Star Citizen: Around the Verse - The Vulcan Hello

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:14

   hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse I'm sandy Gardner and I'm Chris Thomas this week Jared Huckaby brings us inside looks at two very different ships in February installment of shipshape yeah that's right ships are obviously a huge part of the star system experience and we're very excited to use this segment so introduce our first new concept ship for 2018 let's check in with Jared now greetings citizens and welcome to another episode of the brand-new shipshape where we take a quick look at what's in the ship pipeline who's working on what bring you interviews with the developers and sometimes just sometimes we get to reveal something brand new coming to star citizen that I think you're gonna enjoy quite a bit

2. 00:01:01

   I'm your host Content Manager Jared Huckaby behind me you see that ship pipeline I just mentioned the ever evolving continuously expanding network of phases and milestones that each ship or vehicle must reach before they can make their way into your personal hangars or the space ports of the persistent universe whether it's from design to concept from white box to gray box to final art and flight prep this is the system we've built up over the course of our development to ensure you the best possible spaceship or vehicle for your star citizen experience on this month's show we're going to update on a variety of ships that are currently working their way through the pipeline and then sit down with the team in our Los Angeles studio who are currently working on the anvil Terrapin scheduled for release and alpha 3.1 but before we

3. 00:01:50

   get to that we'd like to introduce something that's just beginning its journey through the ship pipeline our first concept of 2018 since our project began we've introduced 114 ships and vehicles in their variants that span a wide array of roles and intentions like combat transport exploration industrial support and competition now this variety is an essential component to creating that living breathing universe that we all aspire to and a variety of profession specific ships will be necessary to populate the spaceways ships like the Miss Star bear bring with it the promise of refueling services to the far reaches of the verse and with a vessel like the anvil crucible a career rescuing disabled ships and helping them in their repair will bring support when

4. 00:02:39

   folks can't make the the long trip home on their own with these two and many others like them profession ships will form the backbone of much of star citizen's emergent gameplay in 2018 beyond but the star fair and the crucible our intermediate to advanced profession ships right so what do we do about those of us who were just starting out our journeyman careers well fret not my friends our first ship of 2018 will have you covered and in more ways than one so which is it refueling or repairing it well the fine folks at Aegis dynamics say why not both let's throw in some rearming to boot yes without further ado let's sit down with some of the team working in our Manchester studio to bring star citizen's first multi profession starter

5. 00:03:27

   ship to life with the aegis Vulcan so the age is spoken is a sort of starting ship for a bunch of professions that we already have in game but we only sort of have the the endgame ship for people to use so if you're interested in refuelling or repairing you've got the staff error and the crucible so those are pretty big ships to to sort of jump in at if you want to go oil today I want to do some repairing of ships you you're looking at these huge ships that have substantial crew requirements and time requirements to get if you jump into those and find actually I don't like this then it's a huge in time investment waste on that so the Vulcan is sort of

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   the jack-of-all-trades starter ship of those professions is does repairing it is refueling and it does rearming which is something we don't have in in any ship currently it's a versatile support ship it's there to to support the ships it's not great at combat it's not great at transport it's not great at racing it sits there for helping out with other ships so if you're that sort of person that is interested in not the the more active combat site but helping others then this is a really great entry into that because it does allow you to help out massively for ships they've run out of fuel ships that have minor damage ships that run out of ammo and then any of these ships could be stuck out in deep space

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   they can call for your help and you can go out there and give them just enough to get them to where they need to go to it's sort of like the space AAA or triple-a for America you call them up they give you just enough to get to where you're going and then you can do your full repairs rearm we feel there so the mechanic for for doing the repairing refueling be arming is via its drones so it has four drones that are sort of contained within the body of the ship and then it can launch them out these drones can they can do all three actions but they can only do one at a time before they have to go back to the mothership to to change function to take on new supplies so whilst you've got four and they could do everything they can't do it all together so you can't

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   have four out fixing everything at a time there are only two stations to control the drones so again it sort of keeps tabs on what it can do it's a it's a three-person ship so you've got one person flying and to support stations which would be either controlling the turrets or controlling the drones so naturally if you're in a sort of hostile environment you may not want to have everybody controlling the drones and leaving yourself defenseless so you sort of got a trade off your defensive capabilities with your support capabilities so we see probably two drones at a time going out at any at any one time doing one or two of those three features and the extra two are just there for if you want to quickly change

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   what you're doing there they're all stocked in the ship ready to go you can send them out naturally the drones will either stay where you've left them or continue on an AI behavior or if you're out for extended duration of time you're probably going to start losing these drones they might get damaged you might be careless flying the browny way if you're trying to repair ship you might actually bang into it and destroy the drone so we felt that if you only had to you can only use two at a time and one gets destroyed that's quite a harsh penalty you sort of lost 50% of you at but is during off the bat so we've got those extra two is sort of redundancies and allows you to just stay out that bit longer there's crew quarters in there so it's not a it's not like I've got a mission to go do this item I've got to go there

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    come back because I can't survive out in space you've got your crew beds you've got basic living quarters basic accommodation so we see people spending significant amounts of time out on these missions using up their drones using up their supplies there's a very small cargo hole to keep supplies in there which sort of feeds into the drones if it's if you're carting amaura around you're not physically carrying ammo boxes doing they go into the drones the drones do it there's an extended fuel tank under the body of the ship which is where the fuel that you're piping to these ships come from and then the repair the drones themselves do the repair much like we have in the PU at the moment with the little drones on the cryo stations where you land they come out repay you it's very similar style to

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    that so there's a there's a small crew on this ship three people pilot and then two support staff basically and they'll you know they can basically either control the guns or the drones basically so I guess I don't know if you'll have to fight it out over who does well or if they can you know both you know I guess you know you've got two drones on either side of the ship so I guess possibly one guy could do two on one side two and another and send them off doing their thing so the ship is the way it works is entry is from the rear of the ship so you know you've got a big tailgate that sort of opens up and that gives you access to the cargo area and I think it's 12 SC use that it can hold and then there's a

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    small elevator that takes you up it's almost like a mezzanine and then takes you to the living quarters some basic habitation and they've at the rear of the craft so a couple of beds you know the obligatory toilet and shower and you know food station you know a little table you know - you know it's very much it's in that you know it's that same sort of style it's basically the industrial aegis essentially and so that feeds through the whole of the ship so there's a lot of you know we've taken a lot of what the art team have done when they've been making the reclaimer and sort of pulled that in and use that with and use that is sort of ism not a template but just hard to define the style of the interior

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    there's three liveries basically that we've done for the ship one's more military based and that's that's one we sort of focused on initially just to get the ship through the pipeline and then after that I was there and we had a little you know we had more time to then sort of focus on the alternatives you know sometimes a ship sort of fight you back and you have to you know is sometimes you just have to you know you like up to 80 iterations before you hit on the shape before you know before you go to 3d if that does sound a lot and sometimes that's just the way it is so on this one it was a pretty strong start and like so there is the sort of stylistically the baby reclaimer

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    and just by its very nature of what it does the functionality that needs to be in the ship or I won't say it designs itself but you know it's it's close to it you know there's a there's a logical route that you want to take and so but even still even though that you know it's relatively small ship there's still a lot of interest in the spaces but yeah I like it I think it's got it's got a good feel so I'm looking forward to when this one gets built this gives you that taste of those careers and see whether you actually enjoy doing it whether you feel it's got a sort of inning game money-making opportunity enough that you want to do it full term or full-time as a procession it's not for everyone but

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    lots of people just love that support game play and this is really a ship for that refueling repairing and rearming and with a collection of skins to do so in style the Aegeus vulcan is our first concept addition to star citizen for 2018 and will be available to all backers for an extended pledge period that begins on February 22nd and runs through the remainder of March so every backer will have a chance to attain what could be star citizen's most versatile starter ship yet and well I mean I can tell you I'm gonna be picking up mine to be certain now if only Vulcan owners could have a special salute to greet others with this will work now farther along than the Vulcan we have a number of ships working their way

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    through the pipeline on their journey to release into the star citizen universe to get us started this month the constellation Phoenix which is now entered gray box phase at the high poly modeling stage is currently having its exterior and interior fleshed out the Geo refined tweaks made to the lighting and the incorporation of all the all the most important features like fish tanks wall screens a bar area and of course the hot tub while the anvil hurricane is close to wrapping up grey box on the art side and will soon be passed over to the tech design team for their work on the tech setup also in gray box is the Aegis hammerhead where progress continues on the interior with a focus on the nose and the main corridor layout utilizing interest parts now it's not all just

17. 00:13:07

    idris hand-me-downs for this ship there are new modular pieces bespoke to the Hammerhead that are being built as part of this process such as the specialized lips and the signature turrets specific to this design that must be included in rework news the consolidated Outland mustang update is also in gray box with the artena while the tech design team is preparing for another white box review and moving ahead to final art we finally Avenger reworked where a new EMP room for the warlock has been through several revisions and it's close to completion as is the new landing gear that had to get scaled up because while the ship hull got scaled up as well so you know how that does finally and the fight prep phase we have four ships that are currently nearing the finish line for their intended release in the upcoming alpha 3.1

18. 00:13:54

    the miss grazer the aegis reclaimer the Tumbo cyclone and of course the anvil Terrapin for the ship animation team each vehicle presents its own variety of unique challenges for instance the aegis reclaimer has a very sophisticated landing and VTOL system requiring unique rigging and technical setup some of which you may have seen on this week's calling all devs in a sneak peak offered by our own Matthew in terraria the audio team has been supporting the SFX requirements for ships like the misc razor and the turbo cyclone for those including thrusters mechanical elements ambience and the UI while the anvil Terrapin is the very first ship of the year to go through the VFX treatment working on effects like thrusters damage and a deaf mask that's using some new debris assets that have never actually

19. 00:14:40

    been seen before all of these teams from around the world are working to bring these four ships across the finish line in time for our intended quarter 1 release of alpha 3.1 but before we let you go we're gonna check in with some of the team currently working in our Los Angeles studio on the little turtle that could the anvil Terrapin the anvil Terrapin is your first step into the exploration specialization of ships of going out into the unknown and surviving it the Terrapin is built to be very very durable over most other things it's not really for combat is not for cargo it's for finding things for exploring seeing what's out there and and living to tell

20. 00:15:28

    about it as the as that first leg into exploration the Terrapin is a relatively modest ship it's not too imposing which I actually consider one of its strengths it gets to go into uncharted territory and if it comes across someone else who is also exploring or he comes across aliens or natives it it is not this imposing warship it's it's there to see what's what's there to find it's got a scanner array and it's got heavy armor but a aside from that it's it's it doesn't really have any offensive focus so if someone sees you they know that you're

21. 00:16:15

    not here to pick a fight in in the current iteration of the flight system everything is kind of the same and that the the thrusters that you have they have different uses and so will allow this thruster to to contribute a certain amount of thrust and not that thruster because they're specified for different uses but the reason that they're specified for different uses is still being implemented and then part of that is the heat factor which we don't currently take into account with our thrusters we have it in a lot of other systems but we're still getting everything built out and when thrusters overheat they'll start to have error and they'll start to have give you less thrust than you expected or in give some

22. 00:17:05

    of that thrust in directions that weren't intended and so that's going to make your thruster systems a lot less reliable once they start to overheat your maneuvering thrusters are designed for instantaneous thrust high output immediate action and then hopefully because you're in space not needing to follow it up maybe follow it up with a different action on some different set of thrusters that will allow you to counteract that motion or augment into some other more advanced maneuver that's fine in space because you get to carry that momentum when you're in atmosphere when you're under the influence of gravity you have a constant force to negate in order to stay up in the air and maneuvering thrusters aren't meant to be able to take that kind of load not

23. 00:17:53

    indefinitely for the for a couple seconds is fine but in order to be able to really just hover in the air you want to have veto so you want to have sustained thrusters or sustained thrust thrusters so the Terrapin will be able to point it's it's mains down and be able to stay up indefinitely and avoid overheating as long as you don't do any anything too crazy to my job on the Terrapins was building out the interior which was pretty difficult considering that a lot of the concept art we had for it had to be changed to match the new anvil style guide so I got to like really hone in on what anvil interiors look like it's the first major like actual walkable anvil

24. 00:18:42

    interior that we have the original didn't really have like a distinct look like a lot of our manufacturers like if you look at origin they got a lot of big bubbly shapes that right that kind of like are reminiscent of Soviet aircraft the anvil has a lot of exterior shapes that are very recognizable like everyone knows that anvil dome and the big angular shapes so when we wanted to go to the interior we were looking a lot at the angles and we came up with the idea of this hexagon pattern like that and then you have the floor plane which is lifted up inside of that so a lot of the stuff that makes and volonteers unique and exteriors is like 30 degree angles

25. 00:19:34

    everywhere hexagons everywhere it's made to look kind of like Star Wars meets aliens some of the things I had to create for the anvil interior were like component boxes I had to design out the dashboard which is really fun cos anvil has a lot of analog controls it's still a little bit more sleek than Drake but it was it feels very like bulky and militaristic I'm really proud of that joystick that I made it's actually designed off of a warthog joystick inside the Terra pen you got the scanner array the chair the chair that rotates the support here I did a lot of the initial work on it but it really came together when Ellen got his hands on it and kind of took it the extra couple

26. 00:20:23

    steps it's a really cool chair we had a completely redesign the control panel that comes down because originally it was just in front of you and but we couldn't get to look right so we ended up having it come down over you and act kind of also as like almost a seatbelt when I first get my hands on the Terrapin it's just--come hot off like the artists plate right so what I do is I look at the damage plan for and I try and figure out where it needs to break apart and how I need to set it up and make sure it works so for the Terrapin in particular when I was looking at the damage plan I realized that it has a pretty unified shape so I had to look for a lot of dangly bits to kind of break off luckily it has the four thrusters it has some panels

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    control consoles the door can break apart the nose tears apart from the body which rips apart from the tail in each of those chunks there's the viz area so I need to make sure that when the nose and the tail rip apart the pieces stay things disappear yeah and all the damage has its LEDs making sure that every every piece that breaks off also decreases in quality as it goes away from the camera so making sure that the terrapin for example has mounted weapons and those weapons fly off with the correct parts you know like just going through all the checks and balances of the ship can I walk in and press the button turn the ship on okay great can I walk in have a seat in the seat does the character's hands look okay do I have to send it back to animation you know I'm just taking a look at the Terrapin and just the from the player's standpoint perspective of i plopping game I walk up

28. 00:21:59

    to the ship press the button door opens going to the ship look at the passenger seat hop in the back and the rate under the radar dome there's a player's seat in the front of the ship there's a seat so you're just kind of going around making sure that all the functionality is there the design has put in making sure all the parts that design is put in or loading in just general feature checks and everything and Terrapins looking so far so good the arts looking really nice on the damaged side it's got lots of nice details under the surface and the effects are looking good too still needs a few tweaks here and there the overall damage system isn't done yet we've been implementing I don't say necessarily a new tech it's the item 2.0 thing everyone's been hearing about for a while but basically we're converting a lot of items to item 2.0 what that means is basically they existed as one form and now they exist as another form but a weapons are

29. 00:22:47

    weapons or thrusters a thruster but when it comes from the tech arts standpoint when I'm doing the damage set up for the Terrapin it's got say five or six parts it's got the body which is the whole ship and it's got attachments that load in separately like the thrusters and the radar dome and the door all those need to be kind of stitched separately into a uni to sheet so I talked with art and I talked with design I find out what parts are gonna be this way and what parts are gonna be pulled in that way and then I go in and I make sure that everything is kind of working together but so far Art's done a bunch of changes I requested recently and the models looking much better from a damage standpoint functionality standpoint still work-in-progress but otherwise the Terrapins looking really good so the changes I am particularly requested for the damage system since I first get the ship and when I get it nothing breaks

30. 00:23:33

    off right it's just like shoot the ship nothing kind of happens so the artist doesn't necessarily see what it's gonna look like at the end until I've done my initial pass so I went in I shot up the Tara pin and I blew off each part and I'm like okay well when to thrust a leg detaches from the body what kind of like metal and wires and stuff are sticking out of the hole does it look to flush that was kind of my first thing it just kind of looked like an empty cavity and I'm like hey could you just add some more stuff here because if a modeler adds say wires or pipes or tubes my initial particle pass is gonna be like oh what cool damaged stuff did the guy add that he had wires add some sparks there did he had some tubes well maybe there's some gas venting out of there you know so the artist helps me define what the initial prep is gonna look like than my initial prep helps the final guys do the Polish so once I had the ship breaking apart into its three main

31. 00:24:23

    pieces I could say well the body doesn't detach from the nose well enough it looks a little too flush could you add a little more randomness to say break up the silhouette against the light stuff like that and then after a few days of revision I got it back and I'm just keeping on going and it's just kind of back and forth revisions so it's usually what I'm not working on one part of the Terrapin because I've either finished it or requested changes I'm working on another part I can always jump around it's not like I'm just doing art or just doing design I like I do a lot of checks I check the shields on the Terrapin make sure that works the v2s on the Terrapin general allottee like controls seats animations destruction lighting you name it if it's part of the ship I have to check and make sure it works before I can sign off of course there's no promises with this we're still exploring this we're still

32. 00:25:11

    building it out and we won't really know if it works this way or delivers the behaviors that we're hoping for until we actually see it in game it just gets really exciting when you see something line up the way that like mmm you know I bet we could do something with that so we'll see how that goes among other interesting things about this ship is I got to set up it sounds dumb but it makes me really happy that I set up a light switch in the terror pen that's correctly integrating with our power system and correctly integrates with our light groups to set it from the on to the auxiliary behavior and it uses the new interaction system and it's it's a simple thing but it makes me so happy to have something so simple in game and

33. 00:26:01

    reacting the way that you'd expected to when the ship loses power those lights go off and that light switch doesn't help when the ship is in emergency mode you can turn the lights off but the the emergency lights aren't a part of that system so they keep going everything behaves the way that you'd expect it to is it's these early examples of of systemic winds that really are really nice reminders of why we're building things the way that we are so so that ultimately it's as simple as make it the way you expect it to be made and in it and that it behaves the way you expect it to behave it's just really nice when that happens when we get to the point where it where a system begins to be it begins to exhibit those systemic

34. 00:26:47

    behaviors with that this month shipshape comes to a close but don't worry we're gonna be right back here next month with updates on the Aegis reclaimer and the tumble cyclone and of course keep an eye out for the launch of the aegis Vulcan concept for all backers next week on February 22nd and of course the subsequent Q&A post after that first ship shape I'm content manager Jared Huckaby we'll see next time everybody thanks Jared yes Thank You Jared like to say it a lot both of these ships will be nice entry points into very different career types that star citizen the Terrapin is a great ship for aspiring explorers and the Vulcan is going to be a particularly great for players that want to get into supporting other ships in combat and exploration remember the concept sale starts next week so be sure to check it out Jared we'll be back next month with

35. 00:27:36

    another shipshape and tune in tomorrow at 8 a.m. PST for another episode of reverse the verse live yeah well Jeremy on that one to me well basically so this week's guest is lead systems designer damn trophy he'll answer questions about AI and naturally gameplay systems so you won't want to miss that and you can get even more Q&A with Jared and developers from all of our Studios on calling all devs airing every Monday yes Jared son that one says yes yes you can check out this week's episode now as well as the most recent book smashes which had yesterday which I actually don't think he's not thanks as always to our subscribers for sponsoring these and all of our shows and of course thank you to all our backers for continuing to make the development of all our games possible we couldn't do any of this without you that's right and that's all for today until next week we will see

36. 00:28:24

    you around the verse [Music] thank you for watching so if you want to keep it with the latest and greatest in the star cities in the squadron 42 development please follow us on our social media channels see you soon