Highlight video of the APB 2.1 Beta with Q&A

[Kevkof 806]

Much like with the previous Q&A, I have made a text transcript for the entire video.

(Thank you @Iazer for some of the typing)

 

All the questions have been split up more or less per subject, each with a timestamp of where that segment starts.

I'll post the entire thing in a Spoiler tag so you can still go past it if you want to.

Things said by @SKay are in indicated by the S:
And things by @MattScott are indicated by the M:

 

For those that want a download of the file instead of reading it on the forums: Download

 

Video timestamp
S: Let's start off with an easy question, how are you Matt?
M: I think I'm feeling a little better, we made it through this. I thought this could have gone incredibly horrible, we had a couple crashes. It is what it is, I knew this was a little risky because we're showing off a bunch of unfinished work. So pretty good.


Video timestamp
S: How is everything in terms of our progress really, how far do you think we're along with what we've been streaming today?
M: I think there's different categories, right. So if we break it down we've got what I would say is visual categories, we've spent a lot of time trying to pull apart a lot of the unfinished work. And before we get started, I just want to throw a nod to Reloaded Productions and just all the work they've put into this. This was a herculean effort, I know they didn't finish but a lot of our stuff wouldn't be possible but for the work they did. So visually, a lot of work has been done there. All new lighting, tons of rewriting, tons of rebaking things. I would say audio is completely not touched, I think we heard some scuffed audio today so that needs a lot of work. Rendering wise, I'm happy with the renderer itself. *I just saw the mention of the pink headset. No, that was Razer's headset so I had to give it back.* Rendering wise the new renderer is hands down faster with the multithreaded rendering. All of the fps slowdowns we saw today are purely related to UI or to game-loop issues, so that's what we're optimizing now. Which is just getting some of the game-loop elements that are related to missions, the reason we're not doing Financial today was because some of that stuff just grinds to a halt right now so we're fixing some of that stuff.


Video timestamp
S: So you were talking about, in the chat as well, you were talking about how currently the fps is not where we want it to be. Do you want to try and go into that a little bit?
M: Sure, I was gonna see ... if we could jump back into Asylum and that we could just show framerate with Asylum not running the minigame and sort of empty. Because I think like you and I are on comparable systems. I run an RTX 2080 and on the highest settings it's upwards of 200 frames per second when we're not running the minigame, you might be slightly slower than that but I think the speed is definitely there when it's empty. I saw someone ask a question, when I refer to game-loop I'm referring to all the underlying code that the client is managing when you're doing a mission or a minigame. We've got a bunch of HUD elements that are on the screen and it's doing a lot of ray casting to figure out where people are and to give you the appropriate options and things like that, so that's what's kind of dragging us down right now. It's not the rendering itself, but kind of the gameplay elements. I saw someone mention the 2080, definitely in live. You know, live is a 32-bit client. One of the big things we had to fix recently is that we have a lot of alignment issues. So there was code that was written at 4-byte alignment and then 8-byte alignment and then 16-byte alignment. 16-byte alignment being more 64-bit and so when systems would try to interact with each other the alignment is off and it crashes. So the 2080 in live right now has a lot of problems and we've done our best to fix them, some of them are driver related but it's very smooth. I think, SKay you're running an RTX as well aren't you?
S: I'm running a GTX 1080 Ti
M: A GTX, right. We both have the Ryzen chipset
S: We do, yeah. I have the 1800x but you have a newer cpu than I do.
M: Yea, Nvidia was nice enough to donate some 2080's to the studio so whenever the developers have been testing on that full time to make sure we work the kinks out there.


Video timestamp
S: So, you are live with Asylum.
M: Excellent, do you wanna put the framerate on screen here? We'll see what kind of framerate we're getting while we're not running the mission and don't have a bunch of ... I don't know how many other players are actually ...
S: There's 0 players in this session right now, so you're good to go.
M: Go for it, when we put the framerate up and there we go. So I think what you'll notice is the framerate is considerably higher when we're just sort of running around the district and we're not running a mission or not running a bunch of UI elements, this varies a little bit. SKay's running what we call uncapped, so he's got V-Sync turned off, he's got smooth framerate turned off. What that does is it just unlocks the frame cap there. What most people notice as framerate lag is actually the change in framerate, so if you're sitting at 100 and you drop to 60 that's going to look like lag. If you're sitting at 60 and you drop to 40 it's going to look like frame lag and so what we wanna do is have the highest possible framerate but have it be as consistent as possible so people don't see that. The framerate window is so small, you'll see it hop around. We'll talk a little bit about benchmarks and things like that.


Video timestamp
S: The thing that I saw the most was that the stability was quite good. How are you feeling about the stability of the game in comparison to live? I know live does have a lot of issues with regards to the garbage collector and having to do stuff with that and it hiccups the game essentially.
M: A lot of stutters and hitches on live which is just stuff we inherited there. One of the big goals of the engine upgrade was to just smooth all that out and we've been able to do that. So I think regardless of the framerate, I was on Pound's stream earlier and popped into a couple of others, it plays/feels really smooth. 


Video timestamp
S: Are you hoping that we probably will be raising the ceiling in both the maximum fps that we can gain and the minimum, sort of 1's and 0.1 %s?
M: Yea, we're hoping like right now if we can that's probably a good segway once we get through a little more. Do you wanna run outside and run around the edge here. Because there's one of the big things in the engine is just the view distance and how we're handling some of the things, even the unplayable area's in the game. Once we show off Financial I think we'll see more of that, we're not going to do Financial in this stream but view distance is a big difference between live and the new engine and it's something we had to take into account when we were talking about settings. So, technically speaking 'Very High' on the new engine is actually not equal to 'Maximum' on live because the view distance is about 3 times farther. So you have to manually kind of switch your view distance and run 'Very High' to get apples to apples. The way the LOD system works in the engine, you're seeing just a lot more high fidelity farther away. 


Video timestamp
S: Coming to fidelity, sort of on the high end and the low end. What can we expect in terms of the high end so for people who are running these crazy systems that are able to push 400 fps and the lower end players who are not able to push 60 fps?
M: I will say this, we've focused a lot on the high end right now. I know that SKay runs benchmarks every build and he's been great at that. That's actually why I'm doing the stream with SKay, because he's been so instrumental in the benchmark side of things and admittedly we've been focusing on the high end of things because that's what, you know, we just want the engine to perform. We need to do some optimization at the mid-level, we've started improving the settings at like medium and even low quality so that you're still getting a good gameplay experience but the game doesn't look just completely like play-doh. Definitely, some more work to do for the lower end systems and the medium level systems.


Video timestamp
S: In regards to the current topic, so to lean onto the high and low. What can we expect to see for people who are currently sort of upset, not upset but they are not too happy with how the game looks. It is a very old game, it's coming up to 10 years this year. Are we expecting any upgrade in terms of fidelity in terms of car textures?
M: Those are great questions, I'm of two minds. I want the game to look as good as it can look, we're not gonna get PBR rendering in this engine. It's just not something that Unreal 3.5 was designed to do. There have been some upgrades here, I think you guys can see upgraded textures and better normal maps and some other things here. Me, personally, I'm all about "Let's just ship the game". There's so many benefits in the engine outside of the fidelity, it does look a little better. The lighting is a completely different lighting model, but I'd rather just get it into players' hands because the unified codebase makes it so much easier to work with. We've got some kinda fun ideas about getting console players into Social alongside PC players and being able to use the economy back and forth and the customizations which are harder to do on console and easier to do on PC and having them kinda transfer back and forth. There's a lot of benefits in the engine in general. I'm tempted not to overnoodle the visuals right now and just get it into the players' hands.


Video timestamp
M: I know this is the big one and this came up in a couple of streams and that is the estimate of when the new engine will go live permanently. I think it's going to go in stages, we specifically have spent a lot of time on Social and Asylum because they were the closest and so we kinda wanted to get those done. It's a very big game, as everybody knows there was more than 100 million dollars spent on this and so rather than try to do everything at once and hit a home run and have it continue to take so long. We're going to release to the general public the open beta with Asylum and with Social and we're going to do that for a couple of reasons. We need to get more large scare testing for districts so that we can continue to optimize things like framerates with more characters in the game and that sort of thing. Stage 1 is to get this, what you're seeing here as the beta, into the hands of players which will have Asylum and then Social and give us a little bit of a chance to finish on Waterfront and Financial. Then as a second release, we're going to do iterations of that and then the next stage would be to release Financial and Waterfront in beta and kind of tweak those out. Obviously, we can throw crate (Baylan) and some of the other districts in there too at that point. And then the third stage will be to transition everybody. So when everybody goes to download it will patch to 2.1 and everyone will be cut over running 2.1. I will say this, we have 1 blocker right now and it's a good problem to have but our servers are fairly full. So even for this we had to kind of set aside resources to run this beta and we're looking towards that timeline of when we want to open the beta to everybody and one of out big blockers is just 'We need more servers, because we're kinda capping out what we have on live'.


Video timestamp
S: Are there any plans for UI changes or will the game keep its current look?
M: So, I'm going to give the same *oh, look we changed time of day there*, the same kind of answer. I think with UI we're going to keep the same kind of look, I don't wanna go into that rabbit hole. There are plenty of optimizations I would love to do, because I think there's just places in the UI we could streamline and make a lot more easy to use. But I don't want to go down that rabbit hole and delay the game any longer than it's been delayed. I think part of the purpose of the weekly blog is to just show you guys what we're doing and we're not just sitting on this, wasting everybody's time or 'pretending like we're working on it', the vast majority of the team spends every day working on this.


Video timestamp
S: Will the netcode improve with the current engine, as you are saying everybody's working on it. So will the tangible benefits be client-side and server-side?
M: Yea, you'll see a lot of server-side enhancements. The server side on 2.1 has had a lot of work on it and there's actually a lot of different features in there. I can't say that we're completely clear of that. I think we did get reports even in last night's playtest of some ghost shots with some specific guns and things like that so there's some work to be done but I believe it's better than live, we got a lot of optimizations in there. So yeah both sides, mainly on the server-side we've talked about some of the benefits coming which are the district allocation system. So we can talk about that a bit if we want, just getting into matches and how we're going to distribute players. There's a ton of work that has been done on the server-side to make that whole process better.


Video timestamp
S: I think we can talk about the district access and we can go down that rabbit hole a little bit and see what your thoughts are on that. Because it is a rabbit hole in the sense that everybody can have their own sort of thoughts about it really.
M: Sure, I think what's interesting is ... When Reloaded had the game there was this effort to just kinda keep it running, right. You're dealing with something that is aging and they certainly put content in, but the focus was to primarily just keep it running. We had to make some very tough choices and I know even back in the May and November timeframes we dismantled our network to fix a bunch of DDOS issues, we paid the price for that. It was horrible, I will say just straight up horrible. We had a lot of problems transitioning networks, a lot of servers that hadn't been touched in 5 years but that's paying off for us now. I actually think that our performance in live in terms of anti-DDOS has been incredible, we've kept the servers up. We've had very little problems and hopefully, the players have noticed that, that just the availability of the servers across the board has been better. When it comes to threat and matchmaking, I'm sure that's everybody's biggest beef. It won't launch immediately with the beta, but it's the next major thing we're putting in and a ton of work has been done server-side for this for 2.1 and that is the way districts will expand and collapse. So in off-peak times, we're actually going to be dynamically scaling the threat levels so we can get everybody either on to one server or multiple servers but basically reducing/contracting how threat works so you can get matches. And then during peak times we're actually going to be subdividing threat even further than it is now so that we're getting very very closely matched players on each district. That's part of what we call district allocations that's in the new systems, but this idea of being able to scale dynamically and get people to the right servers so that they're getting matched a lot better.


Video timestamp
M: There's a lot of questions in the chat about the tutorial and just straight out, that needs work. Our new player experience needs work. I would ask everybody in the community, we're certainly growing ... we're getting thousands of new players a day right now. Please be kind to these players, a lot of them have no idea what they're doing. They're going through that god awful tutorial, coming out of the tutorial with no idea about progression and how roles work with weapons and how to really play the game. And I think that is something that we have to address but I'm really looking for the community to help us out in the meantime just in the short term where we need to finish what we're doing with the engine upgrade, get the matchmaking sorted and then just go through and take a hatchet to the current tutorial and rebuild that from the ground up. You don't really walk away from the tutorial knowing anything about the real game, you get like a character mod but you don't even get a gun mod or understand that sort of progression that is so crucial to getting better in the game.
S: Especially with the fact that grenades are hidden behind the tutorial system.
M: That is one of the worst elements I think. I don't want to throw shade at Reloaded, those guys took a beating doing this game and largely did a great job just there are some things we definitely have to fix. I would love to put the old login music in and the old login screen, these are all amazing things that I'm totally on board with. I just feel like we've got to fix the big problems, for the last 2 years it feels like we've been doing open-heart surgery on a patient that is running on a treadmill. It's very difficult to keep a game running and do work on it at the same time but the work we've been doing with the Joker system and the Joker store, Armas changes across the board there and now with this engine upgrade and server-side stuff it's just a whooh. We're slowly getting there, I think we're starting to see some of the benefits from all of that behind the scenes investment.


Video timestamp
M: Yeah, it's been a long grind. The team has worked incredibly hard, I love when people say "Look, thank you guys for doing so much work". My job is to communicate that back to the team, obviously I'm involved but it's really everybody behind me that should get the credit for that.
S: And where credit's due, from my side anyway. I would like to give my thanks to the team for sticking it out as they have.
M: I also do want to thank all the streamers who participated today, I think we had around 19-20 different folks that got involved, some of the SPCT maybe didn't stream. There were a lot of last-minute hiccups, it was a lot of tolerance and flexibility from the streamers as they had to redownload builds and get set up. I think they did an amazing job dealing with crashes or potential problems, so thanks guys. I think they all took time out to make this happen for the community and it was important to us.


Video timestamp
S: Let's move on to something more about what makes APB really that bit more special, the customization. 
M: Do you want to jump into Social?
S: We can jump onto my character, that's the most customized.


Video timestamp
M: I did see some stuff in chat asking about new content, we're not planning new districts. And btw I have seen the fan-made midtown, it's coming along quite nice. It's an impressive amount of work that he's done on that, we're chatting but I don't want to put any illusions out there in terms of like us taking that and putting it into the game. It's a great project and I am following it and look, if it is viable at all to put that content in the game then it's definitely something we'll look at. But the important part right now is to not add new districts, I want the current districts to be populated so people can progress roles and rank. I think splitting people off into new districts would be maybe a bad idea. That's definitely something I want to do down the road, but the main new content we're doing is 2 new contacts which will be at the final launch of 2.1. We're introducing the E.M.P., we've talked about that. We're introducing new clothing, so there's definitely stuff coming. There is a car in the works so there will be some new content, I don't want everybody to overfocus on the new engine, we know we need to get some new stuff into the game.
S: And speaking of new content, it's a personal question of mine, but would you wager that content being implemented in the new engine and beyond would that be easier or would that be on the same level of difficulty relatively speaking?
M: The tools, I mean look, APB there's nothing like it. The customization system is unique and for a reason. That does make the content really tricky, the content has to be produced at a high level. We've been getting better at it, I would say some of our earlier attempts were C+/B- but the team has fully gotten their head around that process so I think that as stuff continues to come out it's going to be better and better. I don't know if it's any easier, to be honest, the new tools are great in the new engine but there's just a lot of work getting new content in the game. It has to fit so many different formats and body types and everything has to work within the systems, so there's just a lot of work there.


Video timestamp
M: Oh, look at this. We've got the whole team, awesome. Look at everybody, that's great. Thank you everybody, you can kinda see a little bit of what the customizations look like in the new engine. I will say this, I think the texture crispness is better. Some of the elements in the game are done with, their not vectors but they are stuff that benefit from upper res sizes. So the fidelity of characters definitely looks better in my opinion. Look at you guys jumping around in there, so we can run around and have them jump around in the background here. Thank you guys for all the help today, to be fair we did tell the guys they could not use their mains. We've been importing characters from live to make sure everything will port across and so the guys definitely wanted a chance to show off some of the customizations and fun stuff that they didn't get to do during the match. We were worried about it dragging the framerate and causing unexpected problems, so we didn't do that this time.
S: I will give a shoutout to WitchQueen by the way, who has "Hi mum" on the back of his shirt. Do we want to start off with the clothing customization then we'll move onto vehicles and see?
M: Yea, I think just running around Social. We didn't show this off a lot during the streams. A lot of upgraded lighting here, we can change the time of day a little bit and kind of show this off. Lots of hard work in here and I know I talk about it on the blog every week, we're mostly done with lighting and polish and things like that so I would say from my perspective at least that Social's pretty good to ship. Asylum is mostly good to ship, there are definitely some areas in there that I still want to patch up that we found that just need to be reworked from UV's to some of the other stuff. But these two districts are getting pretty close, Financial and Waterfront aren't quite as far along but I don't want to hold the beta back for those. 


Video timestamp
S: Sticking on the customization, how expandable is the system once we do move to the new engine? How can we see the future, can we see new methods of actually applying primitives onto a character for instance?
M: That's a great question, I don't have a good answer for you. What's nice is when we unify the code base, we can make the investment there. It's worth making the investment because we know all the players on every platform will benefit from it and we want to do that. Oh, there we go, we got a new time of day going. I also want to give a shoutout to BrandonBranderson for sending over some of the old Real-Time World screenshots and lighting from different times of day, we couldn't match them exactly but we did want to try and give them a nod and lean into a little bit of that lighting. 


Video timestamp
M: Someone asked what's happening under the chin or some of that stuff. This is indirect lighting and it's definitely one of the big upgrades for 3.5 where we're able to place lights around the level, those are dynamic to start but then as we bake things out it makes rendering a much more full lighting pallet look. It looks way better and it at a decent framerate. If you try to run this just as pure dynamic lights it would just grind to a halt. So it is fake indirect lighting, it's very accurate actually. It's meant to do that so that it runs faster.


Video timestamp
S: Let's stick with customization and try and go on to the day/night cycle and especially with how it is currently in-game in the live version of the game. Is that going to be expanded or is that going to be the same?
M: Someone mentioned earlier 'weather' and the engine has support for weather, it's something we would like to do more of so that on random days you'll see a little bit more variation in the lighting and in the time of day. The whole system is actually called our weather system internally so it was always designed to have a little more variation in what we could do, so people aren't constantly staring at the same day/night cycle.
S: The same day/night cycle being in live where it just goes from day to night instead of just having any sort of impactful weather effects like rain.
M: Correct, shifting into a rain or shifting into a cloudy day as opposed to bright day as you can see another time of day change there. I noticed on police lighting, I'm gonna say I think that's upgraded already in the new engine don't quote me on that. I know we've done a lot of work in terms of car lighting in general. 


Video timestamp
M: disspizza, I know you've spammed that question. That's absolutely going to get looked at, the question is basically are we looking to adjust the rank locked modifications. Because a lot of mods and equipment are locked and lower-ranked players can't get them and that's absolutely a problem. I think if you guys follow me on Twitter, I've been highlighting a little bit of some recent videos that were pointed out and it's just something we need to make the game more new player friendly I think, because they do come in at a bit of a disadvantage.
S: And that leads back into upgrading the tutorial and all that kind of stuff. Trying to make it a lot more intuitive to actually play the game instead of being a "this is how you do something".


Video timestamp
M: That's funny, someone's asking why I'm on Skype. We tried Discord the last couple, you know when I streamed with Kempington we used Discord and some other things and the framerates were bad, the quality was bad so we're just trying Skype this time. This is all work in progress btw, we're sort of making it up as we go. A lot of members of the community wanted to see a little more interaction from the dev team so that's why we're trying out Skype this time to see if it works a little better.
S: It does seem to be working better now, we can actually see you in HD.


Video timestamp
S: Exo says bring back jumpscouting.
M: Urgh.


Video timestamp
S: Which brings me onto my next question actually, will there be any plans for weapon balancing past the engine upgrade? Well, we know that it will happen, but more so are we looking to bring back some of the old favorites?
M: Euhm, I don't know. I feel like we've been bitten by that bear trap, we jumped into weapon balance too soon, made some bad choices there. I'm fairly happy where it's at, I think we brought it back to at least a decent level. I know Exo is really about jumpscouting and I do want to bring back some of the out of bounds, allowing players who are not in missions to just kind of have fun and go out of bounds. I think there's no harm in that so it's something we've been toying with but I can't speak to the other stuff.


Video timestamp
S: When the engine upgrade gets put in and we go past the initial shock of getting the engine upgrade out to people and people getting used to the new norm, will there be an appreciable difference for people to how well the game can run? Especially on non-standard hardware. For instance, remember during the current game we've had the RTX crashes especially for new tech. Will the engine upgrade be more resilient to stuff like that?
M: Absolutely,  I mean look, a large part of what's happening right now with graphics cards is they're being moved to 64-bit so we're seeing the same problems that the main live engine has that's going to proliferate. We're going to see more of that and so internally I know we are on a clock. There's no option to not ship the new engine, because the more graphics cards that come out, the more computers get upgraded, the live game is going to perform worse and worse. We have a lot of systems now with a lot of cores and a lot of processors that are slower, each individual processor's slower than what we used to have and that's where the current live version of the game just falls down. It can't take advantage of all those cores.


Video timestamp
M: So I'm very happy, this is a bit of a different look. I think people are looking at the car editor and the customization editor in general, the backdrop's kinda been changed. We kind of wanted to put a little bit more of a spotlight on what you're designing. Load times are a lot faster in here,  I personally think the cars look a little better in here. 
S: Yea, absolutely. Looking at this right now I can actually see a lot more detail on the actual symbols themselves, that's the main thing that I'm witnessing right now. And this is my first time actually seeing this so ...
M: Definitely fidelity on the symbols is a tad better, at the end of the day we still have to bake that out to a texture so there are some limits to what we can do but I think players will hopefully see some improvement there.


Video timestamp
S: Do you have any plans on doing map balancing or changing of sections of maps that already exist? So for instance stuff like chokepoints ..
M: *cough* Waterfront *cough*
S: What are your thoughts on that?
M: Real Time Worlds did a great job on the vast majority of Financial, each block is its own minimap. I don't know that I want to tweak with that a whole lot, I think they spent a lot of work there. I think Waterfront needs some work in certain areas, but I think we're going to have to be pretty judicious about that. I don't want to create dependencies, so like I don't wanna say we have to finish this before we release the engine. I just want to get the engine out, so many benefits there and then we'll continue to iterate. It doesn't stop there, that's really just where we get started.


Video timestamp
M: To some comments in the chat here, just know that we've dialed in a lot of the materials and some of the materials we have not dialed in. There are still props in Asylum, you guys probably saw that we're not lit properly or didn't have the right material settings. They didn't look like rubber for instance on the tires on here, or certain things. We're still dialing in some of that, there's just a lot to do there so we're getting there.


Video timestamp
S: I think we need to ask this question, do you have any idea of when it'll be released?
M: I don't want to avoid this question, I think it's a critical question in fact. The truth is, as soon as humanly possible. In the back of my mind there was a fantasy of releasing it today and just saying "Hey everybody go have at it", it's not there yet. It would be a disaster if we released it today, we still have crash bugs, we still have a little bit of work to go. I would say that we're closer than we've ever been. I like how both these districts are coming along. I think that we've got to fix the UI slowdown and we've got to fix the performance game-loop kind of issues, but we're close. I know the sort of soon™ and I want to avoid that, but I would say we're within weeks not months. So I think we're getting very close.


Video timestamp
M: We should probably mention that a lot of this was ported right out of live, we basically took a lot of your stuff and moved it into the new engine. The whole purpose of this was try to feel out how much of it would come across smoothly.


Video timestamp
S: I see a lot of soon™ in the chat and it's just like yea yea, I've heard this before. 
M: No no, weeks™. I like that one. There's no way to get away from that, we try to be as transparent as we can. The reason for the blog, I want you guys to know "We're not holding this up, I don't want to create any barriers. I want it out, I want it in the community's hands". Mainly because there's so many benefits to it, outside of the look. It's got a lot of very good optimization in it.


Video timestamp
S: Now here's kind of a jokey question to kind of get us laughing, but do you use conditioner for your beard?
M: I do nothing for the beard, to be honest. I wish I could say that I have some secret ... and to be fair, I saw some comments in the chat. I could not grow decent facial hair 'till I was about 32 and even at 32 very very far from growing a beard. I was on a crunch working with the developers a number of years ago and when I'm on a crunch I don't shave so I just kinda have kept it ever since. Purely an accident, I wish there was a secret to it, there's not.


Video timestamp
S: Oh, that's a good question that somebody raised. The auto-sprint feature that people are putting into the game, so they're using a config to be able to enable auto-sprint. Will that become an actual toggleable option? I know you've talked about this before where you want the user to be able to actually the things that you really deem as necessary to enjoy the game to the fullest, so Quality of Life features like auto-sprint that kind of thing. Will that come with the new engine?
M: The hope is yes. Again, I'm not going to hold it back but very quickly we want to get everything that we want players to be able to do we want it in the settings. We don't want people to have to edit configs. I will say this, there's one main config file editing that is basically what you do with the settings editor ingame. So when you're choosing settings it's writing that out to a file, editing the file that's going to still be possible. However, the new engine encrypts and locks down 95% of the files so there will be a lot less that you can do with this new engine and that you could do with live. It's just not even possible. So the idea is to put what we want in the settings and that way everybody will have access to it, things like auto-sprint and poor Pound. I know he plays with that config and was severely gimped today. We didn't want to mess with that today, we nearly opened that up but today everybody played no configs everybody played equal. The goal is to also do that for the new engine, just let's get it all the settings. 


Video timestamp
S: Do you think we will see an expansion of the current modes we have, so we have action district right now and we have fight club. Will there be any expansion to something like demolition derby? I know somebody's asked that in the chat twice actually. What are your thoughts on expanded game modes?
M: One of the things we're engaging with, it's a little bit of a Skunkworks project on the side but we're digging through all of the old missions, all the old content to see what we can polish up. We also built I wanna say 10 subsystems for RIOT mode that are just really cool outside of the mode itself, but they're just things we'd love to build new mission content around that could be really fun to play with. The racing district of course comes up a lot and it's something I absolutely want to do, but it's on the list. Certainly I think it's a great idea, it's just something we need to get to and there's a couple other competing things in the way right now. Mainly matchmaking. We've got to throw in almost all of our resources post engine upgrade launch on matchmaking, the district allocation system, phasing is in there. That's a big one to be able to kind of phase people in and out of instances to balance things a little better. 


Video timestamp
M: To me I feel like the character customizations, which is one of the biggest key features of the game are really highlighted in the new engine. I think they look gorgeous, the new lighting also kind of highlights them. But I'm very very happy with how stuff is translating out of live into the new engine. I think players are going to be happy with all their customizations porting across seamlessly.
S: We are actually on the character customization right now, you can see that. Being able to actually see, I mean the current editor is good but it's just that this current one has a lot more color and has a lot more vibrance I think. It has a much broader range of lighting and the main benefit for players is that they're able to enjoy the game more, they're able to enjoy the eye candy and the things that they grinded and played for.
M: Everyone else was running Asylum and kinda having fun in that mode, I wanted to take some time to focus on this. On the editors, the customization stuff in this part of the stream just cause I feel like it's just really good. I'm very proud of this, we've worked really hard on making this. You know, making the upgrade look good. 


Video timestamp
M: Someone mentioned private districts and I do want to give a nod today. I hope the streamers had a good time, I know it's kind of a good feeling to be in a district playing against competitors where you know that everybody is using the same configuration. No-one is using anything different. Our goal is really that every player gets to have that experience. We're really looking to and working on ideas and things where we can try to get that experience, because that's when people have the most fun I think. If you're doing missions and you know that everyone's on equal footing then that's a pretty good time. I don't know if we can do private districts, but certainly that topic has come up with respect to e-sports and some other things. We work really hard on the anti-cheat and our ability to detect cheats, the reporting system and things like that. I'm not even going to pretend that we're perfect, no game is. But it's just something that we continue to do.


Video timestamp
S: Is it possible to make your inventory unlimited and with a search bar? I think that was one of the next things. 
M: Inventory is a problem right now, I know we need to do some extending and there is a Quality of Life project that's already been designed and worked on that will rework inventory in a very very positive way. I'm not going to go into details on this stream, but there is a solution coming. It's not necessarily about extending the inventory, I think that's fine. Adding more inventory is great. I think searching the inventory, getting to the inventory in a different way, shifting to more unlocks and less permanent buys where you gotta leave things in the mail or that sort of thing. The way we're managing some of the inventory is going to change, I think in a positive way. 
S: The follow-up question to that then is, not just clothes but in general, to weapons and stuff like that. Especially with the current system that we have now is that people like Kempington, who has 120 guns and can't get anymore and he also has to search through them. There's a whole list, you can drill down into subcategories like rifle, assault rifle, launchers, less than lethal. Is there any way that we're going to be able to actually just have a search for that as well and what are your thoughts on the current method for interacting.
M: It's on the list, we've got to fix it. I think Real Time Worlds never contemplated this many guns in the game, so what we're seeing is just a symbol pushed to the limits that just was never designed to house this level of content. For 10 years this game's been going on and we're coming up on the 10 year anniversary and so I think we've got to improve that system per today's standards and the amount of content we have in the game.
S: I'm having to demonstrate quite live the max symbols we have right now which is 50, I have too many in my inventory so I'm having to delete one. It kind of demonstrates what I personally feel about symbols. The storage is good but when you're the creative type you have to juggle them around and there's a lot of people that actually just use the mail system for storage like that.
M: Which is terrible right. I know they're doing what they have to do but the fact that they have to abuse a different system to try to do that is terrible.


Video timestamp 
S: Exo actually put a good question in the chat, did shotgun crosshairs, are they gonna get fixed.
M: That's gotta get fixed, I think that that got carried over from the console code it's just something we haven't looked at, but I'm not 100% but I believe the crosshairs just need to be fixed.
S: Is there a possibility like in CS:GO we have custom crosshairs you can change so for color blind people it's extremely important. They might not be able to even see the crosshair in the first place well-properly due to their color blindness. Is there a possibility that A. We can edit the crosshair within a certain degree of course to be able to have a personal preference and B. Can we accommodate those who are less fortunate.
M: Yeah, color blindness has come up quite a bit, we have a member of our staff who is color blind so it's something that we talk about when we have time for it. I would put custom crosshairs down the list a bit just because we have so many other pressing critical needs but my hope is that we are at that level doing that kind of work soon because that means we've crossed everything else off our list in terms of matchmaking, phasing, district allocation and a bunch of other things.
S: Actually the other thing is on my head that I've just come up with. When we were doing the testing for the benchmarking a lot of people were asking me directly is this just because you have a sixteen thread eight-core processer or will the multithreading benefit those who are let's say a quad-core or an octa-core for instance with their multithreading as current hardware is the Intel stack is six threads, eight threads, twelve threads. Will the multithreading benefit these people as well, not just those who are able to brute force it with more cores.
M: Absolutely, I think as long as you have more than two you are gonna benefit from multithreading, most hardware today is above two, we've seen benefits at eight, I know my machine has a bunch but I definitely think even lower-end systems will benefit from the multithreading code.
S: And that is sort of from day 1 as well where you would be able to see the difference and will not hear the difference but you'd be able to feel the difference and see the difference, the three feel, see and hear.


Video timestamp
S: How many leftover assets are there that we could potentially use or is available to LO to be able to be used.
M: There's quite a bit, the first one that I would love to see go into the game is the new car which is an entirely new car, it's not a kit and so it's lacking a little bit of polish and we need to as a company we have not yet dialed in getting a car into the game because it was never glued up in the data so it's just something we haven't had a ton of time to finalize because again we just had a couple of higher priority things, but I would definitely like to see that go in. So the new car, there might be a little bit of gun assets I don't think it's a complete gun but there's some stuff floating around in there. We had the two new contacts which were fully voiced already when we took over so I am excited about those two new contacts going in and I think we've exhausted most of the clothing, I don't think there is any clothing sitting around.
M: What are you doing SKay?
S: I wrote in Hi in the symbol editor because all my symbols are locked off and I can't open them.


Video timestamp
M: To Rektigator I don't know you're asking a good question about copying the designs from a car that has one slot to a car that has two slots it's something we need to take care of but it's a little bit further down the list.


Video timestamp
M: The question about contacts, yea there is two new contacts, the EMP is the biggest, newest thing on them that I think we've talked about briefly but there is a brand new little bit of gameplay we are introducing there, anti-vehicle gameplay with the EMP. They do have weapons on them, we're pulling weapons that were maybe paid only or off of Armas and putting them on the new contacts and I think they have some new clothing which hasn't been shown yet.
S: Any idea when that will come?
M: That will be final launch of the engine. We're gonna go through those stages I mentioned earlier you know phase one which is just Asylum and Social and then phase two being the addition of all the rest of the districts for beta and then the final launch. So on the final launch we're hoping to put all of that into the game so people will have something new to actually play.


Video timestamp
S: Perfect, do you want to talk about the SSAO and the recent exploits that you guys had because I know you guys have had a few challenges recently and you've talked with us about it, I'll let you describe it yourself.
M: About the ambient occlusion?
S: Yeah, about the ambient occlusion.
M: So there is some weirdness here. The ambient occlusion is turned on, it's better we've been dialing it in so it's 100% better than it was. One of the biggest problems we're having right now is there's a flicker that happens when you change field of view so one of the kinds of cooler parts that Realtime Worlds put in was that when you run the field of view of the game changes which makes it feel so cool when you run you go from standing to running. That causes a problem with AO so we're in the process of tweaking that and potentially upgrading that, we've got some new variations of AO that we want to pull in so that's going to be tweaking. 
M: What is that, is that Pound fooling around in the background
S: Yeah he is yeah. Let's see if we can switch to this and see what we are talking about because it's worth one thing explaining to people what we are seeing SSAO and ambient occlusion happening live but it's another thing to be able to see it.
M: I think it would be interesting to actually show it because this is something that is incredibly hard to dial in, I like the look of what we have right now and again we have spent some time on it. We did some pre footage here so everybody who's fooling around in social we're gonna cut away and show some footage here just to kind of show off some of the stuff that we see that isn't necessarily available in the engine. This right now is a little dark and I apologize we took this last minute. This is just some footage showing what the SSAO looks like all on its own and kind of the benefits you're getting of just how it sinks or ground everything. What you're going to see is the flicker and the flicker is what we're combatting right now it's from when you run and the field of view changes and then you stop running and so you can see here back and forth how the AO that ambient occlusion is helping to just ground the scene and again it's not final. I'm happier with this, it is the best it has actually ever looked so it's better and I think in fact if you guys go and look at the old screenshots we didn't have any AO at all it was completely broken so this is a little better. We're just showing off the different views here where you can see the various levels, it's all done in real-time so this is going to get a little bit of an upgrade I think before we actually launch but it's coming along. Without it it looks very flat, you can do a lot with lighting you can do a lot with shadows and things but really AO is what gives it a little bit of that depth.
S: And the depth is important especially with something like this because it gives gravity to the 3D space as well. We don't have the footage of if it was just without SSAO both with everything else turned on you'd actually be able to tell the biggest difference being that everything kind of looks flat back like it did in 2008, 2009 it would look closer to what the current engine looks like right now but even further beyond that as well.
S: Do we also want to show the comparison between live and 3.5 especially with this character.
M: We can do some of that, I actually really enjoyed some of the streamer reactions when they got in for the first time, a couple of them messaged me directly. I think we're a little jaded we've been looking at this forever it feels like so it was nice to get some fresh eyeballs on it and again I would love to keep doing some of this as we introduce new districts and things.
S: That is too large, the canvas size is 1440p so it's a bit difficult.


Video timestamp
M: I see in the chat here while you're setting up, the name release. So let's talk about that, we're switching gears a little bit the name release is still going to happen in a way. We are going to go through and clean out some of the old names we want to give people enough time to come and claim them. Specifically what we're going to do though is we're going to change the strategy of names so that we can allow for someone to have effectively conflicting names it's similar to what happens on Discord. I think as things have improved over time, servers and new systems have come up with better ways to handle naming in general so we're taking a little bit of a page from other systems to figure out a better way to handle naming.
M: Someone commented on the game volume. The audio in the game in the new release hasn't been touched at all so know that there was a lot of bad volume happening in the game namely with the Joker ammo boxes and the boiler room. We let streamers know in advance we just couldn't quite get to that prior to the stream.


Video timestamp
S: Will the clan system be expanded once the new engine goes live? The current system for clans is just that you invite somebody to your clan and that's it. Will there be an expansion to kind of encourage people join up in clans and try and sense of foster family within the community.
M: We definitely want to do something more with that absolutely the answer is yes. The question is just timing and what those features will be exactly, there needs to be some design there but I think that we don't do a good enough job of helping people get better and having their sort of family ingame and having there be a benefit to clans.
M: So the first set of shots there that SKay was showing was live and I think you loaded the same car in here and you're driving around the new engine obviously with a little different time of day. We did make some adjustments in time of day just to tune in the look a little bit, there are some times of day I think in live where the screen for lack of a better term becomes a little faded.


Video timestamp
S: Is the anti-aliasing methods being investigated currently, as in is there more types of anti-aliasing being implemented as I know Nvidia and AMD have their own versions of anti-aliasing are you guys looking into that?
M: Absolutely I don't think there is any active anti-aliasing right now. I think it got broke in the engine upgrade when they were doing work prior to us so we're still going through and cleaning that up, I think that will make the game look a lot better but it is work in progress absolutely we're looking at some of the like you said individual methods that can be done on the card or cheaper.


Video timestamp
S: And in terms of being able to sound design and all that kind of thing, will the new and old vehicles have a pass to see if we can integrate better sounds for them, not just as in the engine but more as in general like some people prefer the old vegas sound because of the higher pitch and it was much more natural to them. The idea being that when Reloaded slammed the audio range from a very high frequency to a lower bassier frequency. People didn't like that change so will there be a review of the current sounds that engines produce as well as weapons will we see something coming to the new engine.
M: That's a great question. Truth is I know a part of the team is jumping into audio so we're upgrading the audio engine in general so that will get an upgrade as much as we can take advantage of those features I think we want to, I don't know how much we'll be able to go weapon by weapon or car by car. Although I agree that sound makes a big difference in this game. I give credit to RTW, walk around with an ogre it's a very satisfying experience because they did so much great work on syncing up sound versus some of the other elements in the game. We don't use FMod by the way we use WWise but it is being upgraded to the latest version.


Video timestamp
S: Spawn system. Will that also have a look at?
M: We made a lot of improvements to the spawn system for RIOT and then obviously had to pull that back so that is one of the things that I would like to reintegrate with some of what we're doing for regular gameplay but I don't know that's going to happen prior to the full launch. Again, it is on that list it's something we want to deal with and make better, it's a tricky tricky problem to solve because it's all about view distance and what you can see versus other characters so trying to make that work is tricky, we have some limitations on the spawn points.
S: Sorry just to cut across but Roadrocker says this is a criminal behind me but it's not it's actually LaRocha.
M: There's a badge right there.
S: Yeah there is actually. There's a badge right there.
S: This is more of a sidestep, will we see a return of RIOT or will we see a return of its core functionality in a new light.
M: That's a great question, I don't know. I think there are some interesting subsystems in RIOT, it was not a very well received or quite frankly perfectly executed mode so I don't think so. But there are some pieces that I really like, someone mentioned the map from RIOT which is also has some very cool map changes. The downside to the RIOT map is you can't have vehicles. So it is definitely a different feel, trying to run across that district is tricky because you can't jump into a car.


Video timestamp
S: Somebody was just asking technical stream next time, do we want to jump into some technical questions now and see what your thoughts are.
M: Sure happy to jump in.
S: Because I know someone was asking a few technical questions before and we just glossed over them, but we'll come back to them don't worry about it.
M: There's a lot of questions going here I'll try to watch a little bit but fire away.
S: So the first technical question, what kind of work went into improving the systems that you have improved today. What kind of testing did you have to do, what kind of breaking did you have to do, how far did you have to go?
M: There are a couple places but I feel like we have dug into almost every piece of this engine right or wrong I think the feature system is a great example so when you're running around Financial for instance the way that we handle distance and interactivity in a building is a subsystem that was written from scratch and they did not port that up correctly. The way they ended up doing features ended up being kind of pushed in in a way that got the game live on console but did not work and so we went in to go make some tweaks there and found what was there and it was a rewrite. We just had to rewrite the entire system so there are other systems that are equally ... we're just digging into and saying alright, this is not what we wanted to do at this moment, the frustrating thing is when you have a schedule, you're aiming towards a launch release date that we have internally and then you hit this rabbit hole of stuff that you just have to fix and so it's a bummer. But there are a number of systems that we have had to rewrite from the ground up and the rendering system is one of them. We're not using the Unreal render system it was completely gutted and rewritten so it does have the same materials and inputs from Unreal 3.5 but the rendering itself is completely custom.
S: The rendering system when we were doing the testing for that that definitely did have a lot of ups and downs we were having a lot of tug of wars with it trying to bring it this way and then it did the opposite on us.
M: You're bringing up something, every time we think the engine is going to do something you can pretty much expect it does the opposite. It's the weirdest phenomenon where we're like we think we made an optimization but then it just goes the opposite direction, it's very very complex, SKay and many of the SPCT members have had a front-row seat to the ups and down to the dev team saying hey we cracked the code, no we didn't, hey we did this, no we didn't and then it's trial and error and pure determination to get it across the finish line.


Video timestamp
S: What kind of advertising do you want to see in the game, I think back to the greatest thing that I have seen come out of APB for advertising sake is the be all you can't be that had the Youtuber's and the influencers come in and do that kind of thing. We probably won't see that level of influencer involvement immediately but what kind of ad would you like to see on the big screen?
M: Personally I love that video the be all you can't be. I think we're going to be doing some stuff with that in a smaller way but there is a whole series of marketing steps and I've seen this question come up on the feed here and that is when are gonna start advertising and when are we gonna start marketing the game and I think that is a three-prong approach there, I think there is some stuff we're actually going to start immediately right now. I would love to build up the Jericho player base right now so we're going to be doing some very specific marketing to East Coast and West Coast former players to let them know that we've got dedicated servers now in LA and New York, latency is great their fast servers and we'd love to see them more populated so I think there will be some direct marketing that is really designed to be an awareness campaign. I think you got to see a little bit, I think you're in the know a little bit on what that looks like and some of those ad campaigns that sort of thing so this is the first one. Then the second one will be around the beta and just creating awareness around the beta and just paid advertising on all the standard places, we're partnered with Google on some things and some other partners there and then ultimately just the full launch that's where I think we can really invest because we've delivered something that I think fans to this game have been waiting for a very long time so I think you'll those three things, one right now we're about to start some marketing around New York and LA and then the beta as we roll that out and the final launch.


Video timestamp
M: I have seen a couple comments about dethreating and I'm gonna echo what Kiida said and that is I think dethreating is a multi-sided issue and I think that I'm gonna be optimistic, I think that most people dethreat because they can't get matched in gold or they can't get matched in the district they want, there are some there that just want to go grief newbies and that's just awful for the game. Our new players have it rough enough please don't dethreat down to bronze and start taking out newbie characters that's just not fun. But we're hoping that the changes to district allocation, phasing and some of the things we're doing with matchmaking will vastly improve this because the big problem is you have server peak time and you have the server in off-peak time and you can't have the same level of discretion in terms of how threat works because you wont get good matches. Sort of collapsing districts down to keep a high player population and expanding the bands that make up threat so you just get matches in general and then as peak happens you slice and dice those down further and you've got more servers now but you've got a lot tighter band of what the threat level should be. The concept I think of threat is really going to go away and that's another thing I don't think dethreaters will have a clear target there's not going to be necessarily oh, I'm silver I need to dethreat to bronze like that marker isn't going to be there so it's a little more tricky to do.
S: I think the dethreating has been an issue for many years and segregation was used as a method to try and solve something like that but it kind of did the opposite, as you said before when you're expecting the engine to do something it did the opposite, when you want the community to do something they did the opposite in that case.


Video timestamp
M: I think to xenon I believe that's been looked at, I believe there's a number of things with timers and syncing on the processor or to hardware as oppose to arbitrarily to another standard so I think that's been addressed a lot of the timing on the new client is very different just how it handles is almost entirely different. Sorry, keep going SKay.


Video timestamp
S: Will we see an improvement to the social interactions for the community as a whole. Will we see more implemented in that sort of area.
M: I hope so, look we're learning as we go, we're two years in and still somewhat new I know we want to open the Little Orbit Discord to support players coming on and chatting with the devs from time to time or just with themselves I know it's a big thing for me just opening a place for people to be able to talk in real-time as opposed to forums which are a little outdated but handy for keeping track of an ongoing conversation. But just getting on and getting matches or finding players I would love to see that happen as soon as humanly possible. We are short of moderators right now, we're short the staff to be able to man something like a Discord 24/7 so we're not gonna open until we can properly moderate it. I want it to be a good player experience not just something that ends up just being very toxic. From another social type perspective, I am definitely going to keep doing the blogs every Friday and Saturday. I post customer support stats on Friday and engine upgrade type stuff on Saturdays but I definitely think that someone's mentioned the Reddit and AMA there and just being more accessible in trying to plan more of these, doing more streams, I would like this not to be a once in a blue moon thing. It's something I'd like to do on a regular basis so that people can come and see where we're at.
S: By the way, I think this came down the line here, will there be any openings for the SPCT?
M: Yes I'm gonna say we're right at the cusp of that the main group has done a fantastic job and for various reasons we kept that somewhat locked down, we've not been introducing new people to the group just at the moment but I definitely think moving forward in the near future I would definitely love to see that team be much larger. I think I would love to see the mentoring team come back as well to help provide a little bit of new player help.


Video timestamp
S: Right so let's move onto customization
M: I will say so iSigrun is asking can we have a way to earn G1C without paying. I don't think you'll ever be able to get G1C without paying I think we are all in on trying to make Joker tickets more viable, they are in some ways we think of them as the paid currency of APB. You've got APB dollars you can earn and Joker tickets, I think we are trying to shift into a mode where G1C is outside of the game, it's Armas and it's account unlock whereas Joker tickets are character unlocked and earnable so all of the content hopefully can be unlocked on a character level with Joker tickets.
S: Actually Joker tickets that will move us on nicely, what can we expect with Joker tickets?
M: There's a lot there we've been gradually making changes to Joker tickets, it is one of the bigger places we've made changes to. There are more coming, I think we've been very conservative there because it is tied directly to things that have earned us and the company money and kept the game afloat so we want to be careful but we've tried to also take a really hard look at stuff and try to make it less abusive, less heavily monetized and try to add ways for people to collect the guns just through Joker tickets so we need to get more clothing in there, we need to get more stuff off of Armas and into the Joker ticket store. One thing we're working on is a redesign for the Joker ticket store entirely so when you go to social there is going to be ... that whole area is going to be remodeled to better showcase what we have there for players. As right now it is this tiny little menu and you kind of have to scroll through it to find things and even as few things as we have in the Joker store now it's still pretty cluttered so we want a slightly better experience there for people to go find stuff.
M: Someone is asking about September for the engine. It's funny I put out dates in the past and then we for various reasons have not hit those dates. I will be very very disappointed if we don't get this engine update out by September. I want it out a lot sooner than that.


Video timestamp
S: Will there be an AI implementation into the new engine?
M: That's a great question, it's not in the works yet. I would love to see a small amount of PvE content in the game. There are just some things I would love to do for a new player actually but I think at its heart APB is a PvP game and there is a reason why RTW didn't put an AI system into the game so we don't want to make it any heavier than it already is.
S: Define heavier.
M: The client has a lot going on and we talked about the clunkiness of the UI and the game-loop which caused framerate issues and the last thing I want to do is introduce yet another system like AI that is going to cause slowdowns and framerate issues cause your computer is processing that stuff in the background so we're trying to streamline that stuff so we can get really good framerates out of it. Most of our issues right now with framerate are game-loop and UI based.


Video timestamp
M: For Lavic you see I don't know they've been asking the same question about the ghosting feature I have no idea if that's in the works or not, sorry.
M: When I speak to TzickyT he was asking about the Netherlands and the Joker boxes and kind of our reworking of that, there are ongoing plans there we're taking it very slowly but there definitely is a plan in the works fairly close in that we're hoping will allow the Netherlands to get Joker boxes.


Video timestamp
S: Will people see a much higher increase in the CPU usage of the game as it goes to release?
M: Yeah, I was just talking with Kemp, I think we've seen in general right that you can never take advantage fully of all those cores and processors but I think the current live game on my Ryzen setup I'm using like 40% of the CPU sometimes less. The live game is not really capable of taking advantage of that kind of a machine. I've seen at least in the new engine around 70% so pretty big uptick there in terms of how much of the CPU we can use same thing with GPU usage, I have definitely seen an increase in what we can get out of the GPU in terms of performance so I would say absolutely people should see a lot higher utilization of both the CPU and GPU.


Video timestamp
S: Will cosmetic configs be a thing?
M: That's a great question. I don't know, I'm sure it's been talked about a lot of that stuff kind of drops way down. I don't know.


Video timestamp
M: Someone is asking will about will the engine upgrade make customizations more accurate. Yeah we've previewed that earlier, I think customizations definitely look better in the engine upgrade at a we'll call it HD level.


Video timestamp
S: Does threat as it currently stands will that stay the same as it is or will that be expanded or contracted?
M: I think we're looking at threat I know a lot of people have said go back to the old threat method or the new threat is bad but I don't think the threat itself is bad I think just how we handle it, player population and other external factors make the threat system not so great and so I talked about this earlier in the stream, I think the threat system is getting a massive look at and what we know of really today as pure you've got ten bands in gold and ten bands in silver and that sort of thing. I think some of that will remain behind the scenes it's just not going to be surfaced as much to players. A lot of that is going to be a little more dynamic where we can grow or shrink some of those threat levels based on population.


Video timestamp
M: I saw music studio, I don't think we're making any changes to the music studio I know it's being added and it has been added and it works in the engine upgrade. It was cut entirely from the console so it works, I don't know if there are any significant changes there but it's in the engine.


Video timestamp
S: Will we see an update to the physics?
M: Probably not, I think that physics is so embedded into Unreal 3.5 and we're in this weird trapped little box where we've got physics on one side and scaleform on the other side and there's certain things we can do and certain things we can't. There may be an opportunity downstream where we can disconnect some of these pieces a little bit and we can rip that out and put something in. I know there is a lot of benefits to newer implementations of PhysX or newer physics systems and I could think right off the top of my head five basic things that the existing physics system doesn't do well. But I think for the time being we're sort of stuck with it, it's really embedded into the engine.

[Iazer 204]

17 hours ago, Shini said:

I love the idea at 16:40 to put in console and PC crossplay into social (hopefully not PVP obviously).

I too would love to hear all the console players blasting the N word towards all the PC players  but for real tho, would be kinda cool to see

[GhosT 1301]

25 minutes ago, Kevkof said:

Much like with the previous Q&A, I have made a text transcript for the entire video.

(Thank you @Iazer for some of the typing)

 

All the questions have been split up more or less per subject, each with a timestamp of where that segment starts.

I'll post the entire thing in a Spoiler tag so you can still go past it if you want to.

Things said by @SKay are in indicated by the S:
And things by @MattScott are indicated by the M:

 

For those that want a download of the file instead of reading it on the forums: Download

 

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

Video timestamp
S: Let's start off with an easy question, how are you Matt?
M: I think I'm feeling a little better, we made it through this. I thought this could have gone incredibly horrible, we had a couple crashes. It is what it is, I knew this was a little risky because we're showing off a bunch of unfinished work. So pretty good.


Video timestamp
S: How is everything in terms of our progress really, how far do you think we're along with what we've been streaming today?
M: I think there's different categories, right. So if we break it down we've got what I would say is visual categories, we've spent a lot of time trying to pull apart a lot of the unfinished work. And before we get started, I just want to throw a nod to Reloaded Productions and just all the work they've put into this. This was a herculean effort, I know they didn't finish but a lot of our stuff wouldn't be possible but for the work they did. So visually, a lot of work has been done there. All new lighting, tons of rewriting, tons of rebaking things. I would say audio is completely not touched, I think we heard some scuffed audio today so that needs a lot of work. Rendering wise, I'm happy with the renderer itself. *I just saw the mention of the pink headset. No, that was Razer's headset so I had to give it back.* Rendering wise the new renderer is hands down faster with the multithreaded rendering. All of the fps slowdowns we saw today are purely related to UI or to game-loop issues, so that's what we're optimizing now. Which is just getting some of the game-loop elements that are related to missions, the reason we're not doing Financial today was because some of that stuff just grinds to a halt right now so we're fixing some of that stuff.


Video timestamp
S: So you were talking about, in the chat as well, you were talking about how currently the fps is not where we want it to be. Do you want to try and go into that a little bit?
M: Sure, I was gonna see ... if we could jump back into Asylum and that we could just show framerate with Asylum not running the minigame and sort of empty. Because I think like you and I are on comparable systems. I run an RTX 2080 and on the highest settings it's upwards of 200 frames per second when we're not running the minigame, you might be slightly slower than that but I think the speed is definitely there when it's empty. I saw someone ask a question, when I refer to game-loop I'm referring to all the underlying code that the client is managing when you're doing a mission or a minigame. We've got a bunch of HUD elements that are on the screen and it's doing a lot of ray casting to figure out where people are and to give you the appropriate options and things like that, so that's what's kind of dragging us down right now. It's not the rendering itself, but kind of the gameplay elements. I saw someone mention the 2080, definitely in live. You know, live is a 32-bit client. One of the big things we had to fix recently is that we have a lot of alignment issues. So there was code that was written at 4-byte alignment and then 8-byte alignment and then 16-byte alignment. 16-byte alignment being more 64-bit and so when systems would try to interact with each other the alignment is off and it crashes. So the 2080 in live right now has a lot of problems and we've done our best to fix them, some of them are driver related but it's very smooth. I think, SKay you're running an RTX as well aren't you?
S: I'm running a GTX 1080 Ti
M: A GTX, right. We both have the Ryzen chipset
S: We do, yeah. I have the 1800x but you have a newer cpu than I do.
M: Yea, Nvidia was nice enough to donate some 2080's to the studio so whenever the developers have been testing on that full time to make sure we work the kinks out there.


Video timestamp
S: So, you are live with Asylum.
M: Excellent, do you wanna put the framerate on screen here? We'll see what kind of framerate we're getting while we're not running the mission and don't have a bunch of ... I don't know how many other players are actually ...
S: There's 0 players in this session right now, so you're good to go.
M: Go for it, when we put the framerate up and there we go. So I think what you'll notice is the framerate is considerably higher when we're just sort of running around the district and we're not running a mission or not running a bunch of UI elements, this varies a little bit. SKay's running what we call uncapped, so he's got V-Sync turned off, he's got smooth framerate turned off. What that does is it just unlocks the frame cap there. What most people notice as framerate lag is actually the change in framerate, so if you're sitting at 100 and you drop to 60 that's going to look like lag. If you're sitting at 60 and you drop to 40 it's going to look like frame lag and so what we wanna do is have the highest possible framerate but have it be as consistent as possible so people don't see that. The framerate window is so small, you'll see it hop around. We'll talk a little bit about benchmarks and things like that.


Video timestamp
S: The thing that I saw the most was that the stability was quite good. How are you feeling about the stability of the game in comparison to live? I know live does have a lot of issues with regards to the garbage collector and having to do stuff with that and it hiccups the game essentially.
M: A lot of stutters and hitches on live which is just stuff we inherited there. One of the big goals of the engine upgrade was to just smooth all that out and we've been able to do that. So I think regardless of the framerate, I was on Pound's stream earlier and popped into a couple of others, it plays/feels really smooth. 


Video timestamp
S: Are you hoping that we probably will be raising the ceiling in both the maximum fps that we can gain and the minimum, sort of 1's and 0.1 %s?
M: Yea, we're hoping like right now if we can that's probably a good segway once we get through a little more. Do you wanna run outside and run around the edge here. Because there's one of the big things in the engine is just the view distance and how we're handling some of the things, even the unplayable area's in the game. Once we show off Financial I think we'll see more of that, we're not going to do Financial in this stream but view distance is a big difference between live and the new engine and it's something we had to take into account when we were talking about settings. So, technically speaking 'Very High' on the new engine is actually not equal to 'Maximum' on live because the view distance is about 3 times farther. So you have to manually kind of switch your view distance and run 'Very High' to get apples to apples. The way the LOD system works in the engine, you're seeing just a lot more high fidelity farther away. 


Video timestamp
S: Coming to fidelity, sort of on the high end and the low end. What can we expect in terms of the high end so for people who are running these crazy systems that are able to push 400 fps and the lower end players who are not able to push 60 fps?
M: I will say this, we've focused a lot on the high end right now. I know that SKay runs benchmarks every build and he's been great at that. That's actually why I'm doing the stream with SKay, because he's been so instrumental in the benchmark side of things and admittedly we've been focusing on the high end of things because that's what, you know, we just want the engine to perform. We need to do some optimization at the mid-level, we've started improving the settings at like medium and even low quality so that you're still getting a good gameplay experience but the game doesn't look just completely like play-doh. Definitely, some more work to do for the lower end systems and the medium level systems.


Video timestamp
S: In regards to the current topic, so to lean onto the high and low. What can we expect to see for people who are currently sort of upset, not upset but they are not too happy with how the game looks. It is a very old game, it's coming up to 10 years this year. Are we expecting any upgrade in terms of fidelity in terms of car textures?
M: Those are great questions, I'm of two minds. I want the game to look as good as it can look, we're not gonna get PBR rendering in this engine. It's just not something that Unreal 3.5 was designed to do. There have been some upgrades here, I think you guys can see upgraded textures and better normal maps and some other things here. Me, personally, I'm all about "Let's just ship the game". There's so many benefits in the engine outside of the fidelity, it does look a little better. The lighting is a completely different lighting model, but I'd rather just get it into players' hands because the unified codebase makes it so much easier to work with. We've got some kinda fun ideas about getting console players into Social alongside PC players and being able to use the economy back and forth and the customizations which are harder to do on console and easier to do on PC and having them kinda transfer back and forth. There's a lot of benefits in the engine in general. I'm tempted not to overnoodle the visuals right now and just get it into the players' hands.


Video timestamp
M: I know this is the big one and this came up in a couple of streams and that is the estimate of when the new engine will go live permanently. I think it's going to go in stages, we specifically have spent a lot of time on Social and Asylum because they were the closest and so we kinda wanted to get those done. It's a very big game, as everybody knows there was more than 100 million dollars spent on this and so rather than try to do everything at once and hit a home run and have it continue to take so long. We're going to release to the general public the open beta with Asylum and with Social and we're going to do that for a couple of reasons. We need to get more large scare testing for districts so that we can continue to optimize things like framerates with more characters in the game and that sort of thing. Stage 1 is to get this, what you're seeing here as the beta, into the hands of players which will have Asylum and then Social and give us a little bit of a chance to finish on Waterfront and Financial. Then as a second release, we're going to do iterations of that and then the next stage would be to release Financial and Waterfront in beta and kind of tweak those out. Obviously, we can throw crate (Baylan) and some of the other districts in there too at that point. And then the third stage will be to transition everybody. So when everybody goes to download it will patch to 2.1 and everyone will be cut over running 2.1. I will say this, we have 1 blocker right now and it's a good problem to have but our servers are fairly full. So even for this we had to kind of set aside resources to run this beta and we're looking towards that timeline of when we want to open the beta to everybody and one of out big blockers is just 'We need more servers, because we're kinda capping out what we have on live'.


Video timestamp
S: Are there any plans for UI changes or will the game keep its current look?
M: So, I'm going to give the same *oh, look we changed time of day there*, the same kind of answer. I think with UI we're going to keep the same kind of look, I don't wanna go into that rabbit hole. There are plenty of optimizations I would love to do, because I think there's just places in the UI we could streamline and make a lot more easy to use. But I don't want to go down that rabbit hole and delay the game any longer than it's been delayed. I think part of the purpose of the weekly blog is to just show you guys what we're doing and we're not just sitting on this, wasting everybody's time or 'pretending like we're working on it', the vast majority of the team spends every day working on this.


Video timestamp
S: Will the netcode improve with the current engine, as you are saying everybody's working on it. So will the tangible benefits be client-side and server-side?
M: Yea, you'll see a lot of server-side enhancements. The server side on 2.1 has had a lot of work on it and there's actually a lot of different features in there. I can't say that we're completely clear of that. I think we did get reports even in last night's playtest of some ghost shots with some specific guns and things like that so there's some work to be done but I believe it's better than live, we got a lot of optimizations in there. So yeah both sides, mainly on the server-side we've talked about some of the benefits coming which are the district allocation system. So we can talk about that a bit if we want, just getting into matches and how we're going to distribute players. There's a ton of work that has been done on the server-side to make that whole process better.


Video timestamp
S: I think we can talk about the district access and we can go down that rabbit hole a little bit and see what your thoughts are on that. Because it is a rabbit hole in the sense that everybody can have their own sort of thoughts about it really.
M: Sure, I think what's interesting is ... When Reloaded had the game there was this effort to just kinda keep it running, right. You're dealing with something that is aging and they certainly put content in, but the focus was to primarily just keep it running. We had to make some very tough choices and I know even back in the May and November timeframes we dismantled our network to fix a bunch of DDOS issues, we paid the price for that. It was horrible, I will say just straight up horrible. We had a lot of problems transitioning networks, a lot of servers that hadn't been touched in 5 years but that's paying off for us now. I actually think that our performance in live in terms of anti-DDOS has been incredible, we've kept the servers up. We've had very little problems and hopefully, the players have noticed that, that just the availability of the servers across the board has been better. When it comes to threat and matchmaking, I'm sure that's everybody's biggest beef. It won't launch immediately with the beta, but it's the next major thing we're putting in and a ton of work has been done server-side for this for 2.1 and that is the way districts will expand and collapse. So in off-peak times, we're actually going to be dynamically scaling the threat levels so we can get everybody either on to one server or multiple servers but basically reducing/contracting how threat works so you can get matches. And then during peak times we're actually going to be subdividing threat even further than it is now so that we're getting very very closely matched players on each district. That's part of what we call district allocations that's in the new systems, but this idea of being able to scale dynamically and get people to the right servers so that they're getting matched a lot better.


Video timestamp
M: There's a lot of questions in the chat about the tutorial and just straight out, that needs work. Our new player experience needs work. I would ask everybody in the community, we're certainly growing ... we're getting thousands of new players a day right now. Please be kind to these players, a lot of them have no idea what they're doing. They're going through that god awful tutorial, coming out of the tutorial with no idea about progression and how roles work with weapons and how to really play the game. And I think that is something that we have to address but I'm really looking for the community to help us out in the meantime just in the short term where we need to finish what we're doing with the engine upgrade, get the matchmaking sorted and then just go through and take a hatchet to the current tutorial and rebuild that from the ground up. You don't really walk away from the tutorial knowing anything about the real game, you get like a character mod but you don't even get a gun mod or understand that sort of progression that is so crucial to getting better in the game.
S: Especially with the fact that grenades are hidden behind the tutorial system.
M: That is one of the worst elements I think. I don't want to throw shade at Reloaded, those guys took a beating doing this game and largely did a great job just there are some things we definitely have to fix. I would love to put the old login music in and the old login screen, these are all amazing things that I'm totally on board with. I just feel like we've got to fix the big problems, for the last 2 years it feels like we've been doing open-heart surgery on a patient that is running on a treadmill. It's very difficult to keep a game running and do work on it at the same time but the work we've been doing with the Joker system and the Joker store, Armas changes across the board there and now with this engine upgrade and server-side stuff it's just a whooh. We're slowly getting there, I think we're starting to see some of the benefits from all of that behind the scenes investment.


Video timestamp
M: Yeah, it's been a long grind. The team has worked incredibly hard, I love when people say "Look, thank you guys for doing so much work". My job is to communicate that back to the team, obviously I'm involved but it's really everybody behind me that should get the credit for that.
S: And where credit's due, from my side anyway. I would like to give my thanks to the team for sticking it out as they have.
M: I also do want to thank all the streamers who participated today, I think we had around 19-20 different folks that got involved, some of the SPCT maybe didn't stream. There were a lot of last-minute hiccups, it was a lot of tolerance and flexibility from the streamers as they had to redownload builds and get set up. I think they did an amazing job dealing with crashes or potential problems, so thanks guys. I think they all took time out to make this happen for the community and it was important to us.


Video timestamp
S: Let's move on to something more about what makes APB really that bit more special, the customization. 
M: Do you want to jump into Social?
S: We can jump onto my character, that's the most customized.


Video timestamp
M: I did see some stuff in chat asking about new content, we're not planning new districts. And btw I have seen the fan-made midtown, it's coming along quite nice. It's an impressive amount of work that he's done on that, we're chatting but I don't want to put any illusions out there in terms of like us taking that and putting it into the game. It's a great project and I am following it and look, if it is viable at all to put that content in the game then it's definitely something we'll look at. But the important part right now is to not add new districts, I want the current districts to be populated so people can progress roles and rank. I think splitting people off into new districts would be maybe a bad idea. That's definitely something I want to do down the road, but the main new content we're doing is 2 new contacts which will be at the final launch of 2.1. We're introducing the E.M.P., we've talked about that. We're introducing new clothing, so there's definitely stuff coming. There is a car in the works so there will be some new content, I don't want everybody to overfocus on the new engine, we know we need to get some new stuff into the game.
S: And speaking of new content, it's a personal question of mine, but would you wager that content being implemented in the new engine and beyond would that be easier or would that be on the same level of difficulty relatively speaking?
M: The tools, I mean look, APB there's nothing like it. The customization system is unique and for a reason. That does make the content really tricky, the content has to be produced at a high level. We've been getting better at it, I would say some of our earlier attempts were C+/B- but the team has fully gotten their head around that process so I think that as stuff continues to come out it's going to be better and better. I don't know if it's any easier, to be honest, the new tools are great in the new engine but there's just a lot of work getting new content in the game. It has to fit so many different formats and body types and everything has to work within the systems, so there's just a lot of work there.


Video timestamp
M: Oh, look at this. We've got the whole team, awesome. Look at everybody, that's great. Thank you everybody, you can kinda see a little bit of what the customizations look like in the new engine. I will say this, I think the texture crispness is better. Some of the elements in the game are done with, their not vectors but they are stuff that benefit from upper res sizes. So the fidelity of characters definitely looks better in my opinion. Look at you guys jumping around in there, so we can run around and have them jump around in the background here. Thank you guys for all the help today, to be fair we did tell the guys they could not use their mains. We've been importing characters from live to make sure everything will port across and so the guys definitely wanted a chance to show off some of the customizations and fun stuff that they didn't get to do during the match. We were worried about it dragging the framerate and causing unexpected problems, so we didn't do that this time.
S: I will give a shoutout to WitchQueen by the way, who has "Hi mum" on the back of his shirt. Do we want to start off with the clothing customization then we'll move onto vehicles and see?
M: Yea, I think just running around Social. We didn't show this off a lot during the streams. A lot of upgraded lighting here, we can change the time of day a little bit and kind of show this off. Lots of hard work in here and I know I talk about it on the blog every week, we're mostly done with lighting and polish and things like that so I would say from my perspective at least that Social's pretty good to ship. Asylum is mostly good to ship, there are definitely some areas in there that I still want to patch up that we found that just need to be reworked from UV's to some of the other stuff. But these two districts are getting pretty close, Financial and Waterfront aren't quite as far along but I don't want to hold the beta back for those. 


Video timestamp
S: Sticking on the customization, how expandable is the system once we do move to the new engine? How can we see the future, can we see new methods of actually applying primitives onto a character for instance?
M: That's a great question, I don't have a good answer for you. What's nice is when we unify the code base, we can make the investment there. It's worth making the investment because we know all the players on every platform will benefit from it and we want to do that. Oh, there we go, we got a new time of day going. I also want to give a shoutout to BrandonBranderson for sending over some of the old Real-Time World screenshots and lighting from different times of day, we couldn't match them exactly but we did want to try and give them a nod and lean into a little bit of that lighting. 


Video timestamp
M: Someone asked what's happening under the chin or some of that stuff. This is indirect lighting and it's definitely one of the big upgrades for 3.5 where we're able to place lights around the level, those are dynamic to start but then as we bake things out it makes rendering a much more full lighting pallet look. It looks way better and it at a decent framerate. If you try to run this just as pure dynamic lights it would just grind to a halt. So it is fake indirect lighting, it's very accurate actually. It's meant to do that so that it runs faster.


Video timestamp
S: Let's stick with customization and try and go on to the day/night cycle and especially with how it is currently in-game in the live version of the game. Is that going to be expanded or is that going to be the same?
M: Someone mentioned earlier 'weather' and the engine has support for weather, it's something we would like to do more of so that on random days you'll see a little bit more variation in the lighting and in the time of day. The whole system is actually called our weather system internally so it was always designed to have a little more variation in what we could do, so people aren't constantly staring at the same day/night cycle.
S: The same day/night cycle being in live where it just goes from day to night instead of just having any sort of impactful weather effects like rain.
M: Correct, shifting into a rain or shifting into a cloudy day as opposed to bright day as you can see another time of day change there. I noticed on police lighting, I'm gonna say I think that's upgraded already in the new engine don't quote me on that. I know we've done a lot of work in terms of car lighting in general. 


Video timestamp
M: disspizza, I know you've spammed that question. That's absolutely going to get looked at, the question is basically are we looking to adjust the rank locked modifications. Because a lot of mods and equipment are locked and lower-ranked players can't get them and that's absolutely a problem. I think if you guys follow me on Twitter, I've been highlighting a little bit of some recent videos that were pointed out and it's just something we need to make the game more new player friendly I think, because they do come in at a bit of a disadvantage.
S: And that leads back into upgrading the tutorial and all that kind of stuff. Trying to make it a lot more intuitive to actually play the game instead of being a "this is how you do something".


Video timestamp
M: That's funny, someone's asking why I'm on Skype. We tried Discord the last couple, you know when I streamed with Kempington we used Discord and some other things and the framerates were bad, the quality was bad so we're just trying Skype this time. This is all work in progress btw, we're sort of making it up as we go. A lot of members of the community wanted to see a little more interaction from the dev team so that's why we're trying out Skype this time to see if it works a little better.
S: It does seem to be working better now, we can actually see you in HD.


Video timestamp
S: Exo says bring back jumpscouting.
M: Urgh.


Video timestamp
S: Which brings me onto my next question actually, will there be any plans for weapon balancing past the engine upgrade? Well, we know that it will happen, but more so are we looking to bring back some of the old favorites?
M: Euhm, I don't know. I feel like we've been bitten by that bear trap, we jumped into weapon balance too soon, made some bad choices there. I'm fairly happy where it's at, I think we brought it back to at least a decent level. I know Exo is really about jumpscouting and I do want to bring back some of the out of bounds, allowing players who are not in missions to just kind of have fun and go out of bounds. I think there's no harm in that so it's something we've been toying with but I can't speak to the other stuff.


Video timestamp
S: When the engine upgrade gets put in and we go past the initial shock of getting the engine upgrade out to people and people getting used to the new norm, will there be an appreciable difference for people to how well the game can run? Especially on non-standard hardware. For instance, remember during the current game we've had the RTX crashes especially for new tech. Will the engine upgrade be more resilient to stuff like that?
M: Absolutely,  I mean look, a large part of what's happening right now with graphics cards is they're being moved to 64-bit so we're seeing the same problems that the main live engine has that's going to proliferate. We're going to see more of that and so internally I know we are on a clock. There's no option to not ship the new engine, because the more graphics cards that come out, the more computers get upgraded, the live game is going to perform worse and worse. We have a lot of systems now with a lot of cores and a lot of processors that are slower, each individual processor's slower than what we used to have and that's where the current live version of the game just falls down. It can't take advantage of all those cores.


Video timestamp
M: So I'm very happy, this is a bit of a different look. I think people are looking at the car editor and the customization editor in general, the backdrop's kinda been changed. We kind of wanted to put a little bit more of a spotlight on what you're designing. Load times are a lot faster in here,  I personally think the cars look a little better in here. 
S: Yea, absolutely. Looking at this right now I can actually see a lot more detail on the actual symbols themselves, that's the main thing that I'm witnessing right now. And this is my first time actually seeing this so ...
M: Definitely fidelity on the symbols is a tad better, at the end of the day we still have to bake that out to a texture so there are some limits to what we can do but I think players will hopefully see some improvement there.


Video timestamp
S: Do you have any plans on doing map balancing or changing of sections of maps that already exist? So for instance stuff like chokepoints ..
M: *cough* Waterfront *cough*
S: What are your thoughts on that?
M: Real Time Worlds did a great job on the vast majority of Financial, each block is its own minimap. I don't know that I want to tweak with that a whole lot, I think they spent a lot of work there. I think Waterfront needs some work in certain areas, but I think we're going to have to be pretty judicious about that. I don't want to create dependencies, so like I don't wanna say we have to finish this before we release the engine. I just want to get the engine out, so many benefits there and then we'll continue to iterate. It doesn't stop there, that's really just where we get started.


Video timestamp
M: To some comments in the chat here, just know that we've dialed in a lot of the materials and some of the materials we have not dialed in. There are still props in Asylum, you guys probably saw that we're not lit properly or didn't have the right material settings. They didn't look like rubber for instance on the tires on here, or certain things. We're still dialing in some of that, there's just a lot to do there so we're getting there.


Video timestamp
S: I think we need to ask this question, do you have any idea of when it'll be released?
M: I don't want to avoid this question, I think it's a critical question in fact. The truth is, as soon as humanly possible. In the back of my mind there was a fantasy of releasing it today and just saying "Hey everybody go have at it", it's not there yet. It would be a disaster if we released it today, we still have crash bugs, we still have a little bit of work to go. I would say that we're closer than we've ever been. I like how both these districts are coming along. I think that we've got to fix the UI slowdown and we've got to fix the performance game-loop kind of issues, but we're close. I know the sort of soon™ and I want to avoid that, but I would say we're within weeks not months. So I think we're getting very close.


Video timestamp
M: We should probably mention that a lot of this was ported right out of live, we basically took a lot of your stuff and moved it into the new engine. The whole purpose of this was try to feel out how much of it would come across smoothly.


Video timestamp
S: I see a lot of soon™ in the chat and it's just like yea yea, I've heard this before. 
M: No no, weeks™. I like that one. There's no way to get away from that, we try to be as transparent as we can. The reason for the blog, I want you guys to know "We're not holding this up, I don't want to create any barriers. I want it out, I want it in the community's hands". Mainly because there's so many benefits to it, outside of the look. It's got a lot of very good optimization in it.


Video timestamp
S: Now here's kind of a jokey question to kind of get us laughing, but do you use conditioner for your beard?
M: I do nothing for the beard, to be honest. I wish I could say that I have some secret ... and to be fair, I saw some comments in the chat. I could not grow decent facial hair 'till I was about 32 and even at 32 very very far from growing a beard. I was on a crunch working with the developers a number of years ago and when I'm on a crunch I don't shave so I just kinda have kept it ever since. Purely an accident, I wish there was a secret to it, there's not.


Video timestamp
S: Oh, that's a good question that somebody raised. The auto-sprint feature that people are putting into the game, so they're using a config to be able to enable auto-sprint. Will that become an actual toggleable option? I know you've talked about this before where you want the user to be able to actually the things that you really deem as necessary to enjoy the game to the fullest, so Quality of Life features like auto-sprint that kind of thing. Will that come with the new engine?
M: The hope is yes. Again, I'm not going to hold it back but very quickly we want to get everything that we want players to be able to do we want it in the settings. We don't want people to have to edit configs. I will say this, there's one main config file editing that is basically what you do with the settings editor ingame. So when you're choosing settings it's writing that out to a file, editing the file that's going to still be possible. However, the new engine encrypts and locks down 95% of the files so there will be a lot less that you can do with this new engine and that you could do with live. It's just not even possible. So the idea is to put what we want in the settings and that way everybody will have access to it, things like auto-sprint and poor Pound. I know he plays with that config and was severely gimped today. We didn't want to mess with that today, we nearly opened that up but today everybody played no configs everybody played equal. The goal is to also do that for the new engine, just let's get it all the settings. 


Video timestamp
S: Do you think we will see an expansion of the current modes we have, so we have action district right now and we have fight club. Will there be any expansion to something like demolition derby? I know somebody's asked that in the chat twice actually. What are your thoughts on expanded game modes?
M: One of the things we're engaging with, it's a little bit of a Skunkworks project on the side but we're digging through all of the old missions, all the old content to see what we can polish up. We also built I wanna say 10 subsystems for RIOT mode that are just really cool outside of the mode itself, but they're just things we'd love to build new mission content around that could be really fun to play with. The racing district of course comes up a lot and it's something I absolutely want to do, but it's on the list. Certainly I think it's a great idea, it's just something we need to get to and there's a couple other competing things in the way right now. Mainly matchmaking. We've got to throw in almost all of our resources post engine upgrade launch on matchmaking, the district allocation system, phasing is in there. That's a big one to be able to kind of phase people in and out of instances to balance things a little better. 


Video timestamp
M: To me I feel like the character customizations, which is one of the biggest key features of the game are really highlighted in the new engine. I think they look gorgeous, the new lighting also kind of highlights them. But I'm very very happy with how stuff is translating out of live into the new engine. I think players are going to be happy with all their customizations porting across seamlessly.
S: We are actually on the character customization right now, you can see that. Being able to actually see, I mean the current editor is good but it's just that this current one has a lot more color and has a lot more vibrance I think. It has a much broader range of lighting and the main benefit for players is that they're able to enjoy the game more, they're able to enjoy the eye candy and the things that they grinded and played for.
M: Everyone else was running Asylum and kinda having fun in that mode, I wanted to take some time to focus on this. On the editors, the customization stuff in this part of the stream just cause I feel like it's just really good. I'm very proud of this, we've worked really hard on making this. You know, making the upgrade look good. 


Video timestamp
M: Someone mentioned private districts and I do want to give a nod today. I hope the streamers had a good time, I know it's kind of a good feeling to be in a district playing against competitors where you know that everybody is using the same configuration. No-one is using anything different. Our goal is really that every player gets to have that experience. We're really looking to and working on ideas and things where we can try to get that experience, because that's when people have the most fun I think. If you're doing missions and you know that everyone's on equal footing then that's a pretty good time. I don't know if we can do private districts, but certainly that topic has come up with respect to e-sports and some other things. We work really hard on the anti-cheat and our ability to detect cheats, the reporting system and things like that. I'm not even going to pretend that we're perfect, no game is. But it's just something that we continue to do.


Video timestamp
S: Is it possible to make your inventory unlimited and with a search bar? I think that was one of the next things. 
M: Inventory is a problem right now, I know we need to do some extending and there is a Quality of Life project that's already been designed and worked on that will rework inventory in a very very positive way. I'm not going to go into details on this stream, but there is a solution coming. It's not necessarily about extending the inventory, I think that's fine. Adding more inventory is great. I think searching the inventory, getting to the inventory in a different way, shifting to more unlocks and less permanent buys where you gotta leave things in the mail or that sort of thing. The way we're managing some of the inventory is going to change, I think in a positive way. 
S: The follow-up question to that then is, not just clothes but in general, to weapons and stuff like that. Especially with the current system that we have now is that people like Kempington, who has 120 guns and can't get anymore and he also has to search through them. There's a whole list, you can drill down into subcategories like rifle, assault rifle, launchers, less than lethal. Is there any way that we're going to be able to actually just have a search for that as well and what are your thoughts on the current method for interacting.
M: It's on the list, we've got to fix it. I think Real Time Worlds never contemplated this many guns in the game, so what we're seeing is just a symbol pushed to the limits that just was never designed to house this level of content. For 10 years this game's been going on and we're coming up on the 10 year anniversary and so I think we've got to improve that system per today's standards and the amount of content we have in the game.
S: I'm having to demonstrate quite live the max symbols we have right now which is 50, I have too many in my inventory so I'm having to delete one. It kind of demonstrates what I personally feel about symbols. The storage is good but when you're the creative type you have to juggle them around and there's a lot of people that actually just use the mail system for storage like that.
M: Which is terrible right. I know they're doing what they have to do but the fact that they have to abuse a different system to try to do that is terrible.


Video timestamp 
S: Exo actually put a good question in the chat, did shotgun crosshairs, are they gonna get fixed.
M: That's gotta get fixed, I think that that got carried over from the console code it's just something we haven't looked at, but I'm not 100% but I believe the crosshairs just need to be fixed.
S: Is there a possibility like in CS:GO we have custom crosshairs you can change so for color blind people it's extremely important. They might not be able to even see the crosshair in the first place well-properly due to their color blindness. Is there a possibility that A. We can edit the crosshair within a certain degree of course to be able to have a personal preference and B. Can we accommodate those who are less fortunate.
M: Yeah, color blindness has come up quite a bit, we have a member of our staff who is color blind so it's something that we talk about when we have time for it. I would put custom crosshairs down the list a bit just because we have so many other pressing critical needs but my hope is that we are at that level doing that kind of work soon because that means we've crossed everything else off our list in terms of matchmaking, phasing, district allocation and a bunch of other things.
S: Actually the other thing is on my head that I've just come up with. When we were doing the testing for the benchmarking a lot of people were asking me directly is this just because you have a sixteen thread eight-core processer or will the multithreading benefit those who are let's say a quad-core or an octa-core for instance with their multithreading as current hardware is the Intel stack is six threads, eight threads, twelve threads. Will the multithreading benefit these people as well, not just those who are able to brute force it with more cores.
M: Absolutely, I think as long as you have more than two you are gonna benefit from multithreading, most hardware today is above two, we've seen benefits at eight, I know my machine has a bunch but I definitely think even lower-end systems will benefit from the multithreading code.
S: And that is sort of from day 1 as well where you would be able to see the difference and will not hear the difference but you'd be able to feel the difference and see the difference, the three feel, see and hear.


Video timestamp
S: How many leftover assets are there that we could potentially use or is available to LO to be able to be used.
M: There's quite a bit, the first one that I would love to see go into the game is the new car which is an entirely new car, it's not a kit and so it's lacking a little bit of polish and we need to as a company we have not yet dialed in getting a car into the game because it was never glued up in the data so it's just something we haven't had a ton of time to finalize because again we just had a couple of higher priority things, but I would definitely like to see that go in. So the new car, there might be a little bit of gun assets I don't think it's a complete gun but there's some stuff floating around in there. We had the two new contacts which were fully voiced already when we took over so I am excited about those two new contacts going in and I think we've exhausted most of the clothing, I don't think there is any clothing sitting around.
M: What are you doing SKay?
S: I wrote in Hi in the symbol editor because all my symbols are locked off and I can't open them.


Video timestamp
M: To Rektigator I don't know you're asking a good question about copying the designs from a car that has one slot to a car that has two slots it's something we need to take care of but it's a little bit further down the list.


Video timestamp
M: The question about contacts, yea there is two new contacts, the EMP is the biggest, newest thing on them that I think we've talked about briefly but there is a brand new little bit of gameplay we are introducing there, anti-vehicle gameplay with the EMP. They do have weapons on them, we're pulling weapons that were maybe paid only or off of Armas and putting them on the new contacts and I think they have some new clothing which hasn't been shown yet.
S: Any idea when that will come?
M: That will be final launch of the engine. We're gonna go through those stages I mentioned earlier you know phase one which is just Asylum and Social and then phase two being the addition of all the rest of the districts for beta and then the final launch. So on the final launch we're hoping to put all of that into the game so people will have something new to actually play.


Video timestamp
S: Perfect, do you want to talk about the SSAO and the recent exploits that you guys had because I know you guys have had a few challenges recently and you've talked with us about it, I'll let you describe it yourself.
M: About the ambient occlusion?
S: Yeah, about the ambient occlusion.
M: So there is some weirdness here. The ambient occlusion is turned on, it's better we've been dialing it in so it's 100% better than it was. One of the biggest problems we're having right now is there's a flicker that happens when you change field of view so one of the kinds of cooler parts that Realtime Worlds put in was that when you run the field of view of the game changes which makes it feel so cool when you run you go from standing to running. That causes a problem with AO so we're in the process of tweaking that and potentially upgrading that, we've got some new variations of AO that we want to pull in so that's going to be tweaking. 
M: What is that, is that Pound fooling around in the background
S: Yeah he is yeah. Let's see if we can switch to this and see what we are talking about because it's worth one thing explaining to people what we are seeing SSAO and ambient occlusion happening live but it's another thing to be able to see it.
M: I think it would be interesting to actually show it because this is something that is incredibly hard to dial in, I like the look of what we have right now and again we have spent some time on it. We did some pre footage here so everybody who's fooling around in social we're gonna cut away and show some footage here just to kind of show off some of the stuff that we see that isn't necessarily available in the engine. This right now is a little dark and I apologize we took this last minute. This is just some footage showing what the SSAO looks like all on its own and kind of the benefits you're getting of just how it sinks or ground everything. What you're going to see is the flicker and the flicker is what we're combatting right now it's from when you run and the field of view changes and then you stop running and so you can see here back and forth how the AO that ambient occlusion is helping to just ground the scene and again it's not final. I'm happier with this, it is the best it has actually ever looked so it's better and I think in fact if you guys go and look at the old screenshots we didn't have any AO at all it was completely broken so this is a little better. We're just showing off the different views here where you can see the various levels, it's all done in real-time so this is going to get a little bit of an upgrade I think before we actually launch but it's coming along. Without it it looks very flat, you can do a lot with lighting you can do a lot with shadows and things but really AO is what gives it a little bit of that depth.
S: And the depth is important especially with something like this because it gives gravity to the 3D space as well. We don't have the footage of if it was just without SSAO both with everything else turned on you'd actually be able to tell the biggest difference being that everything kind of looks flat back like it did in 2008, 2009 it would look closer to what the current engine looks like right now but even further beyond that as well.
S: Do we also want to show the comparison between live and 3.5 especially with this character.
M: We can do some of that, I actually really enjoyed some of the streamer reactions when they got in for the first time, a couple of them messaged me directly. I think we're a little jaded we've been looking at this forever it feels like so it was nice to get some fresh eyeballs on it and again I would love to keep doing some of this as we introduce new districts and things.
S: That is too large, the canvas size is 1440p so it's a bit difficult.


Video timestamp
M: I see in the chat here while you're setting up, the name release. So let's talk about that, we're switching gears a little bit the name release is still going to happen in a way. We are going to go through and clean out some of the old names we want to give people enough time to come and claim them. Specifically what we're going to do though is we're going to change the strategy of names so that we can allow for someone to have effectively conflicting names it's similar to what happens on Discord. I think as things have improved over time, servers and new systems have come up with better ways to handle naming in general so we're taking a little bit of a page from other systems to figure out a better way to handle naming.
M: Someone commented on the game volume. The audio in the game in the new release hasn't been touched at all so know that there was a lot of bad volume happening in the game namely with the Joker ammo boxes and the boiler room. We let streamers know in advance we just couldn't quite get to that prior to the stream.


Video timestamp
S: Will the clan system be expanded once the new engine goes live? The current system for clans is just that you invite somebody to your clan and that's it. Will there be an expansion to kind of encourage people join up in clans and try and sense of foster family within the community.
M: We definitely want to do something more with that absolutely the answer is yes. The question is just timing and what those features will be exactly, there needs to be some design there but I think that we don't do a good enough job of helping people get better and having their sort of family ingame and having there be a benefit to clans.
M: So the first set of shots there that SKay was showing was live and I think you loaded the same car in here and you're driving around the new engine obviously with a little different time of day. We did make some adjustments in time of day just to tune in the look a little bit, there are some times of day I think in live where the screen for lack of a better term becomes a little faded.


Video timestamp
S: Is the anti-aliasing methods being investigated currently, as in is there more types of anti-aliasing being implemented as I know Nvidia and AMD have their own versions of anti-aliasing are you guys looking into that?
M: Absolutely I don't think there is any active anti-aliasing right now. I think it got broke in the engine upgrade when they were doing work prior to us so we're still going through and cleaning that up, I think that will make the game look a lot better but it is work in progress absolutely we're looking at some of the like you said individual methods that can be done on the card or cheaper.


Video timestamp
S: And in terms of being able to sound design and all that kind of thing, will the new and old vehicles have a pass to see if we can integrate better sounds for them, not just as in the engine but more as in general like some people prefer the old vegas sound because of the higher pitch and it was much more natural to them. The idea being that when Reloaded slammed the audio range from a very high frequency to a lower bassier frequency. People didn't like that change so will there be a review of the current sounds that engines produce as well as weapons will we see something coming to the new engine.
M: That's a great question. Truth is I know a part of the team is jumping into audio so we're upgrading the audio engine in general so that will get an upgrade as much as we can take advantage of those features I think we want to, I don't know how much we'll be able to go weapon by weapon or car by car. Although I agree that sound makes a big difference in this game. I give credit to RTW, walk around with an ogre it's a very satisfying experience because they did so much great work on syncing up sound versus some of the other elements in the game. We don't use FMod by the way we use WWise but it is being upgraded to the latest version.


Video timestamp
S: Spawn system. Will that also have a look at?
M: We made a lot of improvements to the spawn system for RIOT and then obviously had to pull that back so that is one of the things that I would like to reintegrate with some of what we're doing for regular gameplay but I don't know that's going to happen prior to the full launch. Again, it is on that list it's something we want to deal with and make better, it's a tricky tricky problem to solve because it's all about view distance and what you can see versus other characters so trying to make that work is tricky, we have some limitations on the spawn points.
S: Sorry just to cut across but Roadrocker says this is a criminal behind me but it's not it's actually LaRocha.
M: There's a badge right there.
S: Yeah there is actually. There's a badge right there.
S: This is more of a sidestep, will we see a return of RIOT or will we see a return of its core functionality in a new light.
M: That's a great question, I don't know. I think there are some interesting subsystems in RIOT, it was not a very well received or quite frankly perfectly executed mode so I don't think so. But there are some pieces that I really like, someone mentioned the map from RIOT which is also has some very cool map changes. The downside to the RIOT map is you can't have vehicles. So it is definitely a different feel, trying to run across that district is tricky because you can't jump into a car.


Video timestamp
S: Somebody was just asking technical stream next time, do we want to jump into some technical questions now and see what your thoughts are.
M: Sure happy to jump in.
S: Because I know someone was asking a few technical questions before and we just glossed over them, but we'll come back to them don't worry about it.
M: There's a lot of questions going here I'll try to watch a little bit but fire away.
S: So the first technical question, what kind of work went into improving the systems that you have improved today. What kind of testing did you have to do, what kind of breaking did you have to do, how far did you have to go?
M: There are a couple places but I feel like we have dug into almost every piece of this engine right or wrong I think the feature system is a great example so when you're running around Financial for instance the way that we handle distance and interactivity in a building is a subsystem that was written from scratch and they did not port that up correctly. The way they ended up doing features ended up being kind of pushed in in a way that got the game live on console but did not work and so we went in to go make some tweaks there and found what was there and it was a rewrite. We just had to rewrite the entire system so there are other systems that are equally ... we're just digging into and saying alright, this is not what we wanted to do at this moment, the frustrating thing is when you have a schedule, you're aiming towards a launch release date that we have internally and then you hit this rabbit hole of stuff that you just have to fix and so it's a bummer. But there are a number of systems that we have had to rewrite from the ground up and the rendering system is one of them. We're not using the Unreal render system it was completely gutted and rewritten so it does have the same materials and inputs from Unreal 3.5 but the rendering itself is completely custom.
S: The rendering system when we were doing the testing for that that definitely did have a lot of ups and downs we were having a lot of tug of wars with it trying to bring it this way and then it did the opposite on us.
M: You're bringing up something, every time we think the engine is going to do something you can pretty much expect it does the opposite. It's the weirdest phenomenon where we're like we think we made an optimization but then it just goes the opposite direction, it's very very complex, SKay and many of the SPCT members have had a front-row seat to the ups and down to the dev team saying hey we cracked the code, no we didn't, hey we did this, no we didn't and then it's trial and error and pure determination to get it across the finish line.


Video timestamp
S: What kind of advertising do you want to see in the game, I think back to the greatest thing that I have seen come out of APB for advertising sake is the be all you can't be that had the Youtuber's and the influencers come in and do that kind of thing. We probably won't see that level of influencer involvement immediately but what kind of ad would you like to see on the big screen?
M: Personally I love that video the be all you can't be. I think we're going to be doing some stuff with that in a smaller way but there is a whole series of marketing steps and I've seen this question come up on the feed here and that is when are gonna start advertising and when are we gonna start marketing the game and I think that is a three-prong approach there, I think there is some stuff we're actually going to start immediately right now. I would love to build up the Jericho player base right now so we're going to be doing some very specific marketing to East Coast and West Coast former players to let them know that we've got dedicated servers now in LA and New York, latency is great their fast servers and we'd love to see them more populated so I think there will be some direct marketing that is really designed to be an awareness campaign. I think you got to see a little bit, I think you're in the know a little bit on what that looks like and some of those ad campaigns that sort of thing so this is the first one. Then the second one will be around the beta and just creating awareness around the beta and just paid advertising on all the standard places, we're partnered with Google on some things and some other partners there and then ultimately just the full launch that's where I think we can really invest because we've delivered something that I think fans to this game have been waiting for a very long time so I think you'll those three things, one right now we're about to start some marketing around New York and LA and then the beta as we roll that out and the final launch.


Video timestamp
M: I have seen a couple comments about dethreating and I'm gonna echo what Kiida said and that is I think dethreating is a multi-sided issue and I think that I'm gonna be optimistic, I think that most people dethreat because they can't get matched in gold or they can't get matched in the district they want, there are some there that just want to go grief newbies and that's just awful for the game. Our new players have it rough enough please don't dethreat down to bronze and start taking out newbie characters that's just not fun. But we're hoping that the changes to district allocation, phasing and some of the things we're doing with matchmaking will vastly improve this because the big problem is you have server peak time and you have the server in off-peak time and you can't have the same level of discretion in terms of how threat works because you wont get good matches. Sort of collapsing districts down to keep a high player population and expanding the bands that make up threat so you just get matches in general and then as peak happens you slice and dice those down further and you've got more servers now but you've got a lot tighter band of what the threat level should be. The concept I think of threat is really going to go away and that's another thing I don't think dethreaters will have a clear target there's not going to be necessarily oh, I'm silver I need to dethreat to bronze like that marker isn't going to be there so it's a little more tricky to do.
S: I think the dethreating has been an issue for many years and segregation was used as a method to try and solve something like that but it kind of did the opposite, as you said before when you're expecting the engine to do something it did the opposite, when you want the community to do something they did the opposite in that case.


Video timestamp
M: I think to xenon I believe that's been looked at, I believe there's a number of things with timers and syncing on the processor or to hardware as oppose to arbitrarily to another standard so I think that's been addressed a lot of the timing on the new client is very different just how it handles is almost entirely different. Sorry, keep going SKay.


Video timestamp
S: Will we see an improvement to the social interactions for the community as a whole. Will we see more implemented in that sort of area.
M: I hope so, look we're learning as we go, we're two years in and still somewhat new I know we want to open the Little Orbit Discord to support players coming on and chatting with the devs from time to time or just with themselves I know it's a big thing for me just opening a place for people to be able to talk in real-time as opposed to forums which are a little outdated but handy for keeping track of an ongoing conversation. But just getting on and getting matches or finding players I would love to see that happen as soon as humanly possible. We are short of moderators right now, we're short the staff to be able to man something like a Discord 24/7 so we're not gonna open until we can properly moderate it. I want it to be a good player experience not just something that ends up just being very toxic. From another social type perspective, I am definitely going to keep doing the blogs every Friday and Saturday. I post customer support stats on Friday and engine upgrade type stuff on Saturdays but I definitely think that someone's mentioned the Reddit and AMA there and just being more accessible in trying to plan more of these, doing more streams, I would like this not to be a once in a blue moon thing. It's something I'd like to do on a regular basis so that people can come and see where we're at.
S: By the way, I think this came down the line here, will there be any openings for the SPCT?
M: Yes I'm gonna say we're right at the cusp of that the main group has done a fantastic job and for various reasons we kept that somewhat locked down, we've not been introducing new people to the group just at the moment but I definitely think moving forward in the near future I would definitely love to see that team be much larger. I think I would love to see the mentoring team come back as well to help provide a little bit of new player help.


Video timestamp
S: Right so let's move onto customization
M: I will say so iSigrun is asking can we have a way to earn G1C without paying. I don't think you'll ever be able to get G1C without paying I think we are all in on trying to make Joker tickets more viable, they are in some ways we think of them as the paid currency of APB. You've got APB dollars you can earn and Joker tickets, I think we are trying to shift into a mode where G1C is outside of the game, it's Armas and it's account unlock whereas Joker tickets are character unlocked and earnable so all of the content hopefully can be unlocked on a character level with Joker tickets.
S: Actually Joker tickets that will move us on nicely, what can we expect with Joker tickets?
M: There's a lot there we've been gradually making changes to Joker tickets, it is one of the bigger places we've made changes to. There are more coming, I think we've been very conservative there because it is tied directly to things that have earned us and the company money and kept the game afloat so we want to be careful but we've tried to also take a really hard look at stuff and try to make it less abusive, less heavily monetized and try to add ways for people to collect the guns just through Joker tickets so we need to get more clothing in there, we need to get more stuff off of Armas and into the Joker ticket store. One thing we're working on is a redesign for the Joker ticket store entirely so when you go to social there is going to be ... that whole area is going to be remodeled to better showcase what we have there for players. As right now it is this tiny little menu and you kind of have to scroll through it to find things and even as few things as we have in the Joker store now it's still pretty cluttered so we want a slightly better experience there for people to go find stuff.
M: Someone is asking about September for the engine. It's funny I put out dates in the past and then we for various reasons have not hit those dates. I will be very very disappointed if we don't get this engine update out by September. I want it out a lot sooner than that.


Video timestamp
S: Will there be an AI implementation into the new engine?
M: That's a great question, it's not in the works yet. I would love to see a small amount of PvE content in the game. There are just some things I would love to do for a new player actually but I think at its heart APB is a PvP game and there is a reason why RTW didn't put an AI system into the game so we don't want to make it any heavier than it already is.
S: Define heavier.
M: The client has a lot going on and we talked about the clunkiness of the UI and the game-loop which caused framerate issues and the last thing I want to do is introduce yet another system like AI that is going to cause slowdowns and framerate issues cause your computer is processing that stuff in the background so we're trying to streamline that stuff so we can get really good framerates out of it. Most of our issues right now with framerate are game-loop and UI based.


Video timestamp
M: For Lavic you see I don't know they've been asking the same question about the ghosting feature I have no idea if that's in the works or not, sorry.
M: When I speak to TzickyT he was asking about the Netherlands and the Joker boxes and kind of our reworking of that, there are ongoing plans there we're taking it very slowly but there definitely is a plan in the works fairly close in that we're hoping will allow the Netherlands to get Joker boxes.


Video timestamp
S: Will people see a much higher increase in the CPU usage of the game as it goes to release?
M: Yeah, I was just talking with Kemp, I think we've seen in general right that you can never take advantage fully of all those cores and processors but I think the current live game on my Ryzen setup I'm using like 40% of the CPU sometimes less. The live game is not really capable of taking advantage of that kind of a machine. I've seen at least in the new engine around 70% so pretty big uptick there in terms of how much of the CPU we can use same thing with GPU usage, I have definitely seen an increase in what we can get out of the GPU in terms of performance so I would say absolutely people should see a lot higher utilization of both the CPU and GPU.


Video timestamp
S: Will cosmetic configs be a thing?
M: That's a great question. I don't know, I'm sure it's been talked about a lot of that stuff kind of drops way down. I don't know.


Video timestamp
M: Someone is asking will about will the engine upgrade make customizations more accurate. Yeah we've previewed that earlier, I think customizations definitely look better in the engine upgrade at a we'll call it HD level.


Video timestamp
S: Does threat as it currently stands will that stay the same as it is or will that be expanded or contracted?
M: I think we're looking at threat I know a lot of people have said go back to the old threat method or the new threat is bad but I don't think the threat itself is bad I think just how we handle it, player population and other external factors make the threat system not so great and so I talked about this earlier in the stream, I think the threat system is getting a massive look at and what we know of really today as pure you've got ten bands in gold and ten bands in silver and that sort of thing. I think some of that will remain behind the scenes it's just not going to be surfaced as much to players. A lot of that is going to be a little more dynamic where we can grow or shrink some of those threat levels based on population.


Video timestamp
M: I saw music studio, I don't think we're making any changes to the music studio I know it's being added and it has been added and it works in the engine upgrade. It was cut entirely from the console so it works, I don't know if there are any significant changes there but it's in the engine.


Video timestamp
S: Will we see an update to the physics?
M: Probably not, I think that physics is so embedded into Unreal 3.5 and we're in this weird trapped little box where we've got physics on one side and scaleform on the other side and there's certain things we can do and certain things we can't. There may be an opportunity downstream where we can disconnect some of these pieces a little bit and we can rip that out and put something in. I know there is a lot of benefits to newer implementations of PhysX or newer physics systems and I could think right off the top of my head five basic things that the existing physics system doesn't do well. But I think for the time being we're sort of stuck with it, it's really embedded into the engine.
 

 

 

 

The real MVP. Can't really make time to watch 1,5 hours of "highlights" which could be packed in a way shorter video.

[DoesntExistAnyMore 144]

Thank you Matt ^.^ 

[BrandonBranderson 672]

Thank you so much for doing this again Matt!  The streams leading up to the Q&A were great too.  Non-toxic, no stream sniping, no custom configs, and just over all Asylum is looking beautiful compared to live.  Also really like that you've finally updated the intro with the Little Orbit logo

[xXD4v1dXx 49]

Is apb gonna be on the new consoles?

[TheMessiah 430]

4 hours ago, xXD4v1dXx said:

Is apb gonna be on the new consoles?

you mean ps5 and xbox 2?so this sht to start all over again..

[Gro 104]

Nice beard there.

And your hair looks almost exactly as one of ingame haircuts.

One may witness just by single look at you that you've digged really deep into the game.

-upd-

This one:

Edited April 20, 2020 by Gro

[WitchQueen 316]

Matt's Q&A starts 15 mins in and is condensed into less than 30 minutes:

 

[Yukate 13]

On 4/18/2020 at 10:17 PM, MattScott said:

Hi everyone,

 

For those that missed the streams, the Q&A or my bad posture yesterday, we decided to edit down the demo and Q&A on Little Orbit's channel.

You can see the highlights here:

 

A full transcript of the Q&A section of the video was made by @Kevkof and is posted further in this thread.

 

Thanks,
Matt

Could you PLEASE add more HUD options, I'd love to play w/o any HUD even w/o crosshair but to see who's my enemy (nickname) just to increase the overall performance and game feeling (F12).

[BlatMan 708]

Will the new version require the end user to run the game with admin rights? The live version requests admin rights and refuses to start without them.

 

[pop1234 0]

i cant play apb error 10044 cant sign in please help

[PoshDoll 93]

yeah but I thought other streamers were going to ask their questions. I kinda was expecting to see the answers given to Kempington's questions. or was he even able to ask his questions?

[WitchQueen 316]

1 hour ago, PoshDoll said:

yeah but I thought other streamers were going to ask their questions. I kinda was expecting to see the answers given to Kempington's questions. or was he even able to ask his questions?

We all sent questions to Sakebee who fed them through to Skay. So the questions asked were a mix of streamers, viewers and a few of Skay's.

[111M1kA111 2]

On 18.04.2020 at 23:17, MattScott said:

Привет всем,

 

Для тех, кто пропустил потоки, вопросы и ответы или мою плохую позу вчера, мы решили отредактировать демо и вопросы и ответы на канале Little Orbit.

Вы можете увидеть основные моменты здесь:

 

Полная транскрипция раздела «Вопросы и ответы» видео была сделана @Kevkof и размещена далее в этой теме .

 

Спасибо
Мэтт

 Это PS  ?

[PoshDoll 93]

On 4/23/2020 at 4:50 AM, WitchQueen said:

We all sent questions to Sakebee who fed them through to Skay. So the questions asked were a mix of streamers, viewers and a few of Skay's.

oh okay. this explains it, thanks!

[TheMessiah 430]

Quote

Based on this test, the next step will be to organize another large playtest between SPCT, the streamers, and LO staff so we can get a better benchmark.

I'll let you guys know when that will happen.

Next test will be on financial/waterfront or asylum again?

Edited May 3, 2020 by TheMessiah