20-23 January 2015 Winter Summit Minutes Day Four – January 23 Contents: * Page 2 – Jessica Overview * Page 4 – Art & Graphics * Page 8 – Wrap Up With The EP * Page 11 – CSM – Elections, Summits & Communication * Page 16 – Community Session: Jessica Overview CCP Attendees: * CCP Leeloo * CCP Darwin CSM Attendees: * Ali Aras * Sion Kumitomo * Sugar Kyle * Xander Phoena * corbexx CCP Darwin invited members of the CSM to take a look at our tool for in-game graphics creation, called Jessica. Jessica is used for building new graphic effects and space objects such as ships, creating animated scenes for cinematics, and debugging graphics issues in the client. Players have asked quite a few times if CCP is ever planning to release this tool. Members of the CSM had a chance to look at how it works to understand why we usually deny requests to provide this software to the playerbase. Jessica is a complex tool that requires a strong technical background from the user. It's not user friendly and it will not forgive any mistakes. Jessica has a functionality to work directly with the game server, and this is something we can't afford to put into the players' hands. While it might seem to some of our players that this tool would allow them to create video assets easier and faster, in reality it can be quite frustrating for an unprepared user. CCP Darwin said that he believed it would take about a year to teach an artist to work with CCP's assets and tools. CCP Darwin showed the CSM a practical demonstration how Jessica worked. It is not a simple interface with a UI but multiple windows and programs that work together. The cinematic team will use other tools to add into it and Jessica to make sure that what they build is true to the game environment. Session: Art & Graphics CCP Attendees: * CCP Leeloo * CCP Falcon * CCP BasementBen * CCP Vertex * CCP Darwin * CCP Mankiller * CCP BunnyVirus * CCP RealX * CCP Huskarl * CCP Guard * CCP Manifest CSM Attendees: * Ali Aras * Sion Kumitomo * Sugar Kyle * Xander Phoena * Corbexx * Progodlegend * Corebloodbrothers * Asayanami Dei (remote) * Mangala Solaris (remote) * Steve Ronuken (remote) * Mike Azariah (remote) Session was opened by CCP BasementBen who introduced the rest of the team. CCP BasementBen explained that art, graphics and audio are now all a part of one huge department that consists of Trilambda, Klang and Muppet Shop. Trilambda deals in art, Klang in audio and Muppet Shop with apparel and virtual goods. CCP BasementBen - With the more frequent releases there's a lot that the CSM will have seen already, but we'd like to show all you guys a little more of what we're working on. CCP Mankiller explained V5++ as the next iteration after PBR, which while it was successful is something we want to improve on. WIP Images were shown to demonstrate V5 to V5++. CCP BasementBen explained that we are trying to bring back details on ships that are lost between changing graphics levels that have happened since the switch to PBR. PBR is very beautiful but the way the layers work, when graphics are dropped to medium the ships are not displaying true to their core look and this needs to be corrected. This includes adding new ambient occlusion and the ability to make ships look worn and dirty, which could become part of gameplay depending on how old your ship is to show age and wear and tear after fights and usage. A big part of the backend work on this will be going on towards a May timeframe. CCP BasementBen also explained we have been working on tactical destroyer models too, and showed the Confessor and Svipul (which is currently in texturing and will be ready for the Tiamat release). CCP BasementBen also showed off initial designs for the Caldari and Gallente tactical destroyers, which are progressing nicely, with no solid release date. He stated that it has been interesting for the artists to try to evolve the old styles while staying true to them and to work with more animations. Trilambda is also working on lighting effects both ambient and on ships, and working on booster effects to make them a lot more detailed and realistic. CCP BasementBen stated that CCP would like to move more away from different looking boosters to be able to show different stages, such as using a microwarpdrive or afterburner for instance. CCP is also looking at changing lighting so that ships accurately reflect and react to their surroundings in terms of lighting, such as while in orbit of a planet, or during warp when lighting conditions change. CCP Huskarl - we're also looking at dynamic lighting with ships responding to and reflecting the light from explosions and their weapons. Progod mentioned that this would be awesome to be able to see when stuff in a large fleet is exploding, and would increase situational awareness. CCP BasementBen said that the team are also working on a special edition shuttle to celebrate the 10th CSM election that was requested by CCP Falcon and CCP Leeloo. Observant capsuleers may have already found this on Reddit. CCP BasementBen said that are also a lot more things going on too, including multiplayer animation, temporal anti-aliasing, renovation of deployable structures, kill marks on ships to count kills performed in that hull, as well as more ship redesigns for the Enjo, Ishkur, Sin, Keres, Chimera, Cerberus, and others. Mike Azariah asked about the Dominix, amid stony silence from everyone present. The silence subsided after an appropriate amount of practical joking time and "Sin" was edited in the presentation Powerpoint slides to reflect that the "space potato" was indeed on the cutting board and ready for some sexy metaphorical vegetable carving. Progod - There were threads on the forums regarding ships people would like to see redesigned. Are you taking that into account, or is the drive generally to take care of the ships that the art department are in need of work? CCP Huskarl said that they would be looking over all ships. Some won't be changed, but just made more detailed, especially iconic ones like the Rifter for instance. Sugar Kyle asked about ship symmetry and why most of the asymmetrical hulls are far more subtle now. CCP Huskarl responded that the art team is trying to move to more functional ships designs, and that it would naturally be more subtle in terms of asymmetry. CCP Huskarl further explained that they're looking to make asymmetry more subtle to make ships look more functionality realistic. Sugar asked about small changes to avatars such as characters being able to go barefoot over wearing shoes. Xander said that he would officially like to be documented as protesting any art time going to avatars instead of spaceships. It was pointed out that the art developers who work on avatars do not work on ships and that spaceship development would not be harmed. CCP Huskarl then explained that characters aren't presently modeled like that, as they were intended to be walking around in bars and stations and wouldn't be barefoot. However, the team that handles avatars did say that they could look at it making bare feet perhaps. Sugar asked about being able to freeze frame character creation so that characters don't move around during posing, and being able to backlog the images taken during character creation when selecting 4 variations so that they could be switched on the fly. TL explained that this could be something that could be investigated, along with color grading of character portraits. More possible poses were also discussed. Progod had a few questions about effects. The sensor booster effect was changed a while back because of issues when large groups of ships were together, how does that happen? Does development come to art and say it needs to be changed, or does art decide that? CCP Vertex explained that this was noticed during a mass test and was changed for performance reasons. Progod then asked if there were ideas regarding making effects more dynamic to the point where when you're able to see things when zoomed out to be able to collect information on ships and what's going on in a fleet without having to be at close zoom. CCP BasementBen explained that it would be cool to have picture in picture to be able to see what's going on at close range. CCP Mankiller explained that he feels that anything needed for situation awareness should be shown on the UI, rather than in 3D graphics. Progod commented that it's often super hard to show new players what's going on in the game, and it can be super confusing to follow what's going on in game without visual indicators. corebloodbrothers showed that a good example of this is stargate activation, which used to be very visual, but now is super easy to miss because there's not a lot of light emitted, and also that effects like hulls being on fire in structure add to the immersion of gameplay and add to the adrenaline of a close call. CCP BasementBen commented that it would be good for instance to have a stargate flash on the overview when it goes active and someone jumps. Progod commented that most experienced players will be able to cope with anything, as they can look at turrets on ships for instance or use the UI, but it might be super difficult for rookie players as there's a lot going on when you're looking at the screen, and clear indicators aren't often there, so it's difficult to follow what's going on. CCP BasementBen asked progodlegend if he felt that there was an issue that it might overwhelm the screen if effects were scaled up during large fights, and that it would be too complex to see what was going on? Progod commented that it would only be core effects that were so large to be noticed. Sion asked about what multi layer animations - What are they and can you give examples. CCP Mankiller explained that it was always cool to have little radar dishes and small animations on ships, however we were reaching the edge of what was possible with current animations. Now with a new system the art team is able to put animations on top of animations, like with the new tactical destroyers, so that there can be small localized animations on parts of the ship, then have the whole ship transform. Sugar asked about the warp tunnel and effects being piled on top of each other and if the motion sickness part of the warp tunnel issues were going after the last changes to try to correct motion sickness. CCP Mannbjorn and CCP Vertex indicated that while there had been some internal complaints early-on, the team has heard very few complaints recently. Corbexx asked about overly bright effects interacting badly with the UI. CCP Darwin responded that they're working on making sure that additive effects that brighten as they are piled up on top of each other are displayed correctly, such as gas clouds, bubbles, etc., on a case-by-case basis. Steve Ronuken asked about hats. There was laughter and CCP BasementBen added that hats have been a repeated question but at this time there’s no plans to work on these for avatars. Asayanami asked about dynamic environments that were shown at Fanfest 2014, and if there was any progress. CCP Mannbjorn said that if gameplay dictates the need for it then this would be investigated. Sion asked about the inspiration for ship design, and CCP Huskarl responded that there's inspiration that comes from everywhere, both real life and sci-fi, and that they tend to show ships in different modes to show heatsinks when in an aggressive damage mode, or sleek and folded in while in speed mode. Xander asked if there was a way to show different modes in showinfo or the 3d viewer to show different modes for hulls, for instance, siege on marauders and different modes on the tactical destroyers. TriLambda loved this idea, and there was unanimous agreement they'd look into it. Sugar asked about what's being worked on regarding dynamic lighting. Would the stations now be lit from plants on their dark side. CCP BasementBen said that this is going in for ships first. Then objects such as stations and gates will come after. corebloodbrothers asked if it was possible to make interdictor bubbles fade as they got close to the end of their life, or if they could flicker of give visual notice that they're about to pop. Progod was very enthusiastic about this, and CCP BasementBen responded that he liked the idea and that they may look at this. Sugar asked for a breakdown on what is involved in designing a new ship. CCP BasementBen responded that there's a minimum 6 week pipeline from a rough first sketch to concept art over around a week, through to an established design. The team is starting to incorporate more simple 3d blockouts into the concepting side of things with 2d paintovers in order to speed up the process. It's very useful to be able to see things in 2d concept and see it from all angles. corebloodbrothers asked how long it takes to work on skins for ships. CCP Huskarl responded that it can be as little as a few hours if its only a shader tweak, but it can take longer if its a full skin that's being worked on. The whole CSM then attempted to pronounce the name of the new Minmatar Tactical Destroyer, with varying levels of hilarity and failure. If you are reading this and wondering, CCP Scarpia did a recording a few days ago. Session: Wrap Up With The EP CCP Attendees: * CCP Leeloo * CCP Falcon * CCP Seagull * CCP MannBjorn * CCP Explorer * CCP Scarpia * CCP Manifest CSM Attendees: * Ali Aras * Sion Kumitomo * Sugar Kyle * Xander Phoena * Corbexx * Progodlegend * Corebloodbrothers * Asayanami Dei (remote) * Mangala Solaris (remote) * Steve Ronuken (remote) * Mike Azariah (remote) MUCH OF THIS SESSION IS HELD UNDER NDA, DISCUSSING CCP’S NEW STRATEGY AND DIRECTION. CCP Seagull opened the session explaining that there is no fixed agenda for this session, and that this it is an open session to talk about whatever the CSM feels is most important to work on going forward. The CSM spoke about internal tools a lot, and the communications tools we're using for CCP to CSM communications, and vice versa. corebloodbrothers explained that two things really stood out for him this week, and that was the lack of updates to the EVElopedia and how we were intending to keep video tutorials updated for players. Progod and Xander agreed that the videos and evelopedia were an issue, and that stuff stamped with a CCP logo should be accurate. CCP Seagull responded that it would probably only involve key gameplay and basics, and we'd defer to player videos for the more in-depth content. Corbexx expressed his feeling that there could be more clear communication between CCP and the playerbase, and that developers could be posting more about talks that they're having with players to inform the rest of the community about how they're working with groups within EVE. corebloodbrothers spoke about the more personal and player-related marketing. CCP Seagull explained that the messaging needs to be less about a sales approach and more about the people, the community, and the experience of players, and then using those as marketing moments rather than focusing on what CCP is doing. Session: CSM – Elections, Summits & Communication CCP Attendees: * CCP Leeloo * CCP Falcon * CCP Logibro CSM Attendees: * Ali Aras * Sion Kumitomo * Sugar Kyle * Xander Phoena * Corbexx * Progodlegend * Corebloodbrothers * Asayanami Dei (remote) * Mangala Solaris (remote) * Steve Ronuken (remote) * Mike Azariah (remote) The meeting opened with an extensive discussion of banana engineering (contact CCP Falcon for further details). CCP Leeloo presented updates to the election system courtesy of the web team. The updates improve the back-end interface for CCP to make managing the election easier and less time-consuming. Two things on the agenda: (1) Review the white paper, and (2) Set up a mechanism to replace inactive members. Mike Azariah suggests that the first step is a working definition of "inactive". CCP Leeloo suggested that the definition of inactive is the amount of work the CSM actually does to change the game-- providing suggestions, feedback, etc. The actual channel for this feedback is unimportant (meetings vs. google docs vs. Confluence vs direct dev contact etc). Sion suggested that CCP Leeloo be the one to make the determination with CSM concurrence, and CCP Leeloo agreed that that was the big issue. CSM voting is not the best ("you get voted off the island"), CCP firing CSMs is terrible, and players voting them off is even worse. Corebloodbrothers suggested that both CCP and CSM should agree, so one checks on another. Sion points out that inactive people being booted disenfranchises someone, and Leeloo said that this came up this year when Matias Otero was removed. She talked to Matias, who eventually said "I don't have the time, remove me". CCP Falcon said it's a multi-step process, with CCP or the CSM initiating the process internally. One party needs to approach the other, and the inactive player should be approached and asked to step down. Ali Aras said that it's important that the person who is inactive is given a chance to remedy the issue. CCP Leeloo pointed out that the new release cadence makes it so the CSM needs to be much more active. What is active enough? The CSM suggested "two releases" or 3 months as too long to be inactive. Sion said that any hard line for inactivity makes it easy to game, and Progodlegend agreed. Progodlegend suggested that the current system is not so bad, with the CSM arriving at a consensus in each case that came up this year. Going back into past CSMs, the current CSM has been more active than in the past. Discussion of setting standards to avoid inactive members (whether on purpose or with a valid personal reason). Sion said that ideally this should be a transparent system with feedback to voters, so voters could know whether they were getting value for their votes. Over time, this should cut down "deadbeats". CCP Leeloo suggested a review blog like the yearly one for every release. Sion countered with quarterly, to avoid being too much noise. CCP Leeloo pointed out this also has the drawback of not everyone being a writer. Sion said that the CSM hides behind the NDA more than CCP does, because the CSM can call CCP on stuff, but CCP can't call the CSM on stuff. There's a lot of information that gets hidden behind the NDA, so the CSM has to police and call out itself. Honesty is important. Sugar Kyle said that the three months was fine, if it was gamed by someone being active, as being active is the goal and they're at least contributing. CCP Falcon said that we can call it "CCP's discretion" and know internally it's about that time. Xander asked if someone could stand on disliking the CSM process and protesting it. CCP Falcon said sure, the people have spoken. Xander said this would be a prime case of someone useless. CCP Falcon said this player should be actively criticizing the process and not being useless if he was actually doing what he stood for. Progodlegend asked: What if Travis got in and pushed tracking titans? Sugar Kyle said that he'd actually be putting in work if all he did was push an essay for tracking titans every three months. CCP Falcon said yes, that would be fine, as we can't kick people for disagreeing with CCP. The CSM is not designed to be an approval panel, if we’re screwing up or making bad decision we should be called on it. Sion said that the public disapproval would be enough to keep CCP kicking a CSM off the council in check. CCP Leeloo said she already could kick someone in the case of completely gross misconduct, like NDA breach or EULA breach. Sion suggested that the CSM should bring it to CCP first to look into. CCP Leeloo said she'd likely look into it by talking to development teams to find out what they thought. CCP Falcon said we just need to translate common sense into the white paper. Corebloodbrothers suggested the wording something like "Inactivity is judged on a mutual agreement between CSM and CCP". CCP Falcon discussed that it could happen that someone gets elected that's widely considered a troll vote, and this is a natural consequence of democracy. If the players want to elect a troll, they would be elected. Sion pointed out that there are economic concerns in that CCP spends money on the CSM. CCP Falcon countered that CCP doesn't spend a dime on anyone useless. CCP Leeloo mentioned that there's some loss of reputation. CCP Leeloo moved the meeting on, and Ali Aras suggested it get picked up after CCP Falcon drafts something. The meeting moved to officers, roles, and permament attendees. The CSM and CCP agreed that no-officers was a smashing success. Sion suggested permament removal, everyone agreed. CCP Leeloo brought up the permanent attendee roles, which she wants to remove. It makes the CSM look unequal, and this is useless in fact. CCP Leeloo also brought up the difficulty of vacation for Americans in particular. Sion suggested that permanent attendees were important for institutional knowledge, where returning CSMs provided knowledge. Permanent attendees also have no incentive to sugarcoat things to get more trips or anything like that. Corbexx said that not all permanent attendees were incumbents. Sugar Kyle said the "no picking favorites" is better. The perception can be that all members are acting to gain CCP's favor and that would be bad. Progodlegend said that removing permanent attendees would be good to get a more diverse summit. CCP Falcon looked for a compromise: the public perception is that the permanent attendees are going for free, and everyone else has to scrape for it. Remove the permanent attendee title, and internally set a "priority list", which could achieve the good parts but ignore the public things. People who have the most votes naturally have the most weight as they’re representing the largest demographic, but their performance on the CSM and their contribution should also be a big factor in whether they come to summits. Getting the most votes should not be a free ride. CCP Leeloo was worried about complexity; Sugar Kyle said players running to be CSM members should be fine with complexity. Corbexx said that any prioritization by votes runs the risk of screwing smaller groups, and he doesn't want to get passed over for someone who's done less. Corebloodbrothers said it sounded like a back-room deal with differing public and private things. Sion said that the history of the CSM was that they were formed as a check on CCP, and giving CCP full control of how the CSM operates and who gets to go, then this severely weakens this aspect, at least in theory. CCP Leeloo said Sion's point was important, but that these people were largely bloc voted. Sion disagreed; Ali wasn't. Ali pointed out that Ripard wasn't either. Xander said that increasing the seats makes it more bloc-powered, lowering the number of spare seats for other groups. Progodlegend suggested as a compromise that the top two votes are guaranteed at *least* one summit, which achieves them having to go to CCP. CCP Falcon liked it, and suggested that they get to pick which ones. Sion asked whether the issue was that we have inactive permanent attendees, or whether it was something else. Some discussion followed. Sion suggested that the CSM took a credibility hit in the switch from top-7 to top-2+5. Sion and Progodlegend argued over whether this credibility hit was real, and how important two summits versus one summit was. Sugar reiterated that people still often think that the summits were a gift and a vacation. That perception has to be considered even if CCP and the CSM do not consider the belief to be true. Corbexx said that powers given up is very hard to get back. Argument continued. CCP Leeloo reiterated that the issue was she didn't like that it seemed like two people had more power than the rest of the CSM, and if the community was uncomfortable, who cares. Sion pressed the point about community perception of holding CCP accountable. Ali suggested a show of hands, CCP Leeloo said we only had ten. CCP Leeloo said that the player view that the summit sessions are the important thing should really change; all fourteen CSMs should be seen as people who are holding CCP accountable all the time. Corebloodbrothers suggested removing it but letting the CSM vote someone on. Sugar Kyle said that once it was removed, it was too late. Ali Aras said that to the best of her knowledge this did not matter inside the CSM and was a matter of public perception. CCP Leeloo said it did end up mattering, with people saying that they might not say something because they don't want to piss off CCP. CCP Falcon closed the (over time) discussion meeting by saying that we should bring this to the community by publishing the minutes and watching the feedback, and letting our players discuss the opssible options. This is after all, their council. CCP Leeloo brought it back by talking about summits and Fanfest. She brought up people assured of going to Fanfest. Sion said he didn't care about permanent attendees going there. CCP Falcon said this made complete sense. CCP Leeloo suggested removing the CCP-paid trips to Iceland and retaining the pass. Progodlegend said they should instead try to maximize the number of CSMs who could attend summits, not fanfest. The CSM argued about whether they would go if there were no trips at all. Progodlegend said that before he was a CSM member, he would not have run because he did not realize how important the CSM can be. Most of the rest of the CSM said that wasn't their object when they ran. Xander Phoena suggested booking hotels and flights with CCP rates to help the CSMs who have to spend money to come. CCP Leeloo said this was possible. CCP Falcon said that age limits aside, people who run for the CSM are the people who like the community and want to come, and if they have the money they will get to Fanfest with CCP support or not. CCP Leeloo summarized the motivation for removing Fanfest trips: why not host a third summit? Or have more people coming for summits? It opens up space for more CSMs. CCP Falcon reiterated that the budget could be used for a lot more things to help EVE. Session: Community CCP Attendees: * CCP Leeloo * CCP Falcon * CCP Logibro * CCP Phantom CSM Attendees: * Ali Aras * Sion Kumitomo * Sugar Kyle * Xander Phoena * Corbexx * Progodlegend * Corebloodbrothers * Asayanami Dei (remote) * Mangala Solaris (remote) * Steve Ronuken (remote) * Mike Azariah (remote) This session had no fixed agenda. Open with a discussion of fansites. It's moved to a different person to clear up backlog, and it's now moving which is making people happy. CCP Falcon gave the CSM a run-down of responsiblities, with CCP Falcon as Community Manager leading the team and CCP Guard taking responsibility for all the live streaming and broadcasting side of community. CCP Leeloo will continue working with the CSM, while CCP Frame (running DUST community) will run the CPM. CCP Phantom continues to run the ISD department, which takes up a huge amount of time, and CCP Logibro now runs the fansite program. There were talks of trying to bring streamers into the fansite program, in order be able to promote them too. Xander brought up for Twitch streamers, they're making money off of them and this would need to be reviewed. The Community Team agreed. CCP Gargant remains in charge of "e-sports" (a term he hates) and the Alliance Tournament. CCP considered spreading it out to make it easier to watch, produce, and participate in, but will not be changing the format this year. After some NDA'd discussion, the meeting moved to an update on alliance logos. CCP Falcon explained that CCP knows what they want to do as an alliance logo policy. As discussed in previous CSM minutes, CCP will create a derivative work by modifying the logo with a frame or watermark. Players then retain ownership of the original logo, and they can do whatever they want with that. The derivative logo with the frame would go into the client, and be displayed as now. CCP Falcon said that the hang-up in preventing the policy from being drafted and going out was that the technical requirements were not finalized. The art system is changing, and this means that the technical requirements can't be finalized. Once the changes are done, then CCP can finalize the logo requirements and accept them again once the graphics changes in game had been finalized. Once CCP accepts new logos, they have to remove the old ones. The timeline will be to accept new logos first, then at a deadline, transplant new logos in and overwrite old ones, removing logos which haven't been resubmitted. After this, the logo process would be opened up. If anyone wanted a new logo to replace their old one, they could submit a new one and it would be overwritten. Progodlegend asked about the timeline. CCP Falcon said there was no strict timeline yet but vowed it was a very important issue on the community team, using enthusiastic profanity for emphasis. Sion took a moment to thank the community team for their excellent work over the year. The CSM seconded this thanks. CCP Falcon gave congrats to CCP Leeloo for helping with it, and cited the SOMER Blink stuff as one of the big successes of this year's CSM. The CSM and CCP discussed the ways that this improved CSM/CCP relations, CSM/community relations, and CCP/community relations. CCP Falcon praised the new CCP structure as a part of the success of this year's CSM process.