Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Ship Pipeline Pt. 2: Greybox to Flight Ready

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   hello and welcome to around the verse our weekly look at the development of Star Citizen I'm Eric Kiren Davis Senior producer and I'm Steve Bender animation director over here at cig so Eric I heard you be on a WonderCon panel this hour yeah I'll be joining narrative designer Chris Avalon uh author Janice Davis screenwriter Adam G Simon and composer Shawn pack to discuss how to make a career as a creative professional well very cool and that's for WonderCon attendees yes if you have a badge you can attend and I'd love to see anyone who can make it there on Saturday event details can be found online in your Wonder con program awesome well we have a great episode today to celebrate its reveal in the 262 patch we can finally share share part two of the ship pipeline video that follows the

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   completion of the Drake Buccaneer but first let's go to Brian Chambers in Germany for their Studio update hi everyone I am Brian Chambers the development director here at Foundry 42 Frankfurt uh we started Foundry 42 Frankfurt a little over two years ago with six employees this past month we just signed our 7eventh member of the team 70 we've come a long way in a short time from an office mostly filled with empty desks to now in almost full full office working across most all disciplines this past month has been busy as usual at one point we had I believe 15 visitors here from other offices working across various disciplines we occasionally travel to the other offices to meet and discuss future plans review progress in certain areas uh kickoff large tasks Etc so let's jump right into it see what the

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   team's been working on over the past few weeks starting off with the weapons team the FPS weapon artist finished a second art path on the Clauson verer arkite 2 the gallant and the arrowhead these now include new venting mechanisms which add much more visual interest when you're doing things such as reloads and so on uh they also completed the first art pass on the cak Arms ravager 22 and a second art pass on the CAC arms Devastator with an additional layer of detail for the ship weapons we completed all the rockets and Rocket pods ranging from size one all the way to three as well as the first art pass for the nightsbridge arms ballistic cannons we

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   can now use those various sizes to test out the new modularity system and various upgrade levels and combinations to see what we can come up with in the office here in Frankfurt we recently hired a lead lighting artist uh to work with a global lighting team one of his first tasks was modular surface Outpost and determining how we'll integrate Lighting in such a way that it feels coherent across potentially countless permutations of The Outpost layout every single room could have a different arrangement of props and objects which then dictates where lights would logically be placed as well as the specific theme or mood for that room that we're after for example crew sleeping quarters need to have a different mood than a hydroponic slab Etc our first step though is to

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   integrate simple lighting variations into the procedural system so we can discover and solve any issues that may arise such as light leaking through walls or certain lighting variations looking incorrect when placed next to each other and so on see really see what conflicts at the same time these technical challenges we're also focusing on creating a visual Target for our main room types habitation Hydroponics engineering storage see how far we can push the lighting to match our Concepts and goals for the interior look of our surface outposts when these are finished we can then determine how to break the lighting down into modular components that can then be fed all the way back into the procedural system and be applied to all

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   the other procedural bits we have uh the tech Guard team here in Frankfurt worked on multiple skinning tasks this month including clothing for both the Pu and Squadron 42 to widen the range of customer uh character customization and a skinny pass on the final vanuel mesh so the animators can work across on their animations they worked on a tool for the animators to redirect their walking animations to turn animations it's a fairly simple tool uh but ultimately it reduce the time that the animators need to spend on creating those specific animations in a sense it allows us to to reuse and cycle uh they also created a tool to allow the team to quickly update the exact grip placements of individual weapons artists

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   can now use a reference mesh create an offset hit export and immediately see the changes live in engine uh this things makes things much more efficient allows them to iterate much more quicker than they did before the level design team here in frankfurt's busy working on the modularity of space stations and surface Outpost as seen in a recent ATV episode as an initial proof of concept we have five versions of The Outpost that we're moving forward with in the future we'll be able to create a large number of outposts with different layouts and purpose but as an initial step we focus on just a few to ensure that the systems props placement of planets blah blah blah blah all working together as we intend uh the truck stop is our first

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   test of modularity in space stations we've been working on customizable hubs to be able to create variations using add-ons and procedural plot placement to add flavor to various rooms the modularity of space stations also extends to how the rooms connect to one another following pre-made flowcharts we're currently working with Engineers to get it functioning in game and get it all going the way we actually intended to be the system design team has been continuing their work on the usable system as we've also recently discussed uh they've also been working with the cinematics team and helping to establish the final look and feel that we'll have for the conversation system and the

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   progress is going good uh for the engine team we generally discuss what they've been doing for the procedural Tech and they've continued to make great progress there but I thought I'd dig a little bit deeper into a couple areas this month so uh yeah here goes we finally finished the physics grid refactoring which is used to store each individual physical object in the world and to allow for fast neighbor queries such as give me all the objects within 10 m and it has all the bells and whistles now active the old Legacy cry physics grid system worked by projecting the entire world onto a fixed 2D array of Cs of uniform dimension for memory reason the old system was configured to huge cell sizes to allow for our massive

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    worlds which led to severe performance problems when dealing with lots of small objects as well as lots of entities returned due to the fact that the grid would wrap around every few thousand kilometers uh to address these issues the new grid system was designed to have a sparse and fixed hierarchy of nested 3D grid cells of various sizes where objects would get inserted into different levels of the fixed hierarchy depending on their size we can therefore efficiently handle objects of the size of a planet several thousand kilometers in radius down to small Pebbles just a few centimeters across initial performance tests once it was in in the Crusader have proven the new grid to be

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    vastly more efficient 10 times less entities return for small queries and queries in general faster in the magnitude of 1.2 to few times while using slightly more memory than our Legacy system on the animation front our lead animation engineer Evo hereg has been quizy busy for quite some time um he's been building the core Foundation of our AI movement I want to give you some insight into his progress and give you some examples of what he's been working on most of our animations were motion captured which is a perfect for perfect solution for cutcenes and all types of linear animations where things are fixed and predictable but you can't use mocap data directly for animations that need to be truly interactive uh like we'll have for both

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    the player and the AI to use the map data in interactive situations we must break down the longer motion clips into shorter clips and generate multiple variations of the same motion style as an example for a simple walk cycle we need walking at different speeds walking in circles walking on slopes and walking in different directions such as strafing Etc a typical AI character in Squadron might have about a thousand of these small little motion Clips it's impossible to create unique animation clips for every single given situation that's why we developed a blending technique that we call parametric blending which enables all these clips to be controlled at runtime parametric blending takes the concept of simple animation blending and

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    moves it to the next level the goal is to make the outcome of the transitions or an interpolation predictable for an undefined number of assets each motion clip contains a combination of physical and stylistic properties um we call those the natural motion parameters because they're inherently part of the motion itself to control a character in a game we want to pass these natural motion parameters to the animation system and let it generate the motion we need itself once we have enough animation Clips we put them into what we call a blend space the most important aspect of a blend space is that each animation clip represents a point in a coordinate system and all points are connected by

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    an index list in a blend space we treat blending as a geometrical problem the geometrical relationship between the animation clips is extremely important for the blending to work correctly and the placement of these assets into the blend space is set up so it's fully automatic due to how the animators set up their locators before they export their animations in a single blend space we can have more than a hundred unique animation clips and we can control all of them like a single animation what you see here is an example of a 2d blend space in this case we put the travel speed on the X and the turn speed on the Y we can move the red cursor over the plane and for each

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    coordinate we get a blended motion with the correct parameters this means we can generate all motions between a slow walk and a fast walk while maintaining the correct turn speeds in this test area we can move the cursor in any place or Direction and always get the correct Blended motions back here's an example Le of parametric starts and stops that lead in and out of the Walk cycle you can see how a character starts to walk in the direction we select and then he walks it at different speeds with different turn angles and stops to the left right right foot left foot Etc uh blend spaces are not only limited to simple motion Cycles uh they can be used for most AI motions in our vast Universe enabling our a AI characters to

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    move fluidly and realistically throughout the entire world it's great to see Evo's progress and it's definitely going to have a strong impact on our how our AI navigate around the world the engine team also did improvements uh to the objects blending with terrain the underlying terrain and object shapes are now taken into account to blend procedurally distributed objects more naturally with the planetary generated environment and hope to show you those improvements soon the QA team here in Frankfurt grew by one member this past month James Stevens our new senior QA tester he immediately stepped up and took charge of pioneering the testing of the loadout editor the

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    load out editor is heavily used by our devs across all four locations so it only made sense for us to increase the depth of testing we do for it on a daily basis Melissa strata also spent some time testing the first version of the solar system editor also known as soled the engineers went over Sol Ed's functionality we gathered initial feedback from the team uh QA was there they documented all the feedback and now they'll work closely with the engineers to find the best way to address each item um and how to test it and work with them in the future to get all those resolved they also supported the engine team with testing of a few separate things such as up ated Planet physics grid and refactoring of the texture streamer Logic the AI team this month

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    completed some work on Mission related functionalities for both the Pu and Squadron 42 designers they also worked on improving the setup for complex conversation scenarios where multiple characters need to interact with one another the first step to achieve this was to allow the subsumption logic to run on top of the players this allows us to execute some Logic on the players on predefined story scenes but also make sure that the AI system can fully communicate with the player and interact with them the subsumption tool which you've heard a lot about has also had some improvements on the conversation setup and kicked off work on what we call the conversation sub activities the sub activities describe the logic for multiple

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    characters in one view to make it easier for designers to synchronize interactions between the characters and the environment under the hood these conversations will still result in unique sub activities that will run on different characters so that we can still guarantee that each individual entity can still handle further events and situations uh on their own they also completed the first pass on refactoring of the perception for spaceships we currently have a general perception component on characters that can handle several types of Senses normal human will obviously have things such as vision and hearing but once sitting down inside a spaceship they'll also be able to interface with that

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    spaceship's radar and the group information about the different Senses Into its perception component this will now allow us uh allow us to progress easily towards more character control behaviors on spaceships since we're moving strict dependencies between the game code and specific behaviors running on the vehicles themselves cinematics team as always is making steady progress uh across multiple chapters this month uh some implementing brand new scenes some they're polishing existing ones as I previously mentioned I unfortunately can't show anything specific at the moment without spoiling anything and they'll all yell at me uh in the coming months though we're hoping to show you a

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    few bits uh to really give you an idea on the quality bar that we've Set uh We've set the bar high for ourselves and it'd be good to uh show that off and the work that we're proud of VFX team here in Frankford is continued working on planetary effects the systems for implementation have been progressing nicely thanks to the close collaboration between the VFX artists and our Engineers here they started implementing some of the new effects on the planets including various atmosphere and weather effects as well as more specific effects for VAR types of assets that will be distributed with the object scattering system the Frankfurt environment team has been primarily focused on finalizing the moons the procedural asset distribution

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    system has seen a lot of progress and is still improving all the separate pieces that make up our procedural planets and moons are truly starting to fall in place you could say and things are looking great so that wraps us up for Frankfurt thank you for all the support that everyone gives us on a daily basis the team honestly truly really appreciates it and I'll see you again soon that look at parametric blending really shows how creating something like walking animation which sounds really very simple is actually difficult to do in an interactive Universe yes there is a a lot of inovation involved in developing new gaming tools but it's worth it especially when you want to create a detailed and realistic final product as you may have heard the 262 update was released to the PTU we've

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    been receiving helpful feedback from players which the team is using to fix as many bugs as possible before it goes live and as you probably saw in the forums the latest patch includes an addition to the Drake interplanetary lineup the buccaneer we decided not to announce the inclusion of the buccaneer before the evocati release because we weren't quite sure how the untested ship would fly fortunately the Buccaneers surpassed our expectations to celebrate we're having a drake sale for the next 10 days you can get the buccaneer dragonfly caterpillar and more speaking of the buccaneer a while back Sandy Gardner and Forest stefen premiered part one of the ship pipeline featurette in it the team followed the ship through the first half of its production pipeline to showcase the process each of our ships takes to become flight ready yeah and if you haven't seen it I highly

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    recommend going back and watching that feature at to see how the buccaneer went from concept art to basic white box model and then back to the ship artist for the gray box phase well with the ship flight ready we can now share the second part of the ship pipeline feature app we're picking up right where we left off with the gray boxing and the buccaneer completed take a look last time we spoke about the white box stage and the gray box stage since then we've moved on to doing the final art stage and what we call flight ready stage and that's really where it's just putting the extra polish into the ship uh making sure not just that it flies but that it flies how we want it to uh not just that you can blow it up and

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    that takes damage but that it looks fantastic when you do that it has the right amount of Health uh its Shields are working and soaking the amount of damage that we're intending them to and really just putting all the final touches on the ship what we essentially do is we finish off the surface of the ship so we decide what materials uh any of the geometry is going to be so if we're going to go with a raw metal or a painted metal we'll uh make sure we create all the textures necessary for each material so you know we have wire textures um we'll go ahead and use uh Palms which is a parallax occlusion mapping texture it's basically a decal which makes the surface looks like it has a lot more detail geometry wise than it actually does um and we'll use that in order to add rivets to the surface

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    cut lines um onto the wings as an example where no actual geometry exists so it looks far more detailed geometry wise than it actually is which makes it more efficient to run an engine it uses less resources but it looks great it ends up looking like there's tons of detail on the ship uh and it's actually one of our favorite parts to start working on once we get to that stage it really is about detailing it and sort of bringing the ship to life in terms of the way it looks uh because we have a lot of freedom as to how we make these cut lines you know start dancing across the ship without actually having to affect the geometry in any significant way we'll make sure during that stage also to finalize all the animations so we'll bring in Jay Brushwood in Texas in order to finalize all that change the timing on the animations if we need to

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    finally get to give my hands in and get nitty-gritty in terms of setting up pivots the hierarchy structure of the ship and for those that you don't know the hierarchy is basically a parent child relationship uh for instance it's like your hand being a child of your forearm your forearm being a child of your upper arm same thing deal on the ship we've got all sorts of hierarchy structures where things can Branch out and do their own thing for instance with the landing gear the foot of the landing gear is going to be attached to the ankle of the landing gear and then we might have Pistons that you know uh go in and out of each other and and that allow the landing gear to fully retract in and so anyway after setting up all that uh I get the opportunity to go ahead and work on the timing of the

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    animations and this is where you know you actually add the bit of you know flare with overlapping action and uh a lot of other principles of animation of of how things you know uh deploy and uh the various parts of the ship that that we end up uh setting up animations for are things like the landing gear the ladder entry the canopy opening and closing all sorts of this stuff needs to be worked out and then we export that all to game and once it's exported to game the next thing we do is we set up the character interactions and this would be the character climbing in and out of the cockpit opening up a drawer you know opening up a hatch uh all the various things for me the whole process is kind of building up puppet that I

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    then get to play with and the animation part is where it comes to life and that's where the illusion sort of comes together this is also the stage when we allow the VFX team to come in and start doing all of their effects for thrusters as an example so the difference between the effects that you'll see on the the buccaneer compared to other uh Drake ships would be pretty much driven by what that ship looks like and what the function of that ship is compared to the other ships uh I suppose the best example is the the thrusters so the the color scheme and the style of the Thruster effects for the bucaneer they're going to be sharing similarities with the other Drake ships however the thrusters are a specific shape on that ship and the the thrusters actually animate in a specific way to that ship so that's going to drive what our effects look like compared to the other

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    ones so the VFX pipeline itself um we will have we will go to from the uh the R&D to the blockout we then have the the first pass which is the the artist's first attempt to getting that effect as as kind of good as it can get it and then that will get reviewed uh we will provide feedback from that review and then it goes into the Polish pass so the Polish pass is is once that's done and once that's signed off and it's been optimized as well um because that's a big part of the getting the effects finished in the game um then that's it then the effects are done for that ship and we consider it flight ready UI likes to be involved with with kind of all Milestones of of the pipeline from from the gray box and the white box um Al B A lot of the ships use the same UI style um there's there's definitely quite a

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    few that uh will require unique screen shapes and sizes we have a lot of great upcoming ships that have very unique bespoke uh designs on them so the earlier we know about those designs that the quicker we can start working on the visual side of things um but as as for the buccaneer and a lot of other ships they uh quite a lot of them use the same template system so UI can be kind of hands off until the very end when it when it came to doing the buccaneer thankfully we had a very clean and smooth pipeline introduced already so plugging the new screens in was instantaneous basically after after the 3D modelers came in um there's very few customization that need to be done eventually we want to have the Drake ships have their own looking feel the the Anvil ships everything kind of um while they might have the same screen

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    sizes and Screen ratios we want them to have their own unique colors and feel and and different shape language our audio production Nicola gr um takes care of communication between our discipline and the other disciplines we can see that sort of large ships are coming down the pipeline we can allocate time to work on those smaller ships are going to be going to require less time so the smaller ships tend to wait until more towards the end before we start working on them but they all need to have the same amount of emotional connection with player um so for example with the Drake craft we're looking at um you know the lineage the The Herald the caterpillar

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    these other ships what they sounded like and what they felt like to fly it's quite different from the buccaneer the buccaneer is far more kind of finessed than say the herald the Herald's like a can with the rocket strap to it I mean it's it's like it's going to explode any second and that's part of its charm you know it's sort of agricultural and this is a feeling we get from it but we can only really tell that when the ship's got all its decals and detail and and stuff in situ and we can decide what that that should sound like here's the herald thrusters for a quick comparison so you can hear that engine there it's Roar your strap to a rocket and here's our

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    Buccaneer that's the Drake sound yeah the thrusters are made up of lots and lots of layers and here's one of them that gives it a very distinctive tone as we Traverse the thrust range here moving up towards maximum thrust he the sound morphing and changing in character right up to the top and then back down again that's kind of a synth layer in the background giving it some character so this synth element is just

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    one element of many that make up the compound Thruster sound but look how many real-time parameters are bound to this single synth sound all of these here are going to react to the player's input to the ship controls and they all change the pitch and the filtering and the volume of the various Elements which gives it a very organic feel you know as one element rises in tone with a strain on the ship another electronic Buzz might fall in tone in a sympathetic way and in turn that provides a very natural interaction within the sounds and that's exactly how we um give the ships more of a voice a realistic flexible character and this extends to even the ambient

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    sounds in the ship as well they all have these real time parameters assigned to them taking the the lineage from the other Drake ships and bringing it across to the new ship is what we're trying to do but also create something unique in the new ship it's not like a kit bash it's not the sort of copy paste from an old ship to a new ship it's about taking ideas from those uh other Drake ships and bringing them across into the new sound design sessions for the for the buccaneer but creating something um unique in the process as well then the

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    last stage in the process for us on the art side is the flight ready stage and during this stage we are we are not really focusing on what the ship looks like anymore we've already sort of finalize that but we are filling in some of the gaps that are necessary for for a game play to be fully fledged on the ship so what that means is we need to build damage I am involved in every ship in the pipeline and and I get I jump in about white box stage after concept's done the modeling gets laid out design has put some uh features in I'll go in and I'll look at the what the design is what's been done so far and uh start to uh think about destruction very early on we start to think about how the ship will break apart so we'll talk about how the meshes uh get divided very early and

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    in the case of the buccaneer uh Pat handled the damage and the lighting and I handled some of the optimization work and what we did for optimization was we uh do a process called skinning and it's like rigging a character um where you make several meshes a single mesh which reduces draw calls which R which improves performance and uh that also needs to be hooked up through our mannequin animation platform and driven through uh say the thrust of the the engine needs to dilate the nozzle of the engine so I had to hook that up and um the landing gear of the ship needs to uh deploy and allow you to rest on a platform and have proper collision and

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    materials and so I handle all that when I get the ship from an artist the first things I do are I start to set it up for detachability um what that usually entails is going to Max and the XML setting up the variety of components like the wings detaching and normally uh in this stage we're getting this done so design can start to Iron Out Health values and how Parts break off and how it affects the flyability of the ship so before I even get into doing shaders and effects and making it uh look pretty just got to get it to work after I do all the detachments I set off how the pieces fly off the ship and those are called vectors so when you blow off a piece of Geo it's going to spin around right and that's based on its pivot point and then that's going to rotate and then it's just going to go flying off into space so I set up how that works uh after that I also go into the

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    XML and I set up pieces that will detach with other pieces so say for example you blow off a big huge engine on the buccaneer right but there's a Wing attached to that there's also a Thruster and maybe there's a little wing flap behind it you ask yourself if the explosion was big enough would it take off these other pieces surrounding it so shoot that and then you can have extra pieces fly off with actual probability so it's kind of random whether the pieces fly off or not uh that's actually just the sort of damage setup phase I want to get into making sure everything starts to look appropriate when it breaks off uh that involves getting ready for Shader damage that we've added um we've talked about that where we have the procedural damage Shader which melts across the surface um for that we needed to do what's called uv2 setup and now um if you know UVS are how your texture gets mapped onto the

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    surface of an object so in our game we have two sets of UVS we have one set of UV for the basic texture on your surface of your ship and we have another set of UVS for your damage map to melt and wear across you're creating like a mesh that closely resembles the shape of the actual ship and from there it's kind of trial and error actually there's really no tried andrue methodology for it and uh kind of working it out as we go quality gets better as we keep going through but that's a basic setup so now what I'm doing is once I get into the editor I've start to shoot the ship right and I'm testing and I'm making sure that there's two types of damage happening there's a decal happening when you shoot so a bullet hole will leave a burn or a bullet ding but there's also the Shader damage which should happen around it now the Shader damage is works for different weapon types so laser will leave like a melty wear and a bullet will leave an actual indent that has

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    metal as you keep shooting shooting shooting you can tear a hole um as you tear a hold the modelers have prepped it so that there's internal damage before Tech art can Implement any of the damage we have to build it so we need to actually generate the content that gets revealed in in the damage process the actual setup of it so we'll do internal damage structure so this is like I mentioned before this is where we build the internal structure for the wings and the body so that there's something there to show and we will also do an initial pass on what we call UV 2s essentially it's just a second UV Channel which we use to generate um procedurally on the Fly um an alpha map which then tells the engine where to reveal the damage on a ship after I've done the UV 2s and I've

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    tweaked and it looks good and there's lots of melting metal and all sorts of fun stuff going on I move on to the VFX um now there's multiple people working on VFX I'm doing more Preparatory VFX since I do the Shader damage there's two parts to it there's what's called squibs which are little kind of explosive charges that create Shader damage and radius I set the radius and Max and then there's actual particles like fire electricity smoke explosions you name it right now I don't actually build the particles but what I do is I go into a library where all the particles are held and I start to set up all the pieces and I pick effects and I put them where I think things are exploding are there tubes here maybe there should be gas is there you know something like that um after I set all that up and it looks great and there's Parts flying around and fire you know and smoke and stuff then I send it to the actual particle

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    guys who then do an optimization pass make sure that I'm using the correct libraries and the very last final bit is actually making sure that everything detaches correctly right so when a piece blows off does the gun go flying off with it um artists will generally do the lights on their ships so they'll do that as part of the art pass and then um we'll have the components so if a wing flies off and there's lights on the wing the lights should fly off with the wing that's part of the setup pass right a common sense but usually there's a bit more set up to it than that so with lighting there's two things we have what's called prefabs for multi-light which means that when a player gets in a cockpit seat it then powers on all the lights around him then we have what are called object container lights which are slightly different object containers in new tech someone else will talk about but uh basically when we have lights in an object container they're always on so we use these mainly for more interior

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    sometimes aesthetic lights that always just need to maybe be on anything needs power fits in a multilight I do all that in the ship's setup level so that's kind of post phase but that's the final phas and from there it's polish right you just shoot it make sure everything looks good there's no bad UVS no parts hanging on etc etc but for the most part that's the tech art pass and then it goes off to all the Departments for finalization yeah one of the the interesting challenges that always pops up as we're finishing off a ship are sort of the the random things it's like oh crap I can't believe I forgot that or uh just chasing down why something doesn't work for no reason uh one of the more notorious aspects of that is usually our Collision um so we we're actually just getting the landing gear in it all functions and

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    looks proper now but occasionally it doesn't want to act like it's turned on and so the ship can fall through the ground and just blow itself up for no reason right now I'm uh chasing up several Loose Ends we've got some Shader issues we got some texture issues so I'm also chasing up issues with the Thruster not delivering uh parameterized values to our nozzle correctly and the glow on the material that's inside the engine uh these things will all be solved before the the public finally sees it and it's just getting those little Parts lined up where it's like okay do we do we have to adjust this helper to get that cleaned up or do we have to adjust the landing gear itself uh and sort of chasing down almost to which discipline it's like okay th this is going to be the cleanest

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    fix for our problem uh this is going to be the best fix almost longterm for making sure that uh if we have to do something similar again it's like oh we can refren or refer to this ship because we fix that really clean there this way and we can apply that to what ever other ship you want to so I'm probably the last step the last person to get hands on with the ship um and that's kind of an overlapping stage where test and myself have a little back back and forth when the ship comes to us and it's about tweaking and taking what's already been designed for and making sure that that's the way it it is in game the process of balancing it it's kind of you need to be able to see how

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    um it's kind of like ranking it in in with all the other ships really so being able to see how all the other ships compare to each other that's kind of my job to make sure that nothing comes in with with fly tuning in particular this ship does not help perform where it should be it doesn't it's not too fast it's not too maneuverable where it should sit right where it should sit that's a it's a difficult thing to get right and it's often a lot of back and forth even now with um with testers internally and externally where they point out mistakes or imperfections in the flight model of the ship you know the sorry the flight tuning of the ship it's um when it comes to weapons it's kind of the same you know you've got you we need to make sure

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    that the the ship load out isn't too powerful when it comes to um dog fighting against each other when it comes to finding problems with imbalance like with weapon Loadout for instance it's up to me to to point that out to the designer in charge of the ship see if there's any leeway um the buccaneer being another example of that with it having a very large load out for weapons you know it's it hits it hits really hard it packs a punch I was concerned about that that it may be overstepping its um bounds a little bit in terms of wider balance so that conversation we had had it's um it's all about the tradeoffs so if we can ensure that that ship is weak but still hits hard and

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    that that's that's fine that's that's [Music] balanced I'm really not sure I'm supposed to be talking to you guys about this stuff uh we're not really going into all the details of the company right now well there's something Shady happening at Drake Enterprises that you won't want to miss and that's it for this episode of ATV we want to thank all the subscribers out there who make this show possible for the month of April

51. 00:40:54

    subscribers can test fly the gladious value the Valiant is the first ship to defeat the vanuel in combat sounds like an awesome dog fighter we're also giving an active subscribers uh big Benny's vending machine flare on April 17th so if you've been thinking about becoming a subscriber join before April 17th to qualify for this deal click on the link in the description below for more information of course Star Citizen exists because of our backers so thank you again for all your support tomorrow kick off your weekend with Star Citizen happy hour at 12 Pacific Ben Lesnik and Jared huby will be playing one of Chris's classic Games wing Commander Privateer Ben will also share some little known history about the game's development thanks for watching and we'll see you around the verse

52. 00:42:11

    thank you for watching so if you want to keep it with the latest and greatest and staff citizen of Squadron 42's development please follow us on our social media channels see you soon