Inside Star Citizen: Sprint Showdown | Summer 2022

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:05

   star citizen is a big game with big ideals bigger aspirations and some of the very biggest spaceships and while there's lots to do in the persistent universe with more and more things being added to every patch it's these spaceships that sit at the center of everything that's why each year the community votes big in our annual ship showdown your chance to determine the best of the best and award the winners with new and exclusive paints and since this year's event starts up on monday in like four days we've got a special all vehicle sprint report for you this week a sprint showdown if you would and we're going to start with a big look at the upcoming drake corsair seen over the course of two consecutive sprints as the ship moves through gray box phase

2. 00:00:53

   you can see the exterior detail beginning to take shape as this sprint focused primarily on the nay cell and connecting areas of the starboard side of this asymmetrical vehicle to build them out so they feel properly big and chunky and structurally and functionally sound as is the drake way now the lighter gray areas are the original concept mesh which serves as a guide to artists to maintain the original scale and shape whenever possible the drake visual style is often about layering with the interior structure poking out from beneath the more clad exterior and as grey box continues it'll get closer and closer to the detailed mesh of the concept while maintaining the performance and optimization standards developed since it was first

3. 00:01:41

   envisioned now not every part of a ship moves through the pipeline at the same pace as you can see here with the remote turret jumping from concept mesh straight ahead to final art since it's a relatively small self-contained and not needing the same level of iteration part as the rest of the ship and we also have this look at working out the landing gear a hallmark of any gray box phase making certain it's both stylish enough to maintain the manufacturer look while functional enough so that the physics system won't topple the entire ship over unless the wind kicks up or burks lands it savage and on the inside this sprint also featured work on the crew quarters with a mix of gray box and final artwork coming along quite quickly that's been

4. 00:02:30

   enabled by efforts of team members from previous drake ships [Music] and then two weeks later after the conclusion of another sprint you can see more additions made like the loading ramp a combination of several pieces that fold down and extend out to allow access through the rear of the ship and yes it's big enough for inersa and other similarly sized ground vehicles let's move up the ramp into the cargo hold where the process of gray box is

5. 00:03:19

   being tweaked to include material assignments adding a bit of color to the otherwise gradient only phase and allowing artists to better see engage shape breakout without having to dip into final art early as can sometimes happen here's another look at the landing gear two weeks on with improved animation and detail and perhaps most excitingly this sprint was where the wings were attached to the finished nacelles necessitating two separate attachment and transformation systems for each side due to the asymmetrical nature of the ship which you can see here with these little doors that open to allow folding up and then close down flat when extended for maximum aerodynamics

6. 00:04:07

   you may also notice the thruster flaps are being made to extend and contract to adjust the amount of force being exerted gotta love that drake functionality so feedback during this sprint was to push for a greater diversity between the attached sensor rods from the concept and the mounted weapons on the wings with additional considerations regarding the front loading hangers on planets and stations and the potential adjustments that may need to be made to the wings and well we're just going to have to see how those things progress over the next few sprints and while we're on the multi-sprint look at spaceships let's check in with a little tugboat that could the argo srv which entered greybox phase with one artist on the exterior and one on the interior and those eagle-eyed viewers

7. 00:04:55

   may notice that the ship has grown just a little bit in the cockpit area to allow for the inter-exit animations from the pilot seat and while we're in here let's take a look at the early gray box phase of the inside yeah you can see here that staff are taking craft from the raft especially in the aft because we're not daft i should i should stop this graph before i get the shaft there's no one left and then two sprints later we can see the srv much farther along in gray box phase getting all the main shapes in beginning the discovery of material breakup and really just refining the

8. 00:05:44

   entire model overall yeah you could say it's enough to make one shaft i'm sorry i have a problem to make up for that here are some follow-up images of the banu merchantman from the same time as our alien week segment back in june mostly to showcase how important having the right fov on your camera is an avoiding duckbill platypus face same ship correct fov sorry ben and moving from ship to ship feature news you can see here the first iteration of the vehicle salvage hud for the upcoming vulture reclaimer and more now on the left are all the details that are target relevant the remaining surface area your remaining cargo space and extraction rate

9. 00:06:33

   and on the right things like type of nozzle cutter and tractor the various attributes you'll need to manage and present range and then you can see their first still early implementation in engine as seen here on the vulture and then on the turret from a reclaimer now for how all this works what the final implementation looks like with a full ui and vfx and with the internal functionality that ends with a nice crate of materials that you can sell or trade well there's still some time between now and the release of alpha 318 so you can expect to see more as we get closer to release and as a neat bonus work on the gimbal system for hole scraping has led to new technology that may eventually change

10. 00:07:20

    the way all gimbals work what you're seeing here is variable drag and speed based on size and weight both for the gimbal itself and the item attached to it what this ultimately means is more customization for players allowing for faster smoother gimbals with smaller lighter items and weapons and a potential removal of the size restriction for weapons on gimbals letting players one day use them with weapons of a hardpoint's maximum size with the requisite trade-off in drag and speed it's a great example of work for one system potentially leading to improvements in another and then in preparation of one of the biggest life and the verse changes coming sometime next year the hammerhead just had a sprint retrofitting it with

11. 00:08:09

    internal power relays a necessary component of the resource management system that is at the center of everything from engineering gameplay life support increased time to kill on-site repair and the foundational basis for true multi-crew gameplay now there's still quite a journey ahead for resource management but it's exciting to see the work beginning to get integrated into the persistent universe proper now of course those are just the updates on the ships that we can currently tell you about ahead of citizencon and iae on this special showdown sprint report but maybe you're asking yourself hey jared ship's showdown 2952 doesn't start for another four days surely you've got something more than spaceships to show us

12. 00:08:55

    well it's still a little bit early but i suppose we can tease this look at recent tests of the ui card system a brand new way to take building blocks and display it dynamically and diegetically throughout the persistent universe in squadron 42. just don't tell anyone so what did we learn this week well we

13. 00:09:48

    learned that the corsair asymmetrical explorer from drake is making pretty solid progress through the ship pipeline that ongoing work on salvage and hole scraping may yet lead to positive changes for the combat experience through gimbal improvements that work is already underway retrofitting some of our ships for the enormous change resource management will bring later next year that fov is super important if you don't want three dozen duck memes of the banu merchantman and that ship showdown 2952 begins this monday and it's your chance to decide the best of the best over the following month for inside star citizen i'm jared huckaby here inside the performance capture stage where characters from star citizen and squadron 42 will be brought to life by tremendous performers as time goes on we'll see all here next week

14. 00:10:39

    let me do a couple gestures like you