Inside Star Citizen: Station to Station | 3.5 Ep. 8

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:04

   from Babylon 5 to deep space 9 from the Justice League Watchtower to asteroid n and perhaps my personal favorite space station 5 from 2001 space stations are an integral part of many of our favorite sci-fi settings even star citizen when your journey into the persistent universe first begins your character awakens on port olisar a space station that's high in orbit over the planet crusader space stations are more than just wave points between destinations they're one of the many ways we can show mankind's progression throughout the galaxy and the members of our environment art and design content teams have been working to expand star citizen's space station vocabulary when it comes to their procedural design let's find out more we've been looking at increasing the variety and a sort of complexity of our space station

2. 00:00:53

   exteriors in terms of their shape and basically make our space station is but much more diverse when you first approach them so the first thing to do was take the concept we took the concept we had to look at those and breaking those concepts down into what would be conceived of like our set sets and then we're talking about how to stitch those assets together in a modular way so we would take that first and sort of pieced them together by hand to make sure all the assets that we're going to build would work with one another and then it's a case of taking those into prefab libraries and setting them up to be used with the procedural system basically it's the beginning of fully putting the space stations into a procedural system next comes interiors and then marrying those two things together and that gives us the ability to go away and then

3. 00:01:40

   create things like cargo and refinery stations as well as just the rest stops but all in a completely procedural way and all fully integrated with one another so we should see output in terms of like locations for these sort of what we call secondary like our landing zones are available under stroke these are kind of most secondary locations but we want a lot of them because they're kind of going to be the bread and butter of the player expert Walter look different in some way we can only do that using the procedural tools so what it is it's just the start of a new sort of expansion of our sort of procedural space station locations so for this release 43.6 we're looking at updating the exteriors so they should be a lot bigger there'll be a lot more fun to fly around they'll be more diverse in terms of where the hangars a position

4. 00:02:28

   where landing pans are positioned but you're not going to see much in terms of expansion for the next release that comes in the release after when we're looking at updating the interiors as well and then as as we sort of roll later on into the year you'll see those sort of come together and our entire sort of restaurant experience for the player should be a lot more sort of diverse and expansive when trying to sum up star citizen in a word you can find yourself with a variety of options like diegetic fidelity or immersion it's one of the reasons playing the star citizen drinking game might be the most dangerous game around at least for your liver these words are also the reason our animation team spent time this quarter working on motion capture for bartenders to make these NPC behaviors blend seamlessly within the game's

5. 00:03:15

   universe in ways that people know at least subconsciously it's one more way we're building a universe you can recognize even nine hundred and forty years in the future you should have seen the talent we had in here last week I'm talking choice so last week I was in Austin and we were looking at the bartender in the bartender behavior the bartender we have in game right now has a very simple behavior he works out a very simple counter he gives you a glass he gives you I think a bottle of whiskey and that's basically all he can do but what we wanted to do is to set the foundation to be able to extend it into larger bars things on art core on on different planets in ships and things like that and to be able to create the

6. 00:04:04

   the bar layouts so that they can be used modulae and in other places so the first thing we did is we looked at the counter that we have and we said okay well what are the different portions of a bar and then we started to find ways that we could build sort of an approximation of that using PVC pipes cardboard actual bartending instruments in our austin studio to be able to motion capture a really solid prototype for each one of those sections like the cocktail bar that the taps and stuff like that and we shot a number of different liquor pours I think somewhere in the realm of 25 different cocktails

7. 00:04:54

   it's a fine balancing act as well in saying do we need to ship with 30 cocktails at once no we don't do we even need 30 cocktails I don't know maybe maybe not but at least what that gives us then is an understanding as to the the pain threshold but also that the foundational aspects of the bartender are solid for each one of those things so the whole point of why we're doing this on the bartender is because we are trying to create an environment that when you're in it you feel like you are in an actual bar you're in an actual living breathing location that that bartender is operating just like you

8. 00:05:43

   would expect a bartender to operate in the real world you go hey I know what that's like and that there's an honesty and a realism to the environment that that you're living it gotta go not that kind of place boss if you're a subscriber you may have already seen the first work-in-progress images of the vanguard ward and exterior rework in this month's jump point magazine along with the story behind their team's efforts now many of those teams have been looking forward to the chance to return to the vanguard a bit of a character and aggressive personality that was found in those original concept images joining us this week is Joe Neville with more on our look at the return of glowing engine intakes and tank tread landing gear Cinnabun garb is one of the ships that was in line for a visual update and we've taken this time to reintroduce

9. 00:06:30

   some of the features that were in the concept and push it more back in line with that so one of the features we tried to reintroduce the Vanguard was the glowing intakes and this helps that ship to look a lot more aggressive these are glowing with the missiles right now but they'll be filled in with VFX and particles so that when the red truck drivers get activated these will be a lot more will have a lot more presence another feature you introduced to us the shoulder-mounted missile base and these would be deployable when landing gear get deployed the profile towards the front of the ship is now a lot sleeker and the materials have been pushed more in line with those of the retaliator they're more muted and less Gammage and helps to get the vanguard more of a sense of scale since it is quite a large ship so another feature we've

10. 00:07:18

    reintroduced have been the support columns and these just a bit more interesting than what they were again they helped to give the ship a sense of scale these are large and the cells all kind of engine columns in the shipper very look very big so these columns really help to show that they're supporting the weight of the rear engines so another feature when you introduced was the London gear and they gave it the tires that used to be in the cart and the concept and we've also given that the tank treads that were previously there as well we've also widened the bottom of the ship to accommodates the habitation pod and the rear ramp has been widened to be more in line with the vanguard hoplite variant and this is flowers more player to be able to exit the ship the same time the exterior Vanguard's almost done now the final steps will be to redo the

11. 00:08:09

    damage make sure that all works correctly and then do the once again happy with you guys soon so what we learned this week we learned that the process of procedural stations is progressing from tisha Slee for bartenders it may be the littlest of things that make a universe feel alive and believable and the vanguard appears well on its way towards achieving its namesake at the forefront of badass-looking space ships to our subscribers like I said check out this month's jump point for more on the vanguard rework story and of course this week's subscriber vaults for more images from last week's look inside the 890 jump and to everyone out there in the star citizen root and real-life universe suppose this one's persistent to seeing this week

12. 00:08:55

    [Music] thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in star citizen squadron 42 you can subscribe to our Channel or you can check out some of the other shows and you can also head to our website at www.uvu.edu/library you