Around the Verse: Episode 1.03 (2014.06.26)

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:02

   [Music] hey everybody Welcome to episode three of around the verse I'm Sandy Gardner and I'm James Pew Ben Lesnik is not here this week so I'll be feeling informed sorry about that guys keep the feedback coming uh the show has been changing and we're going to alter stuff as we see fit and and as you guys like because we do read everything you guys write we do I even read the stuff that said I look like schmeel I read the stuff that made me said I look awkward and wooden and kind of weird unnecessarily mean right see we're just people we read all

2. 00:00:50

   these things the arena Commander roll out continues uh tens of thousands of people are already joined the multiplayer Mayhem and the team is currently working on patches to allow more to join and have you picked up your on Scout check out this cool Thruster setup and we hit 47 million we did get 47 the stretch goals are back I know it kind of sounds a little boring but space plant space plant yes but you have to space water it space Sun we have a

3. 00:01:39

   winner for the Mustang contest we do we actually have two Runners up and one grand prize winner so the first runner up is DS random with his piece delivery boy variant second runner up is kick force with his Mustang for the gangsters and l2k is our grand prize winner with his racer variant and he will be receiving the David hobbins original piece of artwork woohoo yeah it's pretty cool huh congratulations news from around the verse work has begun at Behavior to revamp the discount business in Deluxe hangers they have also just about completed the asteroid hanger and only need to fix a few remaining bugs and it will be ready to go in the UK foundy 42 is kicked off design on the fourth

4. 00:02:27

   mission of Squadron 42 this will focus on a strategic plan to develop a vertical slice of the game the dog fighting module continues to see a lot of focus from the company graay box work has begun on a new speed highway map as well as a design for the muray Cup race mode on the FPS site of Star Citizen a first pass on the debug camera system has been implemented which helps to open up the development center around this module redacted has been working on improving SPF mechanics as well as weapon functionality in Austin work continues on the persistent Universe with focus on the first five systems Planet Side location and prototype shops a great deal of design focus is also being spent on the economy prototype and now for the ship updates we continues around the company and developing new ships for the game the constellation base and tourist versions are now complete with L and damage polish

5. 00:03:15

   continuing planning for damage States is also in progress with the cutless and Aventure and animation work has been started on the Mustang graybox work continues on the Gladius Retaliator Gladiator Panther and Javelin white boxing of the Bengal is in progress along with Bridge concepts for the javelin and continuing conceptual work on the f8 the Idris gray box is currently in review and will have an established implementation goals in the vehicle editor awful finally we have completed proportion and armor concepts for the Vandal character CS is really busy right now so unfortunately there will be no customer service update I know we'll all Miss Alexis and Chelsea they got to answer your tickets though right yeah I me however we do have an interview with our writer David hadock how are you Dave good good ready for your

6. 00:04:03

   questions all right so William George would like to know what are some cliches in science fiction settings or stories that you try to avoid and why that's a good question um little green men so far we haven't done that so we've tried to actively stay away from them uh I mean my personal one is just it's more of a a general cliches the um like kind of moral absolutes you know those are the the bad guys you know cut and dry Bad Guys these are the white hat good guys uh I don't know personally I always just get I find this it can be fun but it it gets thin kind of quick and particularly because we're trying to create a universe that has a lot of longevity that it doesn't really lend itself well to what we're trying to do like we want that sort of moral complexity where you can kind of it may be bad but it's sort

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   of a perspective on bad and what is bad what is good you know that type of stuff so uh I would stick with that I think that's a good one some science fiction stories you really admire maybe I mean kind of for that reason the I didn't like the way it ended but the third season of battl Star had that really very weird morally gray type area uh cuz they were like suicide bombers and it was I me it was and those are the good guys I mean it was really it got really crazy uh but you know I love Firefly Cowboy bbop you know all that stuff like this really Cowboy Bop yes all right so hack Benjamin would like to know there are a lot of flavor articles stories and whatnot and we aren't even out of alpha I'm an original backer but it's been tough to keep up with everything can you paint us a word

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   picture of the current state of the Galaxy uh complicated uh kind of yeah going back to the previous answer I mean it's sort of for that reason it's there's been a lot of sort of complicated storylines that have been sort of introduced and you know I mean we have a lot of time until the game comes out so it's you know it's it's a big universe there's just a ton of stuff to fill in so so how do you keep it up up with it all you write your stories and they have certain planets that they're allocated to or um yes uh I mean it's sort of right now it's sort of in sections we're sort of the human stuff is sort of getting the most attention right now but we're sort of expanding into and and working out as much as we can on the humans now uh because that's going to be the sort of Baseline for for the players uh and then move on to the

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   Shion and move on to the Banu and so the hopefully the idea is that we we can kind of focus on them intentionally and uh flush them out organically in a sense so we're not sort of bouncing from place to place to place and so it starts to starts to conflict but uh it's it's tough because it's huge I mean there's so much there's so much to cover that and so many a thousand years of History to come up with so sure all right jack T Colton would like to know you have mentioned in the past that you draw most of your inspiration from music whilst writing to capture the essence of a scene or emotion what type of music do you think applies to each of the alien races in Star Citizen ah I don't know that's a good that's a

10. 00:07:18

    good question the the one that I've sort of I mean I think everyone loves mtown just because why not uh the Shion for some reason I had sort of this this idea that there's something because their society is very kind of controlled and regimented that that they they love uh I think it's Baroque music uh because it's very precise and it has to be like very regimented the timing is very important so it's like technically very proficient type of music that it might be that not necessarily that's what they generate but as far as they actually respond really well to that in human history so like there's an element of Shion that really admire you know I I believe it's broke I might be misspeaking but uh that type of music uh classical music exactly is there an alien race that has like a cowboy bbop

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    feel so they're one way but they listen to completely separate uh different music I mean it feels like the Banu might have that sort of funk flavor to them because they're they're pretty Dynamic civilization so it it probably wouldn't surprise me if they had a very kind of enthusiastic or boisterous uh musical style that they kind of get into or they just like jazz sure who doesn't like Jazz right Hydra kiosk looking forward to playing the adventures you and your team are creating for us I'd imagine that writing for a game has to be more difficult than say writing a novel what are some of the unique challenges you face when composing SC story well with the squander 42 which has been sort of the focus now uh it's not having a main character because we're letting the

12. 00:08:54

    players create their own avatar the sort of fundamental one of the fundamental tools of Storytelling is being basically taken out because we can't write for a main character to go on this journey so we have to account for everybody and we can't have any kind of prior knowledge so I can't say all right well this you know Commander Shephard or Jack Bower or whatever came from this background because your character may come from from a different background than my character does so we can't we can't plan for that uh so that's been definitely one of the biggest challenges and you know and that comes down to the sort of interactive nature of this story too so uh yeah it's it's nice to have main characters that you can write for sounds like you need to be good at mathematics or something all the permutations if like Choose Your Own Adventure if you're this character

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    then maybe this there's a lot of that like yeah the you made this decision here so that has to come back into play here yeah it's a very weird kind of much more technical uh approach to to storytelling than than any other thing I've ever seen it's really strange murck would like to know will there be any sort of reactive writing to player driven events in the persistent Universe say a group of players succeed as starting a colony could you then write a scenario relative to that colony hit play and watch how the other players handle it yes I think it's definitely from very early on you know that was one of the things was that uh that Chris had talked about was getting to the point where we are just reacting to what the players do so when they you know the

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    most obvious one that I always kind of throw out is is Jump points you know you as a player discover a jump point you sell it to the uee you go down in history as the person who discovered that jump point you know we write a news article about the discovery of this jump point we get a sound bite from you you know and so you become the players become a dynamic part of the lore itself uh and you know with the organization systems and all that stuff like that I mean you know if there's a huge two organizations duking it out in a star system you know that's news you know uh so uh yeah I think the the universe is going to react to that and we'll accommodate for it so that sounds complicated too yes forsa would like to know what is your favorite sci-fi novel and who is your favorite sci-fi

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    writer uh I don't know if it actually classifies I actually was I I sometimes it it will be listed as a Sci-Fi novel but uh I am legend by Richard maton uh was probably one of the books that I I read every couple of years cuz it's only about 150 pages so it's really not not big but something about it just I I absolutely love but uh like the movie too no fair enough no uh sometimes it's never as good as the book right yeah they well yeah they made they made choices in there that were very bizarre uh right but and what about your sci-fi Rider I'm a big Neil Stevenson fan so I like snow crash Diamond H cryptonomicon I tackled anathem yet but it's because it's a thousand pages and I that I've read snow crash but

16. 00:12:06

    it's all right everybody this sounds quite complex uh if anybody is going to get this done it's Dave hadock because he's incredibly disciplined and has been here from the start yep when it was just us three we'd shout across the office and now you got to wage for about 30 people before that happens um so we hope to have riters Corner every week a little snippet um um but Dave's not so ke to me on camera and nor the other writers but we'll work that out somehow so thanks Dave sure hey everyone Mark aent here welcome back to bug Smashers bug smashes today's bug got dropped into my lap not because I wanted it but because

17. 00:12:58

    one of our fun designer decided to take the day off so lucky me the programmer gets to look into what's happening in the deluxe hanger with a fun vehicle or in this case shitty Behavior so today's bug is looking at The Hanger and why the vehicle is flipping around like crazy oh that is weird so one of the first things that you'll notice is the ground has the no drop texture which

18. 00:13:47

    means our buggy here has no friction on the ground so it's able to slide like crazy pretty bad the steps to figure out what was going wrong was a bit hectic um because it was actually two parts of the bug know we had the first part of the bug which was the buggy sliding across the floor which was due to uh the level not having any um surface friction and that was as a result of the texture not having the right surface properties the way we found that was actually by accident Dan Tracy mentioned to us when we were looking look at it to hey why not use the debug gun to see what the surface property is the ground is set to

19. 00:14:35

    no draw which means it has no friction which means buggy will just slide all the way across the ground the second part of the bug was something is causing the buggy to when it hit something just freak out and just jump all over the place and go ballistic that one took a little bit more effort because we had to step into the physics code and look at all the physics interactions the momentum the impulses to see what was happening someone decided to set the vehicle gravity to 30 m/s okay which is three times above normal gravity and because of that the spring force was assuming the gravity was 30 which resulted in higher spring Force any he would at U normal gravity

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    and in that low gravity environment it just shot the vehicle all the way around and it only happened in this level because of that initial surface having no friction in another levels you could hit things but it didn't do the same thing for some random reason so now I'm in level and as you can see the buggy no longer freaks out and if I turn on my debug gun I now have the correct surface so we have friction and the vehicle's no longer freaking out we could even now go in it and crash into all the things now that it's fixed everyone can now hop into the buggy no longer need to hit the shift key to move they could

21. 00:16:13

    actually use WD or whatever joystick they want to use to move around and then go and jump around or you could just boost like before and cut [Laughter] see this our game broke someone's Nvidia card this is what happens when you try to use the buggy in the hanger hey everybody Le moderator will here with this week's MVP this week's MVB goes to EV slipstream as he's drawn

22. 00:17:03

    inspiration from the constellation to build his own real life spaceship cockpit currently in its alpha build the sfr slipstream will be able to hold five crew members and will be a fully functional Bridge once completed also he's been updating his thread with impr progress photos so be sure to check it out thank you very much Evar you're this week's MVP James I was able to get a sneak peek at

23. 00:17:53

    some really cool artwork no how'd you do that check it out oh next week we have programmer Mark Avent that's cool good news for everyone who likes mouse pads and patches they are now both back in the store and we have a very cool one to give away which has been signed by everybody in the dev company here in La how we going to do okay let's get that's awkward and weird uh and we're going to send this to somebody and how does the person win uh we want your funniest Microsoft Paint version of one of our ships we do okay cool we do when do we

24. 00:18:41

    want that byy next week next week there we go see you next week post your feedback to the forums this is your show yes thank you guys so much for joining us again thank you for all your support and we'll see you next week around the verse around the verse you James what we're trying to shoot MVP man

25. 00:19:58

    wake up I'm sorry man you were lucky Ben's not here he would lose his mind he