Inside Star Citizen: Enemy Mine | Spring 2020

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:03

   [Music] or than other manufacturers and races the vanduul ships are really material driven over the time we've been working on this game the vanduul race and bundle ships art style changed a few times we believe we found something really good and interesting that really spoke to everyone on a team who is the kingship interior rework and we decided last year to apply that style and those visuals to the rest of the bundle fleet by creating them that no material library we started looking into types of surface and

2. 00:00:52

   large-scale panel textures we often create a test room to bring all in the materials and look at them in certain light conditions and we put it on simple geometry like spheres and cylinders and to have parallax occlusion mapping visible and see how it deforms on a material and this was a very helpful way to look at the materials before we applied on ships so if you think about any creepy-crawlies any deep-sea creatures any kind of slimy horror risk stuff that's kind of what we're going for in our references and that's what kind of all started was again Frank's

3. 00:01:42

   kingship interior he used that a lot and it just all all started from there looking at the blade blade is a light fighter of the bundle fleet so obviously making it look sleek and and nimble and lightly armored was was the big objective on this ship the main difference really between the squadron blade and the blade you know is the cockpit area some of you might know that the vanduul the way they sit in a cockpit is sort of like we sit on the bikes this is kinda where this build of tray look of the ship comes into play which naturally if you're looking mostly

4. 00:02:31

   down and forward the way you want to approach your tray is from above so that's why the ship has the most armor on the areas where like on the top of the ship where pilot doesn't look and it's lightly armored at the bottom where he is kind of heading and he doesn't have to worry about this is probably what defined our style of all the Vandal ships that if you if you look closely you will see it's this little situation nice hard shell at the top soft busy high frequency areas on the bottom and the cockpit that looks not like a human technology at all so if it comes to vandal weapons the one to create their weapons

5. 00:03:19

   sort of like the rest of their technology which is discovering what they can from battlefields and from other races however else they can find the components they need one of the issues on old scythe was the two weapons were part of the shape this is something we wanted to definitely resolve on a new one visual aspects of the shape is we did like asymmetry a lot that definitely has to stay it's fairly iconic but we wanted to make sure the ship looks much more balanced than it was before and we also wanted to give it those medium fighter characteristics which is it has armor plating looks a little bit slower than the faster nimble ships but it definitely looks like it can do better maneuvers than a heavier ship for the reef bundle and and other races if it

6. 00:04:14

   comes to clave we wanted to use this opportunity to give it a unique look so it doesn't look like a scythe with an extra wing on the other side also wanted to make it look special so it looks similar to other ships but in its own right fairly unique we like the bird of kind of prey aggressive silhouette and look we kinda wanted to emphasize on that a little bit more which also suited the art style of vandal especially when looking at other ships the smaller bundles ships definitely have this bird of tray kind of look to them this is a bit of a peek into what we've

7. 00:05:06

   created for a bundle for squadron 42 which was a very exciting task for me and working with Frank on developing this and with Nate our director that was incredibly rewarding and I hope you like what we came up with and universe the ships of the vanduul are just some of the ways we've been celebrating alien week all week from contests to language primers from recipes to historical fun facts to roundtable q and A's and more be sure that you've checked out the website to see everything that's happened this week as for your weekly dose of currently in development updates it's time once again for sprint report let's start things off with some combat

8. 00:05:55

   AI improvements that are underway what you're seeing here is a new reload test using current behaviors available in the game now players don't have unlimited ammo so why should NBC's the set up here is that this NPC starts with a limited amount of clips and then automatically reloads as they empty each one but eventually we'll have individual behaviors here that will distinguish between the various NPC characters but also never mind the invulnerability here they turn that on special for me because I'm as one designer put it not good now when they run out of clips the NPC will then query the area for an ammo usable and then move to refilled before returning back to combat behavior it's a little thing but when combined with the dozens of other small touches like this these behaviors should lead to a more

9. 00:06:43

   immersive and ultimately more rewarding gameplay experience for squadron 42 in the persistent universe of life in ship news eagle-eyed citizens may have spotted the origin 100 series being added to the public roadmap for alpha 311 so here's a look at the current gray box process now rain box is the intermediate phase between white box and final art where the initial geometry is created structure is formed and we get the first real sense of shape language for the ship or vehicle now once it's all validated here the ship will move on to final art where the texture and detail are added and its true personality will begin to shine through of course it's not just new ships that are on the way though old stalwarts like the Gladius opt in a testbed for new

10. 00:07:33

    features and functionality is currently having a little work done including the addition of a weapon and item rack to help with missions in squadron 42 as well as a dash makeover complete with working toggle switches and lights to support the upcoming cockpit interactions functionality now while the weapons rack should make its way to players in the upcoming Alpha 310 we're going to be learning more about the new cockpit interactions featured next quarter so keep an eye out for that over this quarter we've been following along with the early development of our upcoming and refinery debts and we're here now with another look at current white box gray box looked up the refinery decks are meant to occupy a separate space within the rest stops from the more commercial areas these are where players come to handle their more industrial needs from

11. 00:08:23

    refining mined materials to picking up mining related missions or even buying new mining equipment one of the larger elements of these locations are the blazing heat generated from the open smelting facilities and blazing slag being poured into vats refinery decks are intended to be utterly industrial from the large metal clinging to the shouts of the workers all around and if that's not hot enough for you on our last sprint report we showcased the early explorations of fire propagation tests for star citizen and squadron 42 and we're back with another update now after starting with voxels the VFX team is now laying the

12. 00:09:11

    groundwork for a functional entity based prototype that can track things like temperature fuel amount fire and smoke intensity per entity and incorporate those into systemic propagation what you're seeing here now is a fire volume that starts at the ignition point and grows from there using entities that allow for mesh spawning which will then in turn allow fire and smoke particles to spawn directly from the surface of an item's geometry the team's next step is allowing propagation from voxels to entities and vice-versa but honestly it's still this kind of looks like a pyromaniacs paradise to me speaking of pyromaniacs and what might be the best or worst segue i've made all season it's time for another look at early work on the planets of the pyro system in this case pyro - now in the

13. 00:10:01

    original galactic guide for the pyro system pyro - was said to be a cordless planet that once held significant mineral deposits and became the victim of a of a metal rush that quickly picked the planet clean leaving a little more than an empty husk and well we may have to revisit that assessment before all is said and done similar to our I've looked at pyro one last month this is early work on the planet's surface alone so you can expect plenty of changes and improvements along the way before it gets plopped into the pyro system with its family of other planets but it's fun to showcase what planet tech v4 can cook up in a new worlds very early days so what'd we learn about this week well we learned that the vanduul and their

14. 00:10:49

    ships get more alien and more menacing as development progresses that the Gladius remains testbed for the coolest new features and that between refineries fire propagation and the pyro system star citizen's development really seems to be heating up and I have no shame a free side star citizen I'm Jared Huckaby we'll see you next week you