Hey Citizens! This is the transcript for Around the ‘Verse – Episode 4. Thanks to /u/Shadow703793 for giving us access to his collection of transcripts.
Weekly Review
Arena Commander
Squadron 42
Behavior Interactive
Ship Pipeline
Persistent Universe
Character Creation
MVP: https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/154478/tribute-music-to-sc#latest
What has been the most frustrating or most memorable bug you’ve come across so far as a programmer?
There’s a current bug in Multiplayer where the character gets stuck in a funny pose when the player spawns in. This bug seems to happen only at spawn and if the player is lagging. Currently Mark and the other programmers haven’t been able to replicate the bug but QA is able to replicate it.
How many years have you been programming, what languages have you used and what type of programs have you worked on prior to Star Citizen?
Started programming in 1998 by modding Half Life. Mark has worked on Black Mesa Source, then moved on to Insurgency and after that got in to CIG. Marks mainly works with C++ but has worked with Python and Perl.
As a gameplay programmer, my understanding is that your focus is more on the game’s strategy and how to implement the mechanics to create the feel of the game. Chris Roberts has been clear on his vision for SC, to date which part of the vision has been the hardest to get the feel right for the game?
The hardest part is getting the ships to work in multiplayer. Chris’s vision wants very complex interaction with ships which is easy to do in single player, but quite complex in multi-player because you have to take in to account the synching and other backend network stuff.
DFM/AC has been running pretty well and it lead me to wonder how many process threads are used to calculate and simulate the physics related articles in DFM/AC? Ie. Each thruster in use, delta of the player and NPCs, counter inertia from rapid firing of weapons, crashing, etc. Are each of these separated on their own process? Are they grouped?
There are two threads for physics. Any time there’s any physics interaction the game would use one of these threads to execute the job. There’s a main game thread which handles all the game logic for weapons and ships. The thrusters have to be on both the physics and main thread which does cause issues. The main thread handles things like how the thrusters are attached, overheating, weapons detaching, etc. Mark works closely with John Pritchett to sort out the physics and main game thread issues.
10 for the Chairman Logo Contest: https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/156118/10-for-the-chairman-logo-contest
Winner will get a Origin 350R.
Friday Inside CIG: A look inside the Asteroid Hangar with Behavior Interactive.