Around the Verse: Episode 1.47 (2015.06.04)

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:17

   Hey everybody, welcome to episode 47 of Around the Verse. I'm Sandi Gardner. I'm Ben Lesnick and our big news this week is that Sandi Gardner's here. I am here. I am here this week and a little bit next week. You're going back to to London for more Squadron 42? I am going back to London for more Squadron 42. Now I know you can't tell us what exactly you are doing or who you are working with, but what was it like? Uh It was really good fun. The headset is kind of hurts a little bit after a while, but it was actually really good fun. The other actors were very giving. So we had a lot of good giggles on set and Chris was pretty happy. It sure looks like he's been really into it from the videos. Yeah, he's been very happy and the crew is is amazing. So that's always fun when everybody's

2. 00:01:05

   fun to work with. And we've had lots of good improvisation, which is kind of funny. You saw the one where Chris was improvising the Hornet. I saw I saw the pool noodle and then there was one where he was flying a car like a plywood Hornet. Yes. Yes, so everything all of our props have been made out of plywood, which is kind of fun. My locker and my spaceship. Dope spoiler warning, Sandi has a spoiler locker and a spaceship. Yeah. Um and oh, that's what we were supposed to do is talk about the SP42 shoot. Yes. And so we did. The Mis Reliant concept launch was a huge success. More ships sold than any concept sale in history. It was a really good one and everybody's proud of it. We can't wait to get that one into the engine for you guys to fly

3. 00:01:53

   probably a little bit later this year, but a very cool ship and if you didn't have a chance to pick one up, you can still check out the design posts on the site. And I was actually very excited to see that we launched that sale at 9:00 a.m. That was definitely a first also. Um, Amazing. Maybe that contributed to why we were a success for that one. Possibly. Well, you're you're the marketing genius, so you you would know better, but uh, Well, first of all, people aren't asleep, so maybe maybe that helps, but anyhow, thank you very much, everybody, and um, we are excited to fly that Reliant when it gets ready and flyable. Definitely. Our friends at inExile have kicked off their next Kickstarter to make a sequel to The Bard's Tale. Most of you may be too young to remember The Bard's Tale, but it was a series of dungeon crawling RPGs in the mid to late

4. 00:02:43

   '80s and Brian Fargo and his team are bringing it back. As we shoot, they've just launched their Kickstarter a couple hours ago and I believe it's already over $400,000. Um, congratulations, guys. We uh, we look forward to playing it. Now, let's go to the Spectrum for news from around the verse. Hey, everybody, and welcome back to sunny Santa Monica, California, for our update for Around the Verse. I'm Travis Day and I'm joined by Eric Kieron Davis. So, here we are to talk to you a little bit about what's going on in the studio. I think we'll start with the update on

5. 00:03:30

   the characters. Characters, that's a big a big push for us right now. Um, FPS characters, we're trying to get that wrapped up this week. another big thing for characters for us is just trying to unify them globally. So, as you'd imagine, Star Citizen is a very large game. We have a lot of characters. They're interacting in a lot of different ways. So, one of the big things, some of you watched a few weeks ago, we were in the UK just creating the character pipeline, really coming up with a pipeline that makes sense and delivers really quality assets and quality a quality immersive experience with your character. And it's similar to I mean you guys will know like what happened with ships when the ships got a proper pipeline and we started being able to crank them out much quicker. And so the the goal of the establishment of this pipeline right is to be able to service all of the modules and their needs for characters at a much higher Yeah, totally. We want to put this together so we're kind of creating this one solid unified look for our characters like the ships so we can get

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   something that we're delivering quickly. Um and that we all feel good about and looks good in all our modules. Yeah, no it should be great. I mean I'm I'm just it's something that I think a lot of people are looking forward to like character customization and you know different hairstyles. I think you know having all that be possible is going to be great. Yeah, that's our goal. Um you know some other things that we've been working on here in the Santa Monica studio uh basically getting prepared for multi-crew. Uh we've been talking you heard us talk a fair amount about this and you'll continue to hear us talk a fair amount about this cuz multi-crew is a very part big part of space combat and that's what we're charged with here in LA. So we're doing some of the work with the UK right now on the early concepts for what exactly each uh each station is going to look like. What the interactions are going to be, what the gameplay is going to be as well as you know what is a turret going to need to know, how much information does he need to be able to pass to others on the team

7. 00:05:05

   or get what information does he need. So that's a big focus right now as well as the the transiting of ships. So getting into and out of them, all the work that's gone into the local physics grid from our friends in Germany um and getting that working and tested and getting new Whoop, I almost said something I wasn't supposed to. But getting everything ready uh for the future and for when we release that whenever that is. Uh it'll be good. And so it's something we're putting a lot of focus in. I know for for myself and for a lot of people on the team that have joined the the multi-crew that that Millennium Falcon don't get cocky kid experience is the thing that everybody has wanted to do for a long time. So it's it's something that really ignites the passion for the team and it's fun to see. So anyways, hope you guys enjoyed the update and uh thank you very much for tuning in. We'll see you next week. See you.

8. 00:05:59

   Hi, I'm David Ling Leers. I'm senior producer here at IllFonic. Uh couple things wanted to talk to you about this week. Uh the first one is we are mostly focused this week on dealing with ground-based combat uh in normal gravity on the Gold Horizon station. Uh the animators have been working through a lot of the uh the duke start stop system. And to do that, uh we've been doing a lot of play testing on uh in gravity situations. And we've also received and have been receiving more new data for all the dukes and starts and stops. There's a lot of different situations depending on which direction you're turning, how fast you're going. Um and we're still waiting on a couple more animations that should be coming in this week. Um A lot of the other work that's been going on this week has been focused

9. 00:06:46

   around network profiling. Uh so, we were looking at all the packets and all the bandwidth that was being used and there's quite a bit of data there that uh either can be compressed or thrown out or just done in a more efficient manner. Um So, two of our engineers this week have been solely focused on uh just looking at all the different data that's going across the network and finding out the best way to optimize that uh which in turn ends up getting you guys a much smoother experience, uh higher frames per second over the network, and uh you know, just less lag in general. Um so, yeah, that's been our primary focus this week and uh we'll see you next week. Thanks, guys. Hey guys, Jake Ross here, the associate

10. 00:07:38

    producer on the Persistent Universe. I'm here flying solo this week, but I got an update for you nonetheless. We've got behavior working on the Nyx Delamar Levski landing zone as you guys probably are aware. This week they moved from grey box phase, which is basically you know, adding detail to the base mesh and and getting you know, initial detail pass. That's all kind of squared away, so they moved on to shader and texture phase, which is adding in the textures and the shaders obviously. So, making it look nice and gritty and dirty is their next goal for that environment. And we've also got Andrew Win wrapped up his mining gameplay prototype this past week. So, he's passed that off to the designers to play around with so they can get in actually provide some

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    feedback there make it just as good as they want. And while they're doing that Andrew's going to be moving on to the pioneer gameplay occupation, which is the next thing that we're tackling which is used to be called exploration, but now we've kind of got it more of a centralized name for it. Pioneer is what we call it. So, that'll be fun to see coming online here pretty soon. And then after that we've got other universe simulator kind of got the base functionality is nearly there. Ron Bites working on that is formally called the economic simulator. Universe server is functional and allows for visualization of the solar systems now and you can zoom in and see ships flying from point of interest to to another. Solar system service is able to read from the database and get probability

12. 00:09:14

    data from the universe server now. So, that's exciting. It's the first steps toward getting a full-blown universe simulator in effect. So, that's all I got for you this week. I'll see you next time. Thanks. Bye. Hey y'all, Mike here once again from sunny Wilmslow in Foundry 42. Coming at you again with another brief update from the team here at Foundry 42. And I'm here today with another Mike, you know, Mike's greatest name in the world. And he's here to tell you a little bit about what he does. So, Mike, would you like to tell the audience what you're all about? Sure, yeah. Well, I'm Mike Snowden. I'm Foundry 42's lead VFX artist. So, yeah, I make things go boom. Which, as we know, is one of the best

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    elements of the game. Yeah, there's there's a lot of it required in this game. So, what exactly have you been working on lately? Uh well, all kinds of stuff that very kind of typical of the project really. There's there's a there's a lot of effects going on. Personally, at the moment, I've been working on a lot of ship stuff. So, uh that's the damage effects including some new tech that that we recently trialed on the Gladius. So, we're kind of rolling that out on some of the ships. Um across the team, we're working on all kinds of stuff. Um big lightning, clouds in space, um that kind of thing. Big colorful nebulae, Yeah, the big the big scale stuff. Quite experimental, but um looking good at the moment. Um from We're also doing kind of smaller effects as well like interior sparks and and steam smoke, that kind of thing. Just getting that sort of slightly more polished level.

14. 00:10:48

    Cool. Cool. Um yeah, so it's it's looking good. Without going into any kind of spoilers or anything, what's the most exciting thing that you've been working on for yourself in this game? I think it I think it's the damage stuff on the ships for me personally, yeah. As I say, I'm quite heavily involved in that at the moment. So, that's that's a good challenge. And we've also got a quite a quite a range of of scale of ships as well. So, getting that kind of level of fidelity Well, as I say, across the range of ships, As I say, it's something that we've very seen very rarely in the industry, isn't it? So, I think so, yeah. It's quite pioneering, and so Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, that itself must be a challenge, like Yeah, yeah, but a good one. No, that's cool, man. That's cool. As I say, we'll be up to no really have much more that we can talk about today cuz we're not giving too much away. So, Yeah, We'll keep keep it short and sweet today, so thanks once again for watching. We've

15. 00:11:34

    been the Mikes of Family 42 and yeah, praise the sun. Oh. That was pretty. That was really pretty. Try to fire those missiles at me now. All that and more on the latest Empire Report. Big thank you to our studios from around

16. 00:12:33

    the world. Things are looking great. Now let's go to James who had a chance to sit down with technical designer Matt Sherman. The Shermanator. I always feel like he's from Star Wars, actually. Thanks guys. I'm here with Matt Sherman. Matt, how you doing? Doing good, James. Thanks for joining us. Yep. So you're technical designer on the project? You just did some work on a ship that we just recently sold called the Reliant. Do you want to go through that a little bit? Yeah, so really happy with that. Did the spec setup for the Reliant, so planning out what it's loadout is, also starting to plan out the variants. You know, what the ship's going to be capable of and then was able to hand that over to Dave Hobbins who did the incredible job of designing the the

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    outside of the ship and like what it really looks like. How much did you work with Hobbins? Was it a back and forth? Uh or was it like here you go, go. We had a couple like uh, group meetings, but mostly it was, you know, you you let Dave work because he can just come up with some really incredible stuff. Um, I mean, anytime that we had to give feedback, it was always just really easy, you know, he he'd come in, we'd meet up, and get the get the ship planned out, and a lot of it actually fell into place easier than we thought. We were like, "Okay, we're going to need this, this, and this." And he's like, "I've got those." And it's like, "Great." Yeah, I remember that meeting. We need all these images to in order to put them out, and then he's like, "Here you go." And we're like, "Dang, that's more than we needed."

18. 00:14:08

    Yeah, so like, "Oh, yeah, we'll we'll save those two for later even." So, yeah, I mean, it's but I mean, he's an absolute professional, so it it was really good experience. Yeah, Hobbins seem like he might have a future in this industry. He may. He might be going places. Uh, so besides the Reliant, can you uh, go on a little bit of what else you're working on? Uh, the biggest thing recently has been uh, the physically based damage system, and that just everything that encompasses. So, uh, when we get this set up, it's going to be a big sweeping balance pass across the game because well, for changing weapons, we have to change ship health, and if we're doing that, we got to change shields, we got to change power, we got to change coolers. We have to update everything to to bring it in line, but it's also such a huge sweeping

19. 00:14:57

    change that uh, we really start to get like time to kill numbers, which are a bit low right now. We we can start getting those up to a better place in this one big pass, so it's it's really exciting just for how it's going to help shape the game in the coming months. So, when you change one uh, you change one variable, and it creates this cascade effect, and that means you have to involve other people in the process? Not Well, for for what we're doing at this point it's is definitely a big cascade thing, but the other big goal is to build it up so that in the future, once this is out it won't be that much of a ripple where we we'll be able to change things a bit more compartmentalized than having to do this big broad sweep. So.

20. 00:15:47

    It's trying to do some of the heavy lifting up front so you can do lighter load later. Exactly. Exactly. You're also one of the people we go to when we have a balance update or balance question. Do you kind of want to go into where you see the game at now and where you're trying to get it to? Yeah, absolutely. Right now we're a little bit too fast. You know, 2 seconds on a target and you can just bring them down. just tons of missiles you can bring someone down a bit fast. And so we definitely need to to grow that time. Ideally, you know, somewhere in like a 15 to 20-second range, maybe a little bit more. So it it shouldn't be like a minutes-long fight on a 1v1, but it shouldn't be a blink and you're

21. 00:16:37

    dead moment either. It should be something where you need some time on the target and you really get to feel like you're maneuvering well, you're targeting well, you're you're flying your ship well to keep your weapons on that target as opposed to just, you know, the kill them instantly. Um so I mean that's going to be one of the biggest things that the new damage update's going to bring is just really stretch that time out a bit more and make it feel weighty. When you think about balance, how is it this long process you have in your head of incremental changes that are happening, you you almost constantly or is it big chunk of the changes like, you know, we'll change we'll do a lot of thing on this day and then this day or is it kind of So, the goal is to be incremental on it. Um right now, uh especially the system

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    we have to do a big chunk where uh the best way to describe balance is a pendulum. Um you you pull it back and so right now we're we're pulling the ball back and getting ready to let it go. But then even once we release this, it's going to be swinging back and forth until it it settles down into that nice middle ground. Uh it'll never stay still, like it'll never come to a stop, but the range and and how far off that balance is is going to get dialed in more and more just as the project goes on. Thank you so much for coming on, man. Thank you for taking the time to come down here and talk to us and to the backers and um well, back to you guys. Thanks, James. And in honor of uh Sandi's return, no pun. Now we're throwing it over to Lisa

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    Ohanian with this week's Ship Shape and I hear it has a new intro. Check it out. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Ship Shape. We have a new intro. Did you guys see that? It's awesome. It was made by one of our backers, Mychael Westphal. Thank you so much for creating that. We all love it over here at Cloud Imperium. This week on Ship Shape, we're going to be talking about the Starfarer. Now, the Starfarer is a MISC ship with some unique fueling functionality. This ship is able to collect fuel from space, haul fuel around, and even refuel other ships in space. People are able to use

24. 00:19:11

    it to haul other things, but because it's built for such a specialized functionality, people tend to overwhelmingly use it for fuel purposes. This ship is being worked on by Foundry 42, our UK studio. When I first reached out for them on any special insights about working on this ship, the first thing Matt said, who's currently working on the interior, is that it is way bigger on the inside than it appears on the outside, just like the TARDIS. Uh while this is inconvenient for Matt, it's really good for you guys since it is a cargo ship that you'll want to be carrying lots of stuff. Now, we have some work-in-progress images of the airlock chamber. Now, these are very early, mostly to get a feel for what the room is going to look like. Uh they wanted me to let you guys know, you know, design hasn't looked at

25. 00:19:58

    it yet. We want to make sure that it flows well uh with all of the other chambers of the ship, and the art director, Paul Jones, is not a fan of the yellow. Uh it's still one of our first passes at what the airlock chamber is going to look like. When they're finished with this room, they only have a few rooms left to work on, namely the power plant and the gravity generator room. After they've finished with these, they're going to take full force to matching the exterior of the ship to the interior. Of course, we had some passes at this to make sure that there weren't going to be any glaring miscommunications about the two matching up, but this is when we really dig down and get into the nitty-gritty. We also have some images of the exterior of the ship. These are much older concepty-type images, uh not nearly as

26. 00:20:48

    far far along or as finalized as the interior of the ship. The first one here are some of our very early images when we were first figuring out the look of this ship. We ended up not using any of these because we thought they were a little bit too bulky and didn't really look much like a ship that could fly around very effectively. Now, here on the second image, we have some early shape inspiration sketches. You'll notice over on the left of this image, we have some inspiration and reference images from the real world that we wanted to inform the shape and functionality of the Starfarer. That's it for Ship Shape today, guys. Thank you so much for tuning in. And thank you again to Michael Westfall for designing our wonderful new logo. Thanks. Thanks, Lisa.

27. 00:22:02

    Now, let's kick it over to Travis Day, who is going to be talking about the testing plans for Star Marine. Take it away, Travis. Hey everybody, Travis here. I was going to give you guys a little update on Star Marine and where we're at. So, we've been talking a fair amount. We've given the the large community update uh the post. If you haven't seen it, go check it out online. Kind of covering all the different features and details of what we're going to be doing. Um as we progress through the development process, we've been uh as you know, working to get this out to you guys for quite a little while now. And so, I wanted to give you a little bit of an update on kind of the things that still are remaining polish items and things that we need to clean up before it's ready to go on into a testing phase with you guys. So, I would say, you know, one of the big things first of all is we're still working on finalizing the locomotion of the character. Um there's things we have done called start stops and jukes. Uh

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    and this is basically like if you've played um gosh, what's a good example? Like Assassin's Creed. If you play Assassin's Creed and you see the way that the character has real weight when he moves. Something that's very important to Chris is he wants this to feel like a simulation in all aspects, including how the character moves. So, with the character movement, we wanted to get a system whereby when you start running, you don't immediately just start sprinting at 10 m/s or something crazy. You actually have like a ramp up time to speed up, ramp time to slow down, change direction, and then there's balancing that with the gameplay and how you need to be able to react to the situation around you very quickly, but you also want to have that feeling of real weight and you know, encumberment from your armor. So, that's a system we're working on perfecting right now and it's kind of one of those things that without the base locomotion completely finalized, you know, a lot of the feedback in the testing would be um

29. 00:23:38

    you know, of mixed usage because it would be giving us feedback on things that we're still actively working on finalizing the way we want it to be in our vision for the product. Um So, then that's that. There's another one which is we've talked a little bit about it and I think it's worth revisiting which is the new instance manager. So, the generic instance manager has been worked on by the Austin network engineer team and it's a very big core feature to this update because as you know, we've had issues in the past with the matchmaking system along with the issues of you know, scalability, right? So, scalability has always been a big issue for Arena Commander and we'd like to fix that with the FPS release. So, one of the things that we're truly trying to take our time and get right is an entirely new back-end matchmaking system which will make it possible for everybody who joins the FPS to actually experience the FPS and if you want to play, be able to play and be able to

30. 00:24:26

    play with people that are properly matched make to your to your level. Uh so, that's something we feel is very important to have a good player experience and you know, make it I mean, testing is testing, but testing should also be fun and it should work. It shouldn't be a frustrating experience. So, it's one of the other things that's important to us to get done before we get it out to you guys. Um you know, lastly, I think I would talk a little bit about the fact that even though these features that we're trying to finish and finalize and and and really narrow down to before we get it out there would leave other departments, you know, ideally waiting and twiddling their thumbs as as they're trying to get this these things online. We've taken that extra time to basically just go and do additional polish, right? So, the guys that otherwise are not involved in things like the base locomotion set, the zero G locomotion set, which is another big thing, adding of the Aegis system, kind of like euphoria. we have the art team, the lighters,

31. 00:25:14

    they're going back and they're refining and polishing. And so, hopefully when we get it out to you guys, we'll have a really good solid base experience that is valuable to get the feedback on. Um and hopefully we should have it fairly stable also by the time that it gets out to you guys cuz there's nothing worse than you're trying to test something, you're trying to repro something, and the game crashes, or you can't get into a match, or you get into a match and it crashes, or the server crashes and kicks everybody out of the match. So, getting all of these things ironed out that are known issues are really important to us before we turn it over to a large group of people cuz all you're going to see is that thing over and over and over, and you'll miss all the the real fundamental things that we want you guys to test and get feedback on, which is the player experience. I mean, that's that's the value of having so many people be able to play it early on. Um so, as we go ahead and we roll forward, the plan I wanted to share with you guys is we're going to do it for those of you who were around during the

32. 00:26:02

    Arena Commander launch around this time last year, we're going to do it very similarly where we kind of we're going to set it up on the PTU with a build, and we're going to do a phased roll out based on your citizen number. So, we'll invite a fixed number of citizen numbers, have those people have access to this new PTU, then they'll be able to go in there, try out the FPS, give us feedback, and we're going to attempt to patch bi-weekly, so twice a week be patching this PTU. So, if you have data capped internet, maybe maybe it's not for you. Just to warn you cuz we'll be patching very frequently. Um and as we get stability up and we get good feedback up and we iterate on that, then we're going to start opening it to more and more people. And then as we get more and more feedback, we'll open it to more and more people. And as we do this phased roll out, eventually we'll culminate with going live to everybody. That way we can make sure that by the

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    time the whole community gets it in their hands, it'll happen progressively over time based on your your seniority here, basically. And then, by the time it comes out live, we should have a nice stable product for everybody to enjoy together. Uh so, you know, lastly, I think it's important to revisit why why FPS is a big deal. And And, you know, I I see a lot of people on the forums are like, "Oh, we just want to play the FPS module. You know, we want to have these team death match fights." Or, "Oh, we just want to run around." And I think the important thing to realize about FPS is it's not just about um it's not just about the FPS module, the game mode. I mean, Star Marine as a module is going to be great. It's going to be a lot of fun. But the idea too is that we're developing the underlying FPS mechanics for the entirety of the game, right? So, what we're developing for Star Marine is actually the underlying

34. 00:27:37

    when we get to multi-crew, how you're going to be able to EVA. So, the whole zero-G setup is EVA in the persistent universe. It's how do you enter and how do you navigate? What is your player locomotion like in a persistent universe setting in zero-G? It's what are the weapon balances for you versus another player if you board their ship? I mean, it's all these things that play into the larger universe that need to be accounted for. And, you know, if we've coined the term that Star Citizen as a whole is a first-person universe, I mean, that's that's two out of three of the letters of FPS right there. So, So, Star Marine is very important because it allows us and once it's done, it'll allow us to make all of these things possible that have been uh at least for me as a uh as somebody who is looking forward to this game as well as working on this game, it's been important to me is that

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    idea that you can get up out of your chair in the ship. You can run around your ship. You can jump into space and get on another ship. And this is kind of that that linchpin of technology that makes that all possible. So, it's something that, you know, it's it's important to realize that Star Marine is going to be cool and it's going to be a lot of fun. But also, the amount of doors that it opens and the amount of you know, new play experiences that it presents for all the other modules is really not something to be discounted. It's going to be awesome. Uh so anyways, cool. Thank you very much for your time and I hope you enjoyed this uh mini ATV FPS update and we will look forward to having Star Marine out to you guys as soon as we can. That about wraps it up for Around the Verse, but Star Citizen marches on. Check in tomorrow for the May 2015 monthly report.

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    Got uh updates from our studios around the world including for the first time the uh folks in Germany. This weekend we're selling the military focus ships that were free fly last week. The folks in C S have gotten a lot of requests to allow people to purchase the various ships they got to test out, so we're going to make the uh Super Hornet, the Mustang Delta, the Gladiator available again for a limited time. So, if you're interested in one of those ships, check it out. Yeah, and it wouldn't be Around the Verse without an art sneak peek. Make sure to tune into Reverse the Verse tomorrow on Twitch at 11:00 a.m. Pacific. Have your questions about Star Citizen answered and to hear a little

37. 00:29:59

    bit more about that sneak peek. Thank you to subscribers for making this show possible. We will see you next week on Around the Verse. Can you change the animation? Okay, that that means fine. All right, that's good. I did miss you I have to say.

38. 00:30:48

    Missed you too. Yeah, I know. Everybody's like how about Sandy is so awkward together but we're actually like I think buddies Yeah, we are we're buddies we're good buddies. We've been through heaven and hell together. We have and I harass Ben at all hours of the morning like I did this morning at 4:30. It's not 5:00 a.m. without the Sandy emails. Exactly.