CitizenCon 2953: Talking Ship

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:17

   hi everyone have we all have we all had a good morning looking at cool stuff great uh my name is John crew I'm the vehicle director here at Cloud Imperium games and uh my name is Curtis I am the vehicle art director at cig so we're going to spend the next 40 45 minutes talking ship uh we're going to show you some cool stuff that you've hopefully seen some cool stuff that you're not supposed to have seen but you probably already have and some cool stuff again you're not supposed to have seen but what you've seen is wrong so hopefully we can clear that up for you all right so that was the A1 Spirit trailer pretty cool video um but we're now going to do a bit of a slightly deeper dive into the actual art and visuals of the

2. 00:01:11

   [Music] ship as we move into the heart of the ship this area is kind of like really dominant ated by those 10 sci-fi bombs and then we go straight into engineering where you find the rest of the ship components that it needs up front we've got a completely fully featured habitation area suit lockers weapon lockers pod beds everything you're going to need and then right at the cockpit we've have a two-pilot cockpit and I think the Crusader Engineers have done a fantastic

3. 00:01:58

   job of putting everything that the pilot needs right at their fingertips so you know In the Heat of battle you kind of might just e out that Advantage exterior Wise It's classic Crusader we've got our recess weapons we've got our rear mounted uh remote turret and then underneath is all business we've got the missile racks and we've got the big Bombay and I think overall you Crusader have done it again they've done a you know amazing job of packaging something that's like super feature Rich and something stylish Sleek looks fast but still super aggressive and then here is one last

4. 00:02:47

   look oh why not okay that was one last look of the Interior there uh so we had a really cool cutaway that you have saw I'm sure we can show you that again later um if you like what you saw there that is available now on that link and a QR code there that hopefully takes you to the right place um so that is available in Alpha 321 which went live Thursday I've honestly lost track of time the last few days uh so yeah that's the current let's talk about something a bit further in the past so we have a timeline here from the uh today all the way through to today in in game and throughout that

5. 00:03:39

   time period we have our manufacturers in law starting with RSI in the very near future uh going all the way through uh to marai which is this year in game and over that we have some very old ships people ships that people think are quite old we have the Hornet we have the Aurora and we have the Gladius however as you can see there is quite a gap from the current day to these old ships uh so let's talk about one that is a bit older than that so the RSI Zeus so in 2130 oh on in 2130 uh RSI made some major kind of advancements in

6. 00:04:28

   Quantum technology they developed or they released the first ship that was kind of available to the mass Market that had Quantum capability this kind of mid-range Explorer uh really put RSI at the kind of Forefront of ship development now it was a really good thing you it really kind of boosted them as a company but that doesn't it wasn't kind of all good the original RSI Zeus had some major issues with its whole integrity that being said there's always kind of been this uh demand for RSI to release the Zeus it's kind of had this cult following that's grown up over the years I'm kind of very happy to announce today that RSI have kind of taken that

7. 00:05:19

   challenge on board um they've developed a whole new vehicle that is designed to FY a whole new generation of Travelers across our universe visually is something that pays homage back to the original zoos and something that's really uh is is Justified to have that that name and I'm even happier to say it exceeds all current safety standards and all our current ship production techniques so do you want to have a look at the all new RSI Zeus Mark [Applause] I okay then here it is so uh we are going to hand over to elwin and Mark to go through this and you can

8. 00:06:08

   see there's three of them there so we're going to do a bit of a deeper dive onto these three ships now so over to Mark andn let's give welcome come on let's go let's go hio everyone my name is Mark Gibson I'm the lead vehicle content assigned at Cloud Imperium games and I'm ow Bachelor and I'm Owen Bachelor vehicle art director in North America what do you guys think awesome all right well let's take some time now and take a look at this classic RSI design and see how we've reimagined it so when we decided we wanted to tackle the Zeus we had to

9. 00:06:56

   consider what direction RSI would take it in if they were going to do it today we couldn't just remake the original Zeus because although it was obviously a massive piece of History all that was really used for transporting and moving around so we had to consider exactly what we wanted to do with the ship in the end we decide to go for three variants allowing you to pick which way you want to actually play the game so what we're going to do is talk about those variants that we decided on in the end and go into a bit more detail with them first of all we have the es the es is the ESS it's the long range exploration version of the Zeus it's designed to let you go out for a long time and explore the universe next up we have the mark the Mark is the Bounty Hunter version this

10. 00:07:44

    is there for you so you can actually go out find your targets and bring them back it's also been purposely outfitted so that you have all the tools that you need to disable capture and bring them home finally the last version we're going to talk about is the CL the Clipper might be a name people are familiar with if they know much about maritine this is the cargo version of the Zeus Mark I this is designed so that you can move your goods around the universe of the three variants the Zeus essential is the one that hearkens back the most to the original design with the original white on black paint job and the vertical stabilizers we also work to maintain the silhouette of the original but brought that forward to modern day

11. 00:08:31

    RSI design with tons of technical detail and layered panels and on the side the landing gear and the underslung turret as well as the entx ENT entrance ladder fold and perfectly flush leaving behind a super smooth underbelly just like the original design but you probably all want to see what the inside looks like so that's have a closer look despite the sleek and slim body of the Zeus we've been able to pack a lot into it to give everything you need when you're doing the deep space exploration you have a fairly comfortable habitation Recreation Area so that when you're out away from home it's not too unpleasant in addition to that the rear room has a 32 Su cargo capacity as well as being able to fit a cyclone so if you do

12. 00:09:19

    decide to land our planet you can have a look around talking about the loadout it's a ship designed for three crew it comes with four size 2 shield generators two size two power plants two size two coolers and two size four pilot controlled weapons and obviously the lower turret that El mentioned earlier is a size three remote turret now the Zeus Mark was always designed from the beginning to be a sleek and aggressive Bounty Hunter as such the black paint will help you stay hidden in the shadows until you're ready to strike we also redesigned the spine in order to embed an EMP and a Quantum dampening which allows us on the art side to really crank up the level of detail on the exterior we've also added a second remote turret on the

13. 00:10:07

    top looking at the interior of the mark you see that the habitation taking a little bit of a hit it moved forward but what we've been able to add in exchange for that is a massive Armory let you take all the different weapons and equipment you might need while you're tracking your target along the verse looking into the rear we actually have a dedicated area just for the actual um Bounty Hunter pods similar to what you'll see in the cutless blue so you can stack up the pods and take multiple people back with you it has less Su than the es it only has 16 seu and it does have a different load out with the components only having three size two Shield generators like elen said it does have a top mounted forward facing turret so that you can put the pressure on the target as you're chasing them the EMP and QD Drive are designed to stop the

14. 00:10:56

    target escaping once you've caught up with them now because the Zeus Clipper focuses on hauling cargo we've decided to lean into the industrial aesthetic we've covered the exterior with a warning strip paint job uh and we've covered the exterior with more technical detail and armor plating in addition to that it comes with a remote tractor beam which is mounted on the rear to the side of the ramp to make it easier to haul Cargo in and out of the cargo hold we've also added thrust capacity to the base of the Wings as you can see there is an absolutely massive rear to it compared to the others the habitation areas have been massively pushed so that you don't get much space but we can get way more Cargo in it actually has four times the cargo

15. 00:11:44

    capacity of v s coming in at 128 scus of cargo this one also features three size 2 shield generators and like ow mentioned it has a size three tractor beam to make it much easier to get those cargo containers in in and out as you're actually playing what do you think so last year we introduced the spirit and anyone that may be playing on there live live the last couple of days might have seen a new ship adding to the verse the A1 we hope to follow a similar route with the Zeus where we announce it today and then in about a year's time hopefully they'll be ready to reveal to the public to actually play with but

16. 00:12:33

    this isn't just a concept we're not just going to show you some images the Zeus is actually an act of white white box development right now you just want have a look should we okay all right so as you guys have seen with the spirit and with the many shifts we we've released thus far our ships can when they're finished look absolutely gorgeous but before any of them get to that point they have to grow through a very specific development process and this is the first stage in that process we call this white box at this point we've taken the concept ripped it to shreds and then reassembled it and plugged it all back together within the

17. 00:13:19

    editor so that we can get a real good look at what players are going to see when they finally get this game at this stage with the Zeus we've already ripped out all the rusters we've ripped out the landing gear the turret the seats the beds all of the Interior spaces plug those guys back in and we have what you see here so again the beginning of the process at this point we're able to jump in start throwing in cargo interacting with doors getting in and out of beds maybe in and out of toilets and just getting a overall sense of what it feels like to interact with the vehicle and it is very common that in this stage we will make some adjustments

18. 00:14:08

    from the original plan as an example on this ship we've made the decision to expand the center Corridor add a little bit more space to the rooms and as a result that's going to make it much smoother experience for players to Traverse the ENT the the interior of the ship as well as for AI to Traverse the interior of the ship we've also expand landed the main air lock that leads to the enter exit ladder and up here in the cockpit we've separated the co-pilot seats a tad bit just to allow players to get in and out a little easier so with white box not the prettiest stage in the process but it is essential that we nail this because it means we'll be able to deliver a beautiful ship that is also extremely fun to play

19. 00:15:04

    so that was the RSI Zeus and the three variants obviously as the screen says behind me it's available now on the Star Citizen website you or follow that URL or the QR code behind me now we've just talked about the ship with the longest Legacy in the universe it was the first ship of the quantum travel let's change Pace a little bit and talk about a much newer ship we're going to talk about the cutter good little ship so obviously last year IE we unveiled the cutter and you guys seem to love it some interesting information about it it was actually the single most

20. 00:15:54

    popular straight tolight ready ship we've ever released you guys really really liked it in addition to that it's actually the bestselling Drake ship the date but what people didn't know and we kept a very good guarded secret that no one managed to figure out no one it was always meant to be a family of three now what everyone is already familiar with is the base that's the version of T in the universe right now that is already enjoying what we're going to do today though is we're going to talk about the next variant in the family the scout all right let's just take a minute and sort of enjoy the incredible work that the r team has done pushing this guy out when the original Scout was I mean

21. 00:17:00

    when the original cutter was released it helped us to refine the Drake aesthetic and now with the variant we'll be able to add a unique identity to each version on the Scout we've decided to replace the main thrusters with a dual Thruster system and you'll see here we've also added a radar dish to the top which relates directly to the scanning gameplay that comes with this ship in addition to that we have a series of exterior bottom modifications to just push that flavor a little bit further and you'll see here a transition between the default and the Scout so you can clearly see the differences

22. 00:18:05

    on the interior we've expanded the rear section of the ship in order to include a dedicated standing scanning station which will show up here in a second along with that we've also increased the space in the rear to house the larger components that are necessary to support that game play now expanding the rear did encroach into the habitation but we were able to rearrange the components in that room so that nothing was lost in the transition and on the cockpit it's the same cockpit that you all know and love from the original cutter from this view you'll more clearly see the shift that we had to make in the rear in order to support the gameplay that we're trying to achieve we're really proud of what the

23. 00:18:54

    team has done with this ship and we hope you like to scout as much as we do so obviously we've just introduced the Scout what are the main differences between the base there is a variant after all so the first big difference is the radar it has a size two radar and to accommodate to supply that it comes with a size two power plant and size size two cooler getting tripped on own words as well as the at scan terminal that El mentioned earlier obviously as you saw habitation got a little bit causier and unfortunately it has lost two Su compared to the base so only has two Su cargo capacity instead of the three now what we also want to do is talk a little

24. 00:19:45

    bit more about the future of scanning if people are interested in hear about that so what is the future of scanning we'll touch on lightly at the moment there are two main ways for you to interact with the scanning gameplay Loops the first one's obviously the scan and the second one's the Ping system both of these are going to be merged into a single system known as a scan wave when you send a scan wave out if you get any successful pings what will happen is it will immediately populate your hood with an AR marker giving you information about what you've been able to scan as well as starting to give you far more interesting information than you get now rather than just the name of the ship the underlined system will work on the signature system similar to what it

25. 00:20:34

    does today and there are two main scans there is the quick scan the quick scan is just a low version of it it has a very small impact on your own signal output so if you want to stay a little bit more covert and potentially not be seen looking at something you shouldn't you can use that one instead the main benefits are small increased to actual passive detection range as well as been able to detect things that may be a little fainter than you should be able to see this has a decent amount of cutting through interference but not phenomenal the other version is the charge scan the charge scan is the big scan now this will actually allow you to detect things up to Quantum boost range which is way way further than the current passive detection range and not only that but I'll actually drop a

26. 00:21:22

    marker allowing you to jump straight to that location for whatever is that you found now you you don't want to be jumping in blind and as I said it's going to give you way more information than it did before some examples but not limited to this are things like whatever it is is it charging a Quantum Drive is it firing is the shields generating does it have any Shields is it perhaps charging an EMP maybe it's got a snare up trying to catch you it gives you that additional information so you can make the decision whether you actually want to get to that location that's just a brief glimpse into the future of scan what our vision is for

27. 00:22:09

    it right now the Scout is actually in 321 it's available if you go to that address or go to our website you are Cod it's actually in the universe right now you don't need to wa for a patch for that I've been Mark and I'm enen and before we step off if you haven't had a chance to get one of these hats this one in particular is signed by seven members of the ship development team and if you want it when during the meet and greet if you can tell me the name of the seven people who signed this all of who are in attendance here by the way today the first person to give me those names gets to keep it other than that thanks guys and have a great siton small hit for you John crew is one of those names fantastic guys everyone we're going to hand you back to John and Ben

28. 00:22:56

    they've got a few more surprises for you right so as Mark said there scanning stuff coming in the future um we didn't show a lot of it uh because it does sort of turn up in some other teams panels and we didn't want to steal their Glory a day early so I highly recommend sticking around for both the UI one and the flight one tomorrow so we've talked about the past we've talked about the present let's talk about the future so here is a big block of squares that represents our backlock so each one

29. 00:23:47

    of these squares is a ship or a vehicle uh all the light blue ones are all the ones we have released to date all those gray ones are the ones that we have not done yet the dark blue ones are the ones that will be in your hands by the end of year so we have over 200 vehicles for us to support as a vehicle content team um for those of you that are trying to do the maths in your head right now going that's that's a wrong number this includes uh every single vehicle that we've ever shown to you whether that's in a squadron 42 visual tease or like a um a trailer some of them are obviously Squadron exclusives some of them are going to be NPC exclusives we still have to support them

30. 00:24:36

    all so every vehicle in the game we have our hands on and we we do a lot of work to support them for you not the only thing we do we obviously introduce new content like the marai fury uh we deliver previous promised content and as you'll see today and tomorrow we do a lot of gameplay support so obviously we help out ships are like the heroes of the game uh you saw in the resource network uh engineering uh panel how that's going to impact ships uh you will have seen if you've been paying super close attention uh some UI elements to do with maps stay tuned for that uh we do all that so we do a lot of work across all aspects of both projects uh and to do all that we need to do a few

31. 00:25:26

    things okay yeah so talk a bit about the backlog um I'm going to kind of take a little bit you know how how are we going to deliver this so in April 2023 we actually kicked off a new ship team um in our newest Studio turbulent based out of Montreal yeah go Canada um so we've now got um five artists or vehicle artists uh one vehicle designer one embedded QA tester and one producer and that kind of gives us everything we need to start bringing content out of another location um and it also means that we now have kind of reps globally for the vehicle content team in all five of our Studios what's the really nice thing about that is is it kind of opens up a

32. 00:26:14

    new pool of kind of talent that we can pick from and it should you know really help us to deliver some more content to the game and you've actually just seen the first two ships out of that studio so the Scout are and the Zeus are both being developed by our Montreal team yeah they're doing doing great um we're going to look a little bit more in depth at the kind of the art team and and how we've grown over the years um you can see from this graph this is our kind of like live numbers of how many vehicle artists we have dedicated to the project um you can see there's a nice trajectory going up um and you know with more team members that

33. 00:27:02

    also means we get kind of like not just more people to throw stuff but we get more experience we get more knowledge um and that's you know that allows us to kind of tackle our larger kind of more complex ships you will notice there in 2022 there is a a little dip um and you know unfortunately when when that happens that has kind of real consequences on what we are able to do as a team I think you know less people so less power to put on stuff but also some of that knowledge leaves us with that that leads us to have to make some kind of pretty hard and heavy decisions about what we're working on and I think most recently and probably most well known is the bamy merchantman yeah now we're going to take

34. 00:27:54

    a quick look at where we got to with the merchant Moon just to show show where we were up to before that happened in oh

35. 00:30:56

    one so that video shows you know where we got up to with the merchantman you can see we' finished white box we were kind of into gray box some areas were further

36. 00:31:43

    than others and I think one of the best things about working at a company like Cloud imperian games is that we're able to be pretty honest and pretty open with our development one of the biggest questions we get is what's up with the merchantman where is it why' it stop um and you know the merchantman brought a lot of unique challenges to us it was a completely new art style something that's very very different from what we normally do with our human manufacturers I think you know we could have paed other ships we could have moved some of our other artists onto the merchantman but with the kind of Exodus of our kind of senior team in 2022 um we didn't just lose people we

37. 00:32:32

    lost a lot of the knowledge that went into building out that white box and really kind of delivering that art style what we decided to do at the time is rather than try and Rush something out and just get something out to to get it done we looked at where we were and for us the most important thing was growing our team back up we wanted to invest in our team and use our seniors and our kind of managers to help get us up to the point where you know we can tackle multiple large and capital ships at one time I think the graph previously kind of showed that yo we've got the head numbers now and now it's about onboarding our new staff members it's about Skilling them up and getting them to the point and I would absolutely love to be studing on stage going yeah look at the merch it's amazing like it's you know it's done um but we're not at that point just yet we do see all the

38. 00:33:21

    comments I do see all the the notes about it and you know I absolutely want to get this ship out and done um and you know we yeah I just wanted to be open analysis of where we are up to with the development yeah to to add to that it is probably the most question I get asked at any event and I really want to get it done get it out for you guys but we don't want to give you a half baited thing we want to give you a really great product that we can all be proud of and it's delivered alongside gameplay so let's talk about something else quickly so Squadron 42 Vehicles how many of you have an address

39. 00:34:11

    of some kind um right so we plan to deliver the address alongside the squad alongside Squadron and that doesn't mean just the M we're going to deliver the m the PE and the K kit all together in one delivery Javelin owners I'm afraid you're going to have to wait a bit longer after that is obviously the bigger ship players can to own uh and we have recently looked at what is left to deliver on it we've got plans there will be modularity with it um and yeah that will come after Squadron releases and those of you who also have uh the Vandal side BL blade after Squadron releases

40. 00:34:59

    you will also get the updated uh models as well for right next okay no kind of ship panel citizen con event is kind of done without looking at what's coming up next um previously we used to do these kind of like Silhouettes um but we we kind of always felt they were a little bit predictable we ended up just making most of them anyway um so so last year we changed things up we we asked what manufacturer do we want to see uh make our next large mining ship um and you're going to see more about that at IE next month um but again this year we decided just to mix things up a little bit with how we wanted to deliver this so you're

41. 00:35:48

    about to see in a minute a video uh it shows uh some ships you might recognize hopefully it will show some that you don't recogniz niiz um but feel free to get on Spectrum afterwards take a look give us a guess at what you think they might be um because we'd love to you know hear your imput and I will just add to that as well we aim to deliver everything you see in this video and more in the next 12 months [Laughter]

42. 00:37:19

    I don't know if you noticed but there was quite a big ship at the end of that video uh and yeah just to confirm that is the poo yeah so uh we we we've done a lot of talking uh we'll do a bit more talking about it um so yeah okay just wanted to touch again on like you why are we doing an RSI ship like what is with that so the thing about doing another RSI ship is that we've got a really well established art style for RSI in our in our universe um and it gives us the ability to kind of SK or train up newest members of the teams on something that's kind of quite a known element that is absolutely not the only benefit though the way we are like planning on tackling the Polaris is not

43. 00:38:07

    tackling it as one ship but actually we want to tackle well anyone that knows our backlog knows we have a number of large RSI ships on there and our kind of plan is that we tackle that as a family of ships we don't just tackle one of them and then we go off and do something else for six months a year come back do another one something else come back and do another one we want to tackle them all together one after the other and what that really allows us to do is just kind of streamline our development process we're able to you know for our more common areas of the ship we're able to build kits that we're confident in that we can reuse and we can make the most out of them and then that allows us to focus our development time and our efforts really on the much more unique and the important exciting areas of each ship it tackling them as a family kind

44. 00:38:56

    of allows us to expedite their development we leverage the experience that we've got within the team and it just allows us to like I say streamline everything so first up we got the Polaris next up we got the Galaxy then we got the Perseus and that kind of closes out our most of our large RSI ships and then we can you know see what we want to take on after that oh I I think that's pretty much everything thing we want to talk about today um however before we go we we're going to Ton's already stolen the the predictable joke here so we'll do one last thing to show you guys so let's have a look at the current state of the Polaris in engine in it's white bux

45. 00:39:55

    state