another day as the hero, and the calm voice of the landing control welcomes you and gives you the formal green light to land. So he wants that stuff in Star Citizen too, but this time you can actually visit the flight commander in his office, having a warm conversation to cool down, after you exchanged a few cool lines with the mechanic complaining about your tough flying style, always testing the limits of structural integrity (implicitly the mechanic is ok with that, because of your awesome performance/killscore).

Edit: When I see these videos I am always amazed how they do them. You can never tell, if the stuff they are talking about is so complex, that they don't know where to start explaining the system and its possibilities, or if they just don't know what to talk about, escaping into the world of vagueness.
 
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Cmdr Eagleboy

Cmdr Eagleboy
Tippis said:
Instead, they pick these solutions for some warped notion of “fidelity” because that's somehow better than gameplay. That would be true if they were taking the simulation route. But they're not. It's all simulacra. It is inherently and by very definition devoid of fidelity because there is no real referent to be fidelitous to. Chris saw something neat in a film once and he wants it in his game because that would make it more “realistic”… somewhere along the line forgetting that films are real and that what he needs to focus on is making a game, not a movie. Gameplay trumps everything. Doubly so since his attempt at making a movie was arguably the low-point in his creative career, whereas his games were… well… passable, at least, even if they're from an ancient era.
Click to expand...

Make believe system. It is ancient as gambling. Chris taps in - and frankly only reason SC isn't pure open scam for me it is because Chris believes that himself - that 'you can put almost everything in game so let's put everything' feeling lot of gamers definitely have. Just check out these forums for 'what would happen if we cross breed ED, SC, NMS, etc. etc.' and other nonsense. Lot of people, even bright, clever people I know personally, believe it is just that easy and that CIG is able to do that.

What CIG really struggles is to make anything scripted real. They know gamers will call them out on being fake as crap if they just do scripted stuff - despite the fact you can do very immerse things with scripting, just need to be creative and oohhh, you need solid QA team. So it ends up them not knowing really how to achieve that. That's however would be lesser of their problems if they would have at least basic gameplay loop going. NPCs as traffic controllers ain't that.
 
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Theodrid

Theodrid
Where's the important bit -

Random CIG geezer - "And ummm, our controllers are part of a union and ummm, they can and will strike over pay and conditions if need be. It uhhh, it makes sense, potentially players could be waiting weeks to ummm, land and stuff, we think it brings a lot of depth to the game".

:D
 

Agony_Aunt

Agony_Aunt
With the awesomeness of subsibblysumption, i can't wait to see someone being denied docking because that particular controller is having a bad day.
 

Han Zulu

Han Zulu
Skizomeuh said:
What will happen if:
- some griefer shoots the operator?
Click to expand...
Works as intented.

- operator has his StarPoopContainer™ full and had to go?
Click to expand...
Hater! You just don't know how going to bathroom works!!!

- 1000 players call the operator at once?
Click to expand...
No problem. They've put their super-duper AI NPCs as operators.

So much grief, glitch or bug game ruining potential in their loony "simulacrum of pointless minutia" (thanks Tippis, nailed it) gamedesign approach...
Click to expand...
Next stretch goal contains a forum simulator in-game, where players can post and AI NPCs are responding. It will be awesome to do this in a simulated space game.
:D
 

Tippis

Tippis
On a different and ever so slightly off-topic note, I wish to recant my spiel from yesterday(?) about how no-one ever did anything new in the same game genre.

Heat Signature came out and now I'm asychronously saving friends lives by throwing them out the airlock and picking them up just before they (and I) suffocate. PC gaming is saved, and it was all in spite of CIG.
 

lysan

lysan
Dooguk said:
Waiting to see what they shoehorn into this thing after they have watched the Frontier Expo. [haha]
Click to expand...

To be honest ED has been on a slow burn for some time, however it's like when they announce something CIG try to match it somehow.

I guess the ATC feature in ED has been studied by CIG closely :)
 
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