Around the Verse: Episode 1.49 (2015.06.18)

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:01

   Coming up on the Empire Report, peace talks on Charon III collapsed last night, sparking heavy fighting in both states. Delan Governor Tarquin Glass cites the attack as proof of Archon's desire to continue fighting. Ship insurance scams reach an all-time high. With millions of credits on the line, will the UEE intervene? If so, what could their involvement mean for you? Controversy in the fashion world. Hawksworth spring collection turned more than heads today. Lido Gary is live in London with all the details. All that and more on the next Empire Report at 2200 SET. Welcome to Around the Verse, episode 49.

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   I'm Ben Lesnick and I'm flying solo this week. Vanduul are everywhere at CIG right now. Last week we showed you the very first look at the flyable Scythe in Arena Commander. It's being converted for human use and it will be included in the next major AC patch. We also revealed the look for the Void Bomber, the Vanduul's heavy bomber that includes everything from torpedoes to the ability to carry boarding ships. You'll be learning more about that as the Squadron 42 roll out continues and there'll be more Vanduul ships to see in the coming weeks. We actually have some more Scythe contact in this very episode of Around the Verse. You'll be seeing Zane talking about the UI and you'll hear a little bit more about the damage states. Of course, we know that the question on everyone's mind is where is the FPS module. And we still don't have a date to give you, but we are continuing to

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   work very hard at it. Additional resources from around the company, including some of our new programmers in Germany, are now working to try to get the net code up and running and out the door. We are very excited about showing FPS and no one is more eager to have it out than the team here at Cloud Imperium. So, keep checking the com links. We're hoping to go to PTU in the not too distant future. Chris Roberts is still in London working on the mocap and pcap shoot for Squadron 42 and all reports are it's going very, very well. We can't wait to see what he's been working on and frankly we can't wait to have him back at home. Few more weeks and that will be a reality. Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, it's E3 week. Developers from around the world are converging to show off the latest and greatest games. And our team here at Cloud Imperium has

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   had a chance to walk the floor this week and see some very cool titles. Nothing is great as Star Citizen though. Chris of course couldn't make it to E3 because of his responsibilities in London, but he was kind enough to send along a video message for the PC Gamer PC Gaming panel. Check it out. Welcome to Ealing Studios in London, England. This is fortunately where I am as opposed to being with you guys in Los Angeles for the inaugural PC Gaming press conference. I wish I could be with you guys. I'm so happy that we're actually having a dedicated press conference for PC games and they're

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   getting the appreciation and attention that they should at E3 and other gaming conventions and um well, I'm having a lot of fun here in London, England and we're doing amazing things with both Star Citizen and Squadron 42. We're really trying to push storytelling and the fidelity of performance capture, motion capture, how uh you relate to characters in a game, and that's only possible on PCs with the power of the platform, uh with what we can do in terms of uh facial animation, and what we can do in terms of character animation, what we can do in terms of building a visceral uh detailed world. Uh so, I wouldn't be here doing it without everyone out there that are PC gamers. Uh we're building literally a game that uh has a budget

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   rivaling any of the big studio uh publisher games out there, and that's done entirely from a grassroots level at the PC gamer level, which is amazing, cuz it's not financed by some big corporation, it's not financed by some big investor, it's financed by all you out there, and that just speaks to the power of PC gamers and what they want to see, the fidelity, the quality of what they want to see, and their passion of what they want to see. So, I'd like to say thank you. Uh next year I will be at the PC Gaming Conference. I'm uh looking forward to seeing what other stuff gets unveiled at the conference, and I'm looking forward to showing you stuff uh from Squadron 42 and Star Citizen uh as we develop it, and um thank you for listening. Now, that's what I call a short

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   promotional video. We put up the CitizenCon 2015 tickets last week, and wouldn't you know it, they are all sold out already. Thanks to your help, we're going to put on an awesome event. You're going to see some very interesting things, you're going to meet some very cool people, and it's going to be a good time. So, come October 10th, we look forward to meeting uh several hundred of you in Manchester, England, and uh we look forward to sharing everything with everyone else via livestream. And now, let's kick it to the Spectrum for the news from around the verse. Hi everybody and welcome back to Santa

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   Monica, California. I'm Travis Day. I'm Daryn Bolek. We're here to talk to you about a little news from around the verse. So, I guess we'll start off first with the fact that we are preparing for the Alpha 1.2.0 or that's what we call it internally at least the 1.2.0 release of Star Citizen. Uh with preparations for that, we are undergoing one of the things that Calex is doing is a full balance pass on the weapons, all the items, all the missiles. So, all of this feedback that we've collected from you, we've collected from QA, we've seen it on the forums, we've been reading it. Uh there's going to be a full top-to-bottom rebalance pass going into 1.2.0 that we're really excited about, really excited to have you guys try it. Uh and let us know what you think and kind of continue this iterative process that we have going for you guys. And including uh adjustments to like the physically based damage and So, the next thing we've got is actually In fact, you'll actually see this segment later on in this video is our UI designer, Zane Bien. He's working on the

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   HUD for the Vanduul Scythe and you're going to hear about some really cool features about what it's like to adapt Vanduul technology uh in human hands and how we're kind of running with that that theme of how we're going to integrate this into uh human flyability. Uh and the final one that we've got is last week we mentioned uh about our ghost system, game object state machine, where we have a series of triggers uh that activate certain aspects of the game. Previously, we mentioned about landing gears. So, one of the things that we're working on with uh one of our designers, Kirk Tome, and Matt Intrieri, and Dan Tracy is how we're going to integrate this into the lighting system. Uh for example, if you're in a Retaliator, if you're at X amount of damage, you know, warning lights kind of go off. Once it hits to a critical level of damage, warning sirens, um uh exit lights are turning on pointing you to

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    the nearest uh escape pods, whatever whatever is available for you to warn you to to leave the ship. Um also, things like when you open a door or when you power on the vehicle, certain headlights or certain overhead cabin lights turn on. So, we're trying to adapt the ghost system into our lighting as well. And and and fun stupid stuff like you walk into a room and it sequentially activates the lights as you walk through it and turns them off again, which is fun. Yeah, I like that stuff. Less important, but fun. Yeah, just kind of add like a little extra realistic ambiance to the the piloting experience. So. There we go. Thank you very much for joining us and uh we'll see you next time on Around the Verse. Hey guys, I'm uh David Langeliers. I'm

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    senior producer here at Illfonic on the FPS team. Uh so, a couple things I wanted to talk to you guys about today. Uh the first is a couple uh new grenades that are being built here. Um and I can't go into the details of the functionality of those grenades yet. Uh but I will just tell you that we started work on three new grenades from the art side. Uh so, these guys are currently in the process of building the high poly meshes. Um once they're finished with that, then uh we'll move on to the material phase. Um yeah, and I'll probably be letting you know uh on the functionality on some of these things in the coming weeks. Uh we think they're some interesting ideas and and not normally what you'd see uh as far as like tactical grenades. Um uh another thing we've been working on is network optimization. And so, uh recently with the item port system,

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    we've run into quite a few problems with networking uh where anything over roughly eight players or something like that was causing a lot of problems with players switching weapons and getting lagged out. Um luckily, our friends over at War Bite uh helped us out in doing some profiling and uh found a cap in uh the default CryEngine networking code that was uh basically throwing out packets once uh we were hitting the limit. So, after increasing that cap, we've been able to have successful test with a lot more people online now. So, uh that's helped that a lot. Uh the last thing I wanted to talk to you about was uh aiming down sights on weapons and how we're doing things here with the first and third-person uh shared animations and shared rig. So, uh one of the things that we had to do when fine-tuning all

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    the guns uh aiming down sights, uh since everything is animation-based, first we actually pulled out those animations and just purely had it in uh numbers for designers to tweak so that they could choose how fast they wanted the gun to come up, uh how much recoil was on the gun, all these different variables that you would normally have. Uh once they got those exactly how they wanted, then it was up to the animation team to then uh bring the animations for aiming down sights back into the game and make those match up as best as they could with uh the values the designers had put in there without the animations. Um so, that's a lot of the work that's going in now is just uh putting back in these animations to match all the designer values. Um but yeah, I think that's about it for this week. Thanks again, guys. Hey guys, Jake Ross here, associate

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    producer of the Persistent Universe, and here with me this week I have Emrys Switzer, associate lighting artist. And uh Emrys joining us uh from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He just finished up his first week here at CIG. Uh wanted to give him a little introduction. He's uh our helping us out with a few lighting tasks, um much-needed lighting tasks. Um so, Emrys, why don't you guys give us a little bit of of your background? Yeah, so I got involved with the CryEngine modding community back in 2011. I started up on some just some small modding projects. And somewhere along the way I heard about Star Citizen. Some of the people there posted about it. Got involved with it, started following the progress of it and uh I noticed there was an opening position for a lighting artist and I went and applied. Uh originally I didn't get a reply back, but I went on and I I did some mod work

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    and I put it up on Reddit and some of you guys saw it. It got upvoted. It was on the front page and thanks to all the Reddit users who upvoted it. It was all the the hangars, right? Yeah, the the discount hangars, yeah. The self-land hangar, yep. And there's one guy who gave me Reddit gold, so thank you. Um yeah, and apparently some people saw it, they liked it. I got an email, got invited out to the studio, came down, uh did an art test. It was really fun. Um met all the devs and then got the job and now I'm here, so. And uh what do you So what have you been working on your first week here? Um first of all, I just got things set up um until about Wednesday. That's when I started working on uh the Gold Horizon map, which is the FPS level, um which we'll be shipping in 1.2, which is the FPS module. So, it's really exciting that all my stuff is going to

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    be visible that soon. Um so you guys will be able to see it, hopefully. Uh I've been going in kind of just doing an optimization pass on all the lighting, making sure it's all up to par, getting all the PBR values correct so that everything looks and uh yeah, looks physically accurate, Cool. Awesome. We're happy you're here, Emre. And uh you know, there'll be lots of different PlanetSide locations here in the in the near future and far future uh that will probably have your stamp on it, so it's pretty awesome. It's awesome. Um cool. All right, thanks, guys. That's all we got for you this week. See you. Hi, uh I'm Eddie. Uh I am a senior environment artist at Foundry 42. Hi, I'm Nick. I'm a environment artist at Foundry 42 as well and we're both

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    world builders working on Shubin, the uh big mining station. Yes. So, world building as opposed to asset building is kind of we oversee levels, we work with design and layouts. we do the lighting, we worry about the budgets, the optimization. Um the asset builders build the bricks, we build the houses basically. It's a It's a good analogy, yeah. So, we're working on Shubin. Uh the big thing about Shubin for me personally is the scale of the place. It's big. It's huge. Um so, you've got a 6-km-long mining station. And uh basically, you can fly down to meter-scale first-person shooter areas. Yeah. So, there's quite a lot of landing pads uh on Shubin. Don't quote me, but there's more than 20 or so. Uh there's more than that, but yeah.

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    There's a lot of landing pads, but you can you have the first-person level uh detail when you're on the landing pad, and you can go inside Shubin, and there's some vast areas on the interior as well. And it's all first-person detail, and then it's And seamless as well. Yeah. No loading. So, um you basically go through an airlock into into your first-person areas, into your interior. Um the thing for me, I think the important thing about scale and getting scale across is that it's important in these things to have human relative stuff that a player can relate to in terms of scale. details. Um yeah, so you have windows or stairs or lamp posts. Stuff the player knows what size it is. And then you can start seeing, "Oh man, this thing is massive." Um yeah,

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    it's it's it's epic, this thing. It's it's huge. Um it presents certain challenges, but um we are overcoming them one by one, and it's um yeah, it's going to look really good. It's going to look really good. It's always that transition for me. Flying into Shubin, landing, going into the interior. It's amazing. It is, yeah. And it's It's exciting to see other planes flying around while you're first-person shooting. That's about it. So, uh we're assuming you'll enjoy the uh end result. See you next time. See you next time. Are we ever going to talk about these

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    postcards? Thank you to our studios from around the world for the incredible work you're doing. We can't wait to see more. Let's kick it over to James Pugh, who sat down with one of our 3D artists, Gage Hallman. Over to you, or should I say over to Pugh? Thanks, Ben. I'm here with associate 3D artist Gage Hallman. Gage, how you doing, man? I'm doing good. Thanks for coming on. Yep. So, what exactly does a associate 3D artist do? Um we do a lot of things. Um we usually take over tasks from higher artists and kind of handle the overflow. And so, we're more of generalists for this company. So, in the past I've done some proxy rigs for the Vanduul. Mhm. And then just handled, you know, clean up and bugs. And right now I'm handling internal damages. So.

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    So, it's kind of like you have your own work and then some other artist has something they need help with and they come to you guys? Yeah, they'll just dump it on us and we take care of it. Didn't uh we see you on TNGS? Yeah. Yeah. I was on a Team Shima Pon. Mhm. How was that experience? It was uh it was crazy cuz I was also a full-time student and I was graduating during the time it was going on. So, it was just a a crazy time. But, it was good. So, the the hectic nature of TNGS has that helped you as you get accustomed to how the day-to-day happens around here? Um I don't I wouldn't say that, but at the same time I don't think I'll ever go through through something like that again cuz that was just no schedule should ever be like that. Really? Yeah. How bad was it? Um kind of like working two full-time jobs. What's this job like? One and a half

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    One and a half full-time jobs, yeah. Perfect. I knew you were going there. So what exactly are you working on right now? Um so like I said before I'm doing the Scythe and then I basically build out the internal structure for that ship and then have worked on doing and assisting with UVs basically. So it shows what layers of the ship can be burned through and then you know the things that are underneath. And so I'm basically doing the first pass on that. So who besides you who else is working on the Scythe? Um it's me and two other people mostly. So Patrick Salerno, he's been doing most of the UV work and uh transferring those and then Kirk Tone has been doing the game setup. Does the Scythe present any interesting challenges other ships don't, specifically human ships? I would say so because it's a lot more organic in design and also chaotic. So basically like you'll see on upcoming

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    uh Vanduul ships the internals and design and like the the way the ship functions is basically nonsensical when you look at it but it still makes sense. It's kind of like maybe an old 80s action movie where things are just kit bashed together. So there's a lot of that feel going on whereas the human ships are way more planned and sort of clean. And then the Vanduul gives you much more interesting stuff to work with. How long have you been working on the Vanduul Scythe? Um let's see. I think now it's been about 2 weeks. 2 weeks? And did you get brought on by other people that were working on it were they kind of bring you together as a team? Yeah sort of um we hop back and forth on certain things cuz we're like multiple things in the pipeline at one time. So basically I'll be working on one thing and then somebody finishes up their part for the Scythe they can hand it off. I'll take over that and then hand it off again and then we just go back and forth until it works. So

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    as you're gearing towards the end of the Scythe and as we're, you know, trying to finish that up, where do you see your little touches that you put on it or if you do at all? Mhm, really it'd be in the design of the internal structure, which I would like to be proud of cuz I had spent a lot of time on it, but at the same time it's just the first pass. So, concept has been going down the pipe for new internals, like a really like fleshed out structure. So, that'll probably take over what I'm doing, but right now this ill will lay the base for what's going on. Was it exciting to kind of get to set how, you know, the internal the innards of a Vanduul ship would look? It was cuz it was fun to figure it out and like try and find out what would be different, but I was still limited in the fact that I had to use certain assets from the previous damages, which were human. So, I had to sort of distort those in a way. Oh, that's interesting. So, you had to take the damage states from the human

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    ships and kind of like adapt them. Yeah, I had to work with all those old textures and materials and stuff like that without creating new ones to keep it efficient. So, it was it was a challenge. I imagine you have to change them up a little bit because it because it's so almost organic like and it's a different ship. It might it has to break a different way, correct? And there was a lot of discussion about completely redoing the way Vanduul materials work and like the way they would build their structures, like maybe a more cellular design. But, um, we couldn't really do that right now in this early stage. So, later it'll probably come. That'd be interesting if if, you know, if you're instead of getting instead of things breaking apart, they just kind of dent in. And that it feels just more like if you're getting being bruised as opposed to being broken. And that'd be totally possible, but we'll see. Not yet. All right, man. Thanks so much for coming on. Thanks for taking the time to come talk to us. Yeah, and I'm sure

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    we're all really excited to see the Scythe and the other Vanduul ships. I am, too. All right, man. Back to you, Ben. Thanks, James. I guess you could say you gauged him to be a pretty good 3D Thanks, James. Let's go over to Lisa Ohanian with Ship Shape. I tried to tell jokes, but they wouldn't let me. Hello everyone and welcome to Ship Shape. In this week's episode of Ship Shape, we're going to be talking about one of our spaceship manufacturers, Anvil Aerospace. I'm going to be telling you a little bit of background information

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    about this company and how it fits into our game world. And then I'm going to be showing you the style guide and some of the inspiration images that we used when we create Anvil Aerospace spaceships. Anvil Aerospace was founded in 2772 in Terra and its headquarters today is in Nova Kiev. Anvil Aerospace is known for its relationship with the UEE military and makes a very large number of their ships. In fact, every military campaign in the last two centuries has featured an Anvil vehicle. The company currently has factories on three dozen UEE core worlds. And here's a fun fact, the Hornet has destroyed more enemy hardware than all other navy spaceships combined. Now let's take a look at the style guide

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    for Anvil Aerospace. You might have seen this before from when I covered Gallenson, one of the ship weapon manufacturing companies, a few weeks back. The this style guide is intended to tell you a little bit about the brand. Ideally, you'd be able to pass this off to anyone in the company, even one of our outsourcers, and they'd be able to get a good sense of what makes an Anvil Aerospace vehicle look like an Anvil Aerospace vehicle. On page one, you'll notice all the marketing information, the logo, tagline, some flavor text about what the company is, how they position themselves, and what they aspire to be. You'll also notice over on the left where Anvil Aerospace ships tend to fall in the spectrum. Obviously, they tend to be much more military-based with a slant

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    towards also creating civilian vehicles. There's also some information on their color palette and some of the products that they've created. At the bottom, you'll see some images of some of the ships that they've created so far that are synonymous with the brand. You'll see, of course, the Hornet and the Gladiator on top. And on the bottom, you'll see the F8 and the Carrick. Coming soon is going to be the Crucible, but we're still working on the ship right now. On the second page of the style guide, you'll see some inspirational images and some callout information on some factors that are specific to the Anvil Aerospace look. You'll see callouts regarding the shape of the cockpit, the snub nose that a lot of Anvil Aerospace ships tend to share, and the clean edges of the ship in general.

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    We've also got an early image here of the Gladiator. And I think this is a really interesting image because it shows some of the callouts not only on the Anvil Aerospace style, but on some of the functional elements of the Gladiator as well. You'll see the slightly rounded edges, the snub nose that we called out earlier, the circular top, the clean lines, and the geometrical detailing, and how they tie into the functional elements of the ship to create something that not only looks like a specific brand, but also can fly and make sense in the fiction of our world. All right, guys. That's it for today. Thank you for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed learning a little bit more about Anvil Aerospace, and you can look forward to seeing some of these elements in the next Anvil Aerospace ship coming down the line, the Crucible. Back to you, Ben.

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    Thank you, Lisa. Now, here's a segment I think you'll all find a little bit insane. Because it's Zane talking about the Vanduul HUD. Hi, my name is NBN. I'm a UI designer here at Cloud Imperium Games. And today, I want to take you through uh my design process in creating the Vanduul UI. It's kind of a cool little project I did to you know, make the Vanduul ships uh and while you're flying it, feel very unique and alien. Um So, let's go ahead and dive right into it. The goal with this is I wanted to try to make the UI a you know, the shape language of the UI a very aggressive shape. When you look at it, it feels very organic and you have these aggressive shapes. What I did here was um to kind of make everything

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    kind of flow into the center of the HUD. So, you have all of these different um pointy you know, spiky, crazy shapes kind of all going into the center like as if it's you know, targeting onto something and focusing on to a specific point. So, you try to get these kind of nice, sharp, almost tribal-looking shape language uh for the Vanduul. Cuz that's kind of one thing that Chris likes uh with the Vanduul language at least is kind of the tribal look to it and kind of the tribal feel. With these particular elements up here, you can see that they're repeating and I kind of tried to take some cues from some of the ships where you have a lot of uh repeating shape to them and try to bring that into the UI somewhat.

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    I think it compliments it pretty well. So, in this particular design here, we have uh kind of two components that I'm displaying simultaneously. Uh one component is um the visor. And this is kind of the elements on the outer edges here. And the center here will be mapped to your physical fixed HUD in the cockpit. So, what I kept in consideration while designing this was that this wasn't actually going to be shown all the time. What's going to happen is that the UI will boot in when you get into the Vanduul ship, then it will glitch out into the human UI. So, you're not actually going to see this particular design all the time while you're flying. I want it to be a little more gratuitous with, you know,

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    how much screen real estate that this UI kind of takes up. So, I wasn't too worried about like how cluttered or, you know, you know, how much it's going to impede on your vision because it's only going to be there in specific events like boot up as well as when you get hit. And when you get hit, it's actually going to glitch out a little bit. So, I wanted to, you know, get these shapes in there, get them very obvious. So, when it glitches out, you can actually sort of see through it and you know, see some of the alien UI kind of fighting through uh when your ship gets hit and your computer starts to get damaged. So, I think it'll be you know, it's going to be really cool. Okay, so I hope you guys enjoyed this deep dive look into the Vanduul UI. Uh I'll be working on implementing the Merlin next uh and all the rest of the

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    ship UIs and displays. Uh my name is NBN. I'm a UI designer here at Cloud Imperium Games, signing off. That about wraps it up for ATV 49, but Star Citizen marches ever onward. If you're one of the many backers who who made this show possible, please check out the forums where we are collecting pictures for next week's star-studded 50th episode spectacular. Um we want to show off the the backers who made the game possible. Um so share your face, share your rig, share some sort of cool Star Citizen image you happen to have. Whatever you'd like, post it to the thread and we will be sharing it with the world next week. Uh wear clothes, please. We've got a Scythe Q&A in the works tomorrow. If you have a burning or an issue with the human flyable version of

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    the Scythe that we revealed last week, uh please go to the forums and post your question. We'll be answering the best of them tomorrow evening. And check it out. Tomorrow will also bring subscribers a new issue of Jump Point. And we're going to end the week with a free fly for everyone. Uh all backers will be able to fly all ships currently available in Arena Commander for the next week. So get us out get out there, help test the servers, and uh fly any ship you'd like. Of course it wouldn't be an Around the Verse without an art sneak peek. And that sneak peek is right here. Make sure to tune in to Reverse the Verse tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. Pacific on

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    Twitch to have all your questions answered about the art, about what we're going to have for lunch, and about anything else Star Citizen related. Reverse the Verse, check it out. Now thank you to backers out there for making Star Citizen possible. Thank you to subscribers for making this show possible. And we will see you all around Hey.