Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Episode 100 Celebration, Part III

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] when your hunger gets big Benny's gets bigger Benny's fills Your Inner Space while you're in outer space big Benny noodles so yum so wow Addie welcome to around the verse uh star citizens development weekly update uh I'm Jake Ross producer here in the Austin studio and I'm John urin I'm the director here in the Austin studio and I'm the vice president of publishing for cloud Imperium games uh Welcome to

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   Austin segment of our 100th episode of around the verse uh if you've been tuning in the past couple weeks we have a a weekly update from La two weeks ago and one from UK last week and this week it's it's Austin's turn in the spotlight so uh we got a studio tour we're going to show you guys uh some a detailed look at some of our development going on here in the Austin Studio by folks like Rob rininger uh lead technical designer Emer Switzer lighting artist Mike picket uh systems and it engineer and Josh one of our our ship artists here so uh but first I want to talk about the uh the latest Star Citizen news yeah that's awesome we've worked really hard to put together a great show this week we've got lots of cool stuff to show you um do you want to tell us a little bit about what people are working on right now in the studio yeah so um globally we're working towards the Star Citizen Alpha 2.5 um and there are folks here in Austin who are working towards that

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   release as well uh particularly on the Grim heex uh space station um which is more of our it's it's a new kind of pirate Outlaw station that will be uh that be provide an opportunity um to spawn in in different locations besides just Port osar so um we're really excited about that we'll have we'll see a bit more detail there um in the in the studio updates here in a little bit um the uh we're also working towards Gamescom which is a few short weeks away now cool it's coming right up yeah I mean that's all really exciting and hey if you've been thinking about checking out Star Citizen or if you have a friend who wants to check out Star Citizen we have a free fly promotion that starts tomorrow in order to check it out you just have to create an account on our website download the game and then you can just log in and you can check out

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   the Crusader module you can check out Arena Commander you can check out the whole game and that's going to run for a week so that's a cool promotion for anybody that finds out about it or you want to share with them tell them to check it out cool and we just uh upgraded the account security system is that right that's right just this week we launched a new system developed by our platform team that enables multiactor Authentication so this adds a significant layer of security to your account if you turn it on you can have uh device identification that is either uh confirmed by email or through a secondary app on your smartphone we developed our own RSI app which is available on IOS and Android or you can use other popular apps like aie or the Google Authenticator or Microsoft's authenticator as well if you want to

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   check this out just go to your my RSI account under the account settings and look for a new tab on the left side that says security you can turn it on it's super easy to set it up I encourage everybody to do that to protect your account yeah I've already done mine it's a real quick and easy process super simple super simple uh and then there were shirts on the merchandising front we have the new long awaited big Benny's themed shirt uh that will Premiere in the pledge store tomorrow I know a lot of people are uh looking forward to this um and as as am I I'll be I'll be one of the first ones in the pledge store to get mine so look forward to that big Ben's a hit you're going to hear more about Benny later in the show um but hey enough of us why don't we take a little tour of the Austin studio and find out what's been going on this month M hey everybody Welcome to Austin I'm

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   John urin I'm the studio director here let's take a little tour of the studio follow me hey Justin how's it going hey John pretty good good welcome to the QA Room everybody cool this is Justin Benford he's our QA director for cig and and he's stationed here in Austin you want to tell us a little bit about what the QA team's working on right now yeah this week we got on our plate uh 2.5 or what the build will be later become 2.5 and that uh is the uh pirate based grimhex and the flyable Reliant among other things and uh some other stuff we're working on is we have some dedicated testers working on firstperson shooter mechanics the latest thing they've been touching is uh the cover system and we also have uh back here the uh dedicated testers for squadron 42 and they've been

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   working on lately the uh procedural planetary Tech and they've been remarking how cool it is to transition from space to planet in the context of the Squadron 42 Mission and we just within the last hour and a half launched the new multiactor authentication system as well right that's another thing we've been testing lately is the two Factor authentication and we're really happy to finally roll that out to everybody cool seems like it's smooth found a couple of things immediately and I think we've already made a little patch in the back end so it's all looking good and uh here we have Andrew hessie the uh QA manager and he's working on profiling some of the uh uh builds to make sure that the Grim heex pirate base doesn't uh to tell the engineers exactly like what kind of performance hit it might have cool let's

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   go see if we can find Mike Jones and uh talk to some of the devops guys a little bit we're going to walk through this way hey everybody w hello to the camera hey there don't show there you guys can't wave sorry hey everybody let's see if we can find Mike hey Mike you around hello John hey everybody this is Mike Jones he's Our IT director and heads up uh lots of different things for cig including the devops team and the liveops team that are right here along this kind of long row Mike do you want to introduce us to the team maybe we could uh stop and talk to Amed a little bit see how things are going sure right here we have our devops team behind this team we have build Ops

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   and our game support team we also have Amed at the end and uh some of the test support uh group Our IT team is spread throughout some uh high security locations in the building so we won't be able to see them today okay cool here's all that you keep them behind locked doors is what you're saying for for their safety or ours I think it's for everyone okay good all right hey Ahmed how's it going how are you good to see you by John so tell us what you've been working on so we have been working on uh alterating everything that we canate making our delivery time for all kind of builds faster and we manage day-to-day for all our environments BTU live and QA Y and we uh just in the month of June finished a major push for 2.4 yep and a hot and another update to 41 and so now

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    you have a little bit of quiet time to work on automation true yeah we we have a lot of changes coming down the live for deployment b line uh changes in Tech we using moving more towards data driven automation so it's going to be awesome cool awesome well thanks for showing us uh thanks for talking to us yeah thank you thank you for St by let's pop in on the animation team and see if Brian's around you can see we got a little space for growth here in the studio we've got some uh got some more people coming on board soon so let's see if we can find Brian hey Brian how's it going hey how's it going good hey this is Brian Brewer many of you have seen him before and know him well he's the head of our animation team here in Austin you want

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    to tell us a little bit about what you guys are working on we are building an exciting impressive living breathing Universe uh we are um we're bringing good things to life I don't know how else to put it it's but uh I think we're going to be very impressed with or you guys are going to be very impressed with uh what you're going to be seeing coming down the pipeline here cool you guys always have fun toys here with your guns and all kinds of stuff and I always enjoy looking at what everybody has on their screens but a lot of this we're going to see soon with some of the Gamescom demos and some of the FPS modules that are coming up oh most definitely um most of our props here where uh when we're doing motion capture but uh we do use them a lot like we go into like uh here let me show you example

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    here so like whenever whenever you go into a shop because you want to buy a weapon uh we get this we get a little GoPro we stick it on our head and we sit there and we go hm how are we going to how are we going to inspect this weapon and we're just like doing this little thing and charge the handle you know drop the clip whatever you know and uh we use this we shoot all this reference video uh we create a library so that we can go back in hand key or do whatever we need to later as reference that's awesome cool well thanks for the quick stop we appreciate it sure no problem see you guys later great you want to everybody want to stand up and wave and give a look we've got people peeking over their monitors all right I guess hey everybody cool so this is our animation we' got

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    some designers here in Austin uh I think you're going to get a full report from Tony in another segment so I'll leave him off of the tour today so this concludes our tour everybody thanks very much bye bye hey guys Jake Ross here producer of the Austin studio and uh here's a studio update for you from cig Austin so uh this week we're going to dive a little bit deeper into the 250 release as well some other things uh we want to talk about um patch ruction Grim heex uh a ship update um so um well let's kick things off with uh Mike picket systems and it engineer here in Austin uh to discuss patch reduction so what happens is uh when you go to patch the game now what you'll do is download just this metadata which is very thin

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    still pretty big because it's a lot of data but but very very thin uh and you will only download the data that you need say the new files the updated files uh that sort of thing old files of course would be removed we looked at U say a 30 version history for average customer and those those versions are about 30 gig in size and the average customer would download about 900 gab worth of data which is Big that's close to a terabyte with the new system we're actually looking about less less than about a gig because although we put out a lot of art most of the new data is actually not as large and there's a smaller subset of updated data so we're pretty excited about it uh we think you guys are going to like it all right let's jump over to imra Switzer a lighting artist here in Austin to talk a little bit about uh a deep dive into the lighting updates for grimhex station as

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    well as some more generic uh uh art updates as well hey guys uh I'm working on grimex which is one of the pirate based environments we're launching in 25 it's a really exciting environment to work on uh there's a lot of a lot of stuff to do within it we got a bunch of shops that you can go shopping in um as well as some corridors you can have some firefights in so let's Jump Right In show you guys around so this basically is the mood board that we got from our art director which showcases the direction that we want to go with the level so in here you can see that we want to go super saturated um and kind of Neo on Noir um it's a lot of contrast a lot of Reds and blues and just it's a really cool lighting setup to to go with because it's something that we haven't really done before um so if I go over to our actual level here see how that executed

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    into the into level so I'll just fly around a bit here this is our beautiful Corner which is the part of the environment that we take to 100% first um just to get a feel for how everything will look in the end um so we'll fly around here a little bit um another thing that we kind of focused on was integrating the shops a little bit more into the environment so there isn't like a single door that you go into to go into a shop you can kind of just come down this alley and and see all the clothing just hanging there that you can try on and purchase so one of the really interesting things that we've been working on is coupling the light entities with the actual light fixtures themselves um this is something that's completely new to CR engine that we we purpose built for this environment um so when the lights actually

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    flicker uh in the level the actual em missives on the the assets will flicker as well and so this makes it look a lot less fake and it it makes the environment seem more cohesive as you can change the the light style which is basically an animation that we apply to the lights and the actual fixture will change to to match that so if we change the brightness for example to zero on this light um not only will the The Light Within the scene change the actual emissive will change as well which is pretty significant um that Tech hasn't existed before and it's something that's really powerful for us to to make the environments again feel more cohesive and realistic good stuff all right let's jump over to Rob Riner uh lead technical designer here in Austin uh to talk a little bit about grim heex and uh some shopping updates hey I'm Rob rer uh lead

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    technical designer in ATX office uh we're going to show you a little bit more about shopping and the shops coming up in the Grim heck station so let's get to it all right first shop we got here for you is uh scutters and it's a weapon shop uh kind of a somebody who's just a little sick of the uee just kind of wants to get in get his money he knows he's uh kind of selling weapons to people that are probably not going to do very good things with them but uh doesn't really care at this point just fed up that's why he's out here Grim hex um but uh he sells a combination of uh mostly things geared towards Outlaws uh you can see the armor over here it's a kind of a combo shop um one thing that we wanted to do was make sure that not every shop was just the standard format you know so this is a weapon shop this is an armor

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    shop like things need to have character and the one way to do that is to to make sure that we constantly you know cycle out the inventory as we go um throughout the Universe you know so the next uh shop that we got here is um run by a drug addict so it's uh he's just kind of tucked away in the back alley over here um he's living out of the back of his shop so uh the inventory he's got is uh kind of this mix mish mash of uh different items um this is not representative of the items that he's going to have we I'll give you a little Showcase of of what's coming up but um this is just for proxy work and make sure everything is is looking the

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    way we want it to but uh uh as you can see he's kind of living here in the back you know dimly lit plays doesn't look very clean he's not really a clean type of guy um so it's real small we were trying to go for the the Chinatown um flea market kind of feel he got stuff hanging from the rap Rafters up here um so it's it's hopefully just going to kind of give a little more character and um help continue that you know Outlaw we just kind of do things in our own little chaotic way uh type of fuel that the Grim heck station has um so the other thing that uh I kind of put together for you here before we get out of here is um this

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    is uh example some of the the clothing that is coming online here pretty soon um we got some new boots we got uh new jacket uh we got the little you know Outlaw bandana coming online um to give you a little Showcase of some of the other items that we got uh we don't have them in game quite yet but um and just a disclaimer these may change a little bit before they get in game but uh you know we got a couple couple of different hats coming online um wide variety we get a a different leather jacket here that's a little more uh kind of bad boy feeling um much different variety of shirts that uh deviates a lot from from what we had in the first

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    release uh just kind of a different feel than than what we had every every release at least for the the near future we want to try and get a a different um facilitate a different group of people within our world so that way we can build the world out a little bit better and and make it feel much more unique you'll see a much different blend of of people kind of walking around the stations uh throughout the Universe now let's go over to Josh Coons a ship modeler here in Austin to talk a little bit about an update on the heral the herold's come a long way since the last time you saw it we were at about 50 60% with the gray box we're at about 80 85% uh we've got some remaining finer details the nuts and bolts if you will finer

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    decals little bit of interior work to do mostly cockpit related and design related um we're going back and forth between uh design and art when it comes to gam playay so those are the remaining art tasks uh it's shaping up to be a really really nice ship and uh I can't wait for it to be done and uh you guys get to flly around the around the verse all right we're excited now to uh give you guys a little something I know you guys have been waiting for uh special treat interview with Tony zic director of the persistent Universe uh we'll just kick it on over to him the last several months have been really busy we got the first iteration of shopping and persistence out the door which is something that we've been working towards for quite a while this was really critical not just for the

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    near-term functionality that it enabled but also for a lot of upcoming features uh we wrapped leski quite a while ago and were're originally planning to release it earlier this year but the guys in Germany have been making such rapid progress with the procedural planetary stuff that we decided to hold off and release the the two things together this necessitated a bit of retrofitting though uh leski had to be merged into one of those procedural bodies and it had to have changing boost added so that you could outfit your character uh with anything that you'd purchased uh we also had to upgrade the number of landing pads this since you'll be able to seamlessly fly from space right down to the city and we wanted to minimize how long you'd have to wait before you could touch down um artistically leski is absolutely gorgeous with one of the most

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    interesting areas being a Blade Runner esque Bazaar where small vendors will sell all sorts of things uh the main area will be pretty safe and secure but if you want to buy or sell any illicit Goods you're going to need to venture down into the abandoned areas of the facility where it's much more dangerous uh more more recently I've been spending more and more time uh on subsumption which is the AI and mission system that's going to drive all the gameplay uh I'm working on the architecture and programming the editor and in general working very closely with Franchesco Ruchi in Germany and a lot of uh other programmers over there in Germany in the UK to bring this entire system into being subsumption is going to have a dramatic

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    impact on the gameplay experience because it's going to seriously increase the productivity of the designers that are charged with crafting all of the AI and Mission logic by comparison the missions that we're currently putting into the game uh they take far more time to construct they aren't nearly as flexible and they're much more prone to errors they this increas in efficiency it isn't just about allowing more content uh it's also very much about allowing us to create better content uh by way of example think about a bartender if you want them to look really intelligent they need to be able to formulate complex responses to a given stimulus a request from a patron for a drink might cause them to head on over to the sink grab a glass walk to the Beer tap use it uh then put the

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    drink on the table in front of the customer and depending upon whether or not they get stiffed either head back behind the bar or call security the issue that is that you need your characters to be able to respond to lots and lots of different stimuli uh a glass that falls on the floor and brakes needs to be swept up uh a garbage can that's full needs to be emptied a Rowdy Patron needs to be worn to quiet down and on and on and on uh these responses also need to be prioritized it's okay to stop cleaning dishes to break up a fight but not vice versa there are a lot of subtleties like whether or not a stimulus needs to propagate after a character has agreed to respond the sound of a gunshot should affect everyone but a request for a drink can only be filled by a single server these

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    sub activities as I call them also need to be able to be combined when appropriate uh the characters need to be able to walk and shoe gum at the same time the problem becomes more apparent when you consider that the game will have a lot more than bartenders you're going to have shopkeepers tourists vandals security guards and loads and loads of other types of characters all of which which are going to need you know an extensive array of potential responses uh these are precisely the types of problems that subsumption was designed to handle cargo transport is one of the first few occupations that we've got ont uh we're currently finalizing the initial set of Commodities setting prices creating the UI that will allow you to buy and sell these things and adding the ability to automatically load and unload cargo uh piracy and smuggling should arrive around the same time as

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    you pillage and plunder within secure zones your notoriety is going to increase and you're going to start to attract a lot more attention from the resident Security Forces now you can of course board a ship and take it over but you'll also have the option of Simply destroying the ship and sifting through the wreckage to recover whatever valuable bits and pieces you can find uh retail shops within uee space won't usually deal in illicit Goods but if you can smuggle your loot into Port without being detected you might be able to find a black market dealer the last of the initial set of occupations that we're going to uh bring to the game is going to be the mercenary which is the Merchant's answer to piracy Mercers are going to earn a living by taking on all sorts of uh gun for hire missions including responding to Merchants that

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    are in immediate distress their level of success their reputation is going to be tracked so that only the best are offered the most lucrative and important missions the the second set of occupations that we're going to add is going to be mining and Salvage we won't have the dedicated ships necessary for these things until sometime next year but I'm really anxious to widen the scope of what you can do within the game and so we're going to be adding some more labor intensive up close and personal variations on these jobs on the mining front for example you'll be able to extract small pieces of ore from planetary bodies by hand uh although a bit of excavation might be required in order to unearth valuable gases will be able to be collected by fixing a canister onto natural Vents and you know other things

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    of that sort uh on the Salvage side a salvage gun will allow you to strip surface materials from a ship and transfer the material into containers it wouldn't be costeffective it would just simply take you know far too long uh to break down an entire ship like this but if you know where the most valuable areas are on the different types of ships then you'll be able to make a pretty good living doing this uh one of the things that I most like about adding support for these labor intensive variations is that it's going to allow any number of players to cooperatively work together one of the things that we're aiming to do is to make it easier for players with compatible interest to hook up at just the right time uh to that end we're adding a service Beacon to every player's Mobi glass so that they can

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    offer and request services from one another now a player whose ship has been destroyed might need to be picked up or maybe they need fuel or repairs but they don't want to have to Journey all the way back to a planet or a space station the service Beacon is going to allow them to broadcast what they want along with some other information like what price they're willing to pay and other players that are looking to fulfill those types of requests can decide whether or not they want to accept that offer uh this dynamism is going to have some interesting Ripple effects on the gaml when a player is looking to serve as a combat escort they're implicitly telling you that they're interested in a particular you know type of gaml they're probably the sort of player that at least for the moment uh is looking for a bit of action uh a minor though doesn't face a constant Threat Level across you

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    know their entire Journey so you want to give them the flexibility to spend their security budget where they really need it which is simultaneously going to increase the likelihood that the players acting as combat escorts are going to get more of the type of gameplay that they're really after the service Beacon is going to allow these kinds of dynamic contractual links to be created and broken between the player community at will and I think that it's going to not only allow for more interesting gameplay but also provide a lot more opportunities for players to really get to know one another one of the upcoming features that I'm most excited about is the procedural Planet technology because it's going to add some totally unique colors to the palette with which we paint scar iios uh we'll have plenty of

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    ways to entice you to sit down on a planet exit your ship uh and when you're out in the open and vulnerable and racing back to your ship while being straight from above that's going to have a totally different feel than being in a dog fight in space or in a straight- on FPS battle another feature that's got me really stoked is the server transition technology which is going to Break Down The Walls between the isolated server instances and start to finally push all the players within the game together uh that's a bit farther out because we have to replace all the low-level uh cry engine Network code but it's going to have a huge impact across a wide spectrum of gameplay and ultimately it's going to make the entire world feel much more alive fantastic stuff thanks guys so uh that's all I got for you this week

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    guys thanks and we'll see you around welcome everyone once again to the

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    wonderful world of Star Citizen I'm your host Community manager Jared Huckabee and if you've never seen the wonderful world of Star Citizen before this is where we highlight the amazing contributions to the overall Star Citizen experience created by the fans themselves and frankly no fan contribution has been more unexpected than the Ascension of big bennies now originally big Benny's was just a simple vending machine found throughout the nent Stanton system but it wasn't long before enterprising star citizens took it upon themselves to take these Vining machines on tours of the entire playable Galaxy exploring all the places that big bennies could go videos abounded memes covered social media and emergent gameplay was discovered with the big Benny Summit challenge where players used all manner of tricks to bring big

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    Benny's back to their spawning location on Port olisar it's safe to say that big Benny's it took on a life of its own Now to celebrate this contribution that the community has made to the Star Citizen experience we've worked with the original creator of the big Benny's theme song to expand band it into a 4minute Odyssey of noodle consumption then we worked with the Star Citizen Community itself over 3 months to gather footage of big bennies in every place you could possibly put it then we worked with Community video editor years 100 to cut this together so that it is truly a Star Citizen Community Endeavor hey everyone my name is z 100 and I just have a couple things I'd like to say to y'all before you watch this video first of all thank you to Cloud Imperium games and Jared for allowing me to work on

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    this it was a really different project than what I've done in the past and so it was a lot of fun to be a part of but I'd also like to thank you guys the star citizens for all the videos and pictures that you provided on the forums without your hard work and amazing contributions this wouldn't have been possible so I'm very very grateful to all of you thank you very much again and I hope you enjoy the video have a good one bye now with that we present to you the world premiere of The Ballad of Big Benny's you know I yum

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    brod bod yum yum yum yum w

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    super baby Dy b d b Daddy yum yum yum yum

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    hey there Tyler whiten Community manager in the Austin Texas Studio here to bring you this week's MVP when you think of awesome Star Citizen screenshots you probably think of this individual I want to give a huge congratulations to HOSA for his public service announcements helping those who may have become a little too addicted to a certain cup of noodles and now we're going to take a first look at the latest addition to the series which should be on the community Hub right now congratulations sir you're this week's MVP back to you guys 100 episodes that's uh quite an achievement and one I think we're all very proud of uh I wanted to first of all um thank uh fans for contributing over three months worth of videos for that ballot of big Benny's video you just saw uh without you guys OB that video would not have been possible so

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    thanks for that um so you know making this 100 episode uh 100th episode of around the verse special I think has been really really uh important to us um obviously we're breaking up into into four chunks so we can highlight each studio um you know you guys have made this this wild ride so much fun um I know being on around the verse um for a while now giving the studio updates I always look at the comments you guys leave and it's always really positive and supportive so I want to thank you guys for that you guys mean the world to us so thanks for everything yeah thanks for everybody in the Austin Studio that's taken a lot of time this week to put together segments that we've shared today thanks for the guys and gals behind the scenes that are putting this all together and uh we're looking forward to this new format where we show as much or more than we tell and the

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    goal is to rotate so that uh each month you'll get a big major update from each Studio to hear about what's going on in that studio um so now uh of course we can't leave you without a fast forward so uh we want to give you that that to you guys now so check it out be sure to tune in to reverse the verse

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    tomorrow morning at 11:00 a.m. Pacific time on Twitch yeah and thank you to our subscribers for making this show possible without you we wouldn't be here and as always we'll see you around the did you know that many of star Citizen's developers are on social media if you

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    would like to follow Star Citizen on Facebook you can find us here or on Twitter here and even Instagram here and for a full list of developers personal accounts they're willing to share with the community check out this link you can find out uh what I bought at Amazon this week Star Wars stuff it yeah it was probably Star Wars stuff [Applause]