Big life update!
After 9 wild years today was my last day at Cloud Imperium Games. It has been a tremendous honor to work on such a unique game, but after 9 years I was ready to take a new challenge.
I'm gonna miss the team, and I look forward to seeing them fly to greater heights. I'm also going to miss the community who has always treated me with open arms and with whom I've been lucky enough to exchange more than a few beers. Next Bar Citizen make sure to pour a big stout for me!
As for what's next, in a couple week I'm going to Blizzard to start on a new unannounced game. I'm super excited to get back to early development on a game where there's so much ground to break. But don't worry, I won't forget about y'all. Alright I've rambled enough.
Wishing you all the best, Chad
Additional note: Chad worked as Senior Lead Gameplay Engineer in recently closed LA studio. Guess he was one of the remaining employees who decided against moving to Manchester.
Some more details from the wiki:
https://starcitizen.tools/Chad_McKinney
The source for this isn't cited too well (the referenced link leads to the homepage of his site instead of a direct link to the info), but it lines up with the kind of subjects that he spoke about in the official videos.
Tap for a long list of videos that Chad appears in.
Chad talks about the tractor beam/cargo refactor work he was doing during one of the SCL episodes:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr6_sIg8LA0&t=628s
About 3-4 years ago he was also on a long episode of Star Citizen Live:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjmgIl-fYkc
One of the other devs described Chad's work on room system/atmosphere mechanics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oxonCvCNZg&t=1628s
An episode where Jared talks with Chad about icache (core tech needed for persistence and before server meshing would work):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKJfRwjA2RA
Discussion with Chad about Object Container Streaming:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wENuiIcPK10&t=1258s
A dev (Mark Abent) talking about Chad's work on Persistence:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zPhpxYD7f8&t=1234s
Jared brings Chad on to answer an upvoted question about ship settings with persistence:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xAJgRFc01c&t=248s
Jared asks Chad a question about physicalized inventory:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fhVfJAcNKI&t=1215s
Jared asks Chad a question about waypoints and queuing up destinations:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugwnT5F5m0E&t=566s
Jared discusses service beacons with Chad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S8NC_va-JY&t=426s
A question about quantum travel in asteroid fields for Chad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cAzagggfHA&t=599s
Chad answers a question about the buggy issues with ship persistence at the time, Chad talks about an early version of server recovery that they were working on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5D4newL3xM&t=447s
Chad answers a question about persistence allowing us to log in/recover to where we left off:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIJtzjUsf08&t=36s
He's in a lot more videos than this... I'm just going to leave it here for now.