It's the monthly Town Hall! Today will feature Turbulent and them talking about Spectrum along with other things.
As per usual, anything said during the show is subject to change by CIG and may not always be accurate at the time of posting. Also any mistakes you see that I may have missed, please let me know so I can correct them. Enjoy the show!
The show is live! Today we have Turbulent with Benoit and Benjamin. Benjamin is a strategist at Turbulent and Benoit oversees all things involving Star Citizen at Turbulent.
Spectrum has been out for a little over 6 weeks officially and Spectrum is designed to replace communication platforms currently involved for Star Citizen. Chat, Forums, VOIP and integration with the game will all become standard with Spectrum in the coming months/year.
[Polls? Where are they?] To be able to launch Spectrum they had to make some tough choices at what will get put in the first iteration, but they have plans to do polls. However their goal isn't to copy everything forums have done, but iterate on them that makes them unique, but polls in some fashion will be on Spectrum.
[What's next for Spectrum?] The most short term thing that they're working on that is slated for 3.33 is nested threads. This allows people to make a "Reddit" style thread and to give people the option of what type of thread they'd like to do instead of just the classic one.
[What's next for Orgs?] What Benjamin would like to see soon is having deeper integration of the things they already have for orgs such as being apart of multiple orgs and hiding which ones you're apart of for Spectrum, but feature wise it's mainly everything an Organisation would need. There isn't a specific feature that's slated first, but they want public forums within orgs so that orgs can have a recruitment thread or area for people not apart of an Org to communicate with them.
[What does the update for the launcher entail with 2.6.2?] It's nothing special, it's just for bugfixing and giving them more information on troubleshooting.
[Delta patcher progress?] From Turbulent's standpoint the actual patching process is progressing very nicely. The engineers working on the project are patching the game with the new method, builds are being produced with the file system and they're ironing out the kinks. On Turbulent's end they've received the patching library and they're integrating it into the new patcher application which doesn't look any different, but underneath is completely different and allows them to bring Spectrum into the launcher, but the launcher will come first and then Spectrum integration into the launcher. So right now they're at the stage of internal testing and once they're happy with it then they'll release it to all the developers and once it's good from there, then it'll go to the Evocati. The timeline isn't distant anymore, but there's still some work to be done, but it's a lot closer than it was before.
[Fleet view?] It's still in holding because they're determining how to best implement it because some people may not want their ships being shared with the org or have only some shared with the org. It's something they have to get more feedback on, as well as let the game build a bit more before they can really dig into that.
[How do you intend VOIP integration to work?] The idea is for players to create voice lobbies, switch between them and be able to do that quickly. This is stage one which is within Spectrum.
[Mobile app?] Currently the resources for making the mobile app are tied up at the moment, but the way they've built Spectrum will allow them to create it fairly quickly when they are able to work on it. Currently the priority of on VOIP and players would rather have that than the mobile app first.
[Why can't you just work on everything at the same time?] It would be awesome if they could do that, but they don't have enough desks or enough people to do all the tasks at the same time. You have three options: money, time, quality, pick two. They wish they could get all the awesome things out right away, but there's only so many hands and some of those hands are working on making builds to release to the backers weekly/monthly instead of a traditional software.
[Will a dev tracker be added to Spectrum?] They've talked about it, but want to go about it differently from the way the old forum had it integrated and use the role functionality to allow players to see a dev reply to a specific thread or have a notification feed on when a role has posted. They want the functionality of something like that be applicable for orgs which is their goal with all features is have them work not just for one thing, but other areas in Spectrum and the community.
[What's next for the Starmap?] Their goal next is the Galactapedia which is a much more indepth wiki that allows you to search for things based on a phrase or specific word that will pull up info and also have that integrated with MobiGlas.
[What is the Issue Council and what plans are there for it in the future?] It's a place for players to submit their bugs, and have others try to reproduce the bugs and give feedback by replying directly, or upvoting or downvoting.
[What's up with the ship stats page?] The ship stats on the website were made a long time ago and their stats are there to reflect what the design goal of the ship is. The issue isn't tools as they have the tools to change them, but that there are lots of changes that happen that may or may not be permanent and they don't want the stats page constantly changing because of a bug or testing.
[API] API stands for Application Program Interface and is a way for people to write their own program, but use the services provided by the API. They plan to have an API for Spectrum, but a dedicated machine API so you can write your own APIs that aren't using your credentials.
[Can we have the ability to type in our native language and have it automatically translated to what other people can read, Google has something like that.] Maybe. They have a couple ideas that they'll try to pursue.
[Custom Emojis?] It's one thing they're wanting to have as soon as possible. 0.35 is a possibility for when you might see it. 0.33 is subreddits and thread types, 0.34 is more than likely Org quality of life improvements.
[Ingame states] They're working on expanding the current states, but that will come in time as the game grows so you'll eventually be able to see where a person is or what they're doing.