Inside Star Citizen: Tactical Capital

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   last week was our inaugural Idris War Games test and while that completed earlier this week with many Lessons Learned and the ship itself is still awaiting important Resource Management Maelstrom multi-crew gameplay work and more before it'll arrive permanently in the persistent Universe we here at ISC still jumped to the chance to showcase the current artistic progress of the vehicle inside and out as well as to enlist a few of our oldest friends in providing a sort of director's commentary to the proceedings here's how it went just look the camera hi I'm John gr I'm nickley the art director 32 you're new title I've got I don't even know what I am anymore should I say that should I say that that would be good yeah yeah yeah hi I'm Nate I I'm not got a clue

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   what I am anymore he the one one the one beef of the should yeah yeah get some days I'm this other days I'm that where do you want to be today Nate I don't know what I want to be today what should I be today yeah I was the art director for the thing there you go do you mean to go first you can be my bloody guest mate okay hi my name's John crew I'm the vehicle art director hi my name's Nate uh I was the V cart director we've been asked today to give you a little director's commentary over the Idis that you will have seen in the Pu being fought over recently [Music]

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   right so the exterior this is this had quite a few iterations over time in terms of not the shape the shapes stayed the same but how like the breakup the materials on it the engine thrust the thrusters of yeah the shapes remain pretty true we did make amendments to the exterior to fit the interior in because the number of spaces that we needed for squadron sort of slowly increased so it's a very tightly packed capital ship if you look at the original concept it was quite a thin ship as well it's it just couldn't fit everything in it I think my favorite feature from the original one was the hilarious flight stairs that came down in the middle of the flight deck yeah I think that was my first fix then we're going to fly into the uh

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   the back of it which is the way most players should normally enter the address landing gear deployed Landing complete you can go in the front but that'll be a bit it's getting dark now John so there we got in Squadron there is space for two gladies gladi ey uh and there's a space for the Aron PV at the back but you can technically fit three ships in here yeah when you first land you'll sort of notice that the exits for the hanger are generally sort of a lower level one of the things we do a lot of throughout the ship actually is just SL slight changes

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   in elevation even though you're on the same deck um and the general layout um it's fairly symmetrical I would say the ship when it was first put together was really sort of I would say designed from the inside out so there was a lot of amendments on the exterior to make the interior you know interior to me is always King you spend a lot a lot longer on the interior of the ship so uh we sculpted the exterior skin around that um if you were to to hide that exterior I mean there is no breathing room it is like a bit of an engineering Masterpiece to be honest this is where the uh mpuv hangs from the ceiling iy I've watched many people accidentally fall out the bottom of the address in atmosphere at that hole so don't do that

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   or if you want to recreate the alien drop ship SC pretty cool the gravity room was was originally upstairs we had to shift things around through the process again taking inspiration from you know real world science specific areas that whole room actually closes into its own cylinder you have to sort of open the door to to sort of get in and you can close it behind you it's quite a trip and for all intents and purposes unless you're going to your bunk or you're going to uh very specific areas like the briefing room or the gravity room which You' just seen there there are no dead ends um it was it was put together when I was on the ship and it

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   originally sort of designed behind it it was very much sort of focused around multiplayer combat uh at the time and you know a good multiplayer map is is you've always got options you've always got at least two options at every every Corridor every room you're constantly flowing around yeah no dead end so yeah as you can see I actually had a bug this morning come through about the uh writing on the wall being shorthand oh dear so it's spelled incorrectly oh I like no it's not it's a intentional Choice yeah so we got the ATC room which overlooks The Hanger which is obviously very useful for being an ATC and we'll come back later to the other side to see what's in there there's a lot of decks to the address yeah yeah there's a sub deck in the Argo which you you know You'

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   have seen or the utility vehicle I should call it you've got your main deck this is the sort of the main symmetrical area and then through the heart I would say the center of that sort of floor plan is all of the I would say bus business side of the room so obviously you got your meso here the CH line don't talk about the CH line it's there here roast lamb is still uh on special yeah yeah that's an inside joke but sleeping quarters this is for your your general crew for the ship the bunks have shutters on them a bit more pracy within built Home Entertainment system so this is uh two mirrored I guess solo cabins uh the pilots get

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   their own little area at the end which are about to get a little bit bigger but you didn't hear that from me so the uh the version that you're seeing here is taken from a point in time on Squadron recently uh but there are lots of little tweaks that we'll talk about in the future to deliver more of the address uh one of them the missile room is a big one that's still to come uh that is not available here at this time um but there's like Nate said lots of other little tweaks as we get closer to shipping Squadron that we'll be making again Inspirations with regards archetype for for ages you know you can see there's a strong inspiration from some of my favorite 1980s movies through here I like to see you know material breakup introduce te you know textures uh leather where we can do to make it feel a bit softer and more

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    inviting as a habit a good habitational area should be and it's different for different ships right but when you're designing a capital ship it kind of needs to tick all of the boxes from a putting the ship together point of view everything is modular so you'll notice probably in the Pu now a lot of these elements are reused in some of the age of ships simply because you know we try and put the ships together in a modular fashion and the bigger the ship gets the more modular it needs to be you really want to avoid doing too much unique stuff because it will Hammer your video memory cuz this was the I would say it's the first capital ship we done it is the first isn't it yeah and it was really sort of you know Genesis of um this was put into production actually around the same time as the Retaliator um many many

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    many years ago and it was at that time we started to establish you know a really good understanding of how we want habitational areas to feel and look feeling being The prominent feature engineering again um completely different you got the technology side of it the medical side of it so they became the sort of like four style guides I would say that became the you know the springboard for a lot of the other ships to sort of follow on from yeah you see a lot of similar stuff in the the Hammerhead which actually uses a lot of the the Idis kit as well different different areas have their different technical feeling you'll notice here when you come in through the center of the the medbay for example um there are very very very little right angles um when you look at the floor plan plan for example it generally dollies off at 45°

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    angles or 60° angles I I don't like right angles in in floor plans things need to flow as you can see there you're going to get a right angle when you come out of the door there's not much you can do about that but uh yeah and it's all into weave you'll notice there's lots of Windows look outside there's lots of Windows look back into the hanger um so we're not doing any cheating Escape pods here yeah right at the front of the ship now so this is the Mann uh turret at the front the big one up top and then of Escape pods here for everyone that's in the sort of Upper Front half if things go sideways and you need to get off the ship going back down starboard side have to do the bassim head of port and starboard yeah interesting you mentioned that John cuz um navigation has been a little bit of an issue so these corridors that you're running around at

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    the moment they're going to have a lot more of an injection of color um in the future so you'll have a much better understanding of whether you're going forwards or backwards or whether you're on the left or the right worth noting as well like all the spaces that you're seeing are completely undressed there are you know tens of thousands of entities that end up on top of what you're seeing for squadron because it needs to feel more lived in it needs to tell that story so it's kind of bare bones seeing it this way which is kind of strange for me at the moment yeah it was very strange when we were getting this ready for the Pu to to take off all those layers and sort of see it in a state that we've not seen plus also we're not seeing it with NPCs yeah when you see this with NPCs and you know people walking around carrying out their duties Engineers doing their things at panels and whatnot it feels lived in it feels alive um but you know hopefully

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    when it goes into the Pu there'll be plenty of people running around anyway and which will make it feel very similar for you guys hamster balls you want to get buff go to the gym I don't know what we had there originally opposite the ATC was it it was the pilot it was the pilot ready area but we moved the pilot ready area down to the same level as a hanger so you can get your gear scramble out as quickly as possible rather than getting your gear run down the fly stairs falling down too F the stairs um and then sort of hobbling into your ship with a broken ankle then going further back we're sort of halfway 3/4 of the way back yeah you got your sort of I think the crossover Point here yeah you got two crossover points on the

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    hanger now you're going to sort of come through and this is where a lot of the asymmetry comes in although the the footprint is sort of similar you come through on one side you've got a Brig which is where all the naughty people go and we have a lot of naughty people in the game there's a security office in there and on the opposite side of that is basically the opposite side of the ship is the Armory which you'll see in a little bit big Escape pods so big shared ones rather than individual pods you might have seen as we've gone around some big red signposted rooms they believe have Eva airlocks in them as well as sort of Maintenance storage area so all sign posted so you know in a hurry where to go then the main briefing room main briefing room again integral to Squadron this where you're going to get your mission briefings and so on it's a big ship y there's a lot to it

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    I say there's a lot crammed in yeah so now now we're in the opposite side to where the brig was this is the Armory and shooting range quite a bit of inspiration from RoboCop as you can probably all tell I'm a bit of an 80s Buff when it comes to the movies when I had to do things for real actually build things it visually makes a quite a big difference to me as a as a as a visual kind of guy that uh firing range areas another one of the areas that has changed around a bit over time cuz it was it was all an Allin one I think it was on the other side I think we flipped it and then we got into the logistics of you know what happens if you take your gun away from it know what's going to happen to you as a player so there was there was you know you're not supposed to walk around a military ship with with a firearm in

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    your hand basically so um yeah lots of minor changes there more for the social experience so this is above the rear of the hanger not all the way at the back uh because it has two lifts that go down to or one lift that goes down to the uh two two yeah there's one each side that connects with the hanger so if if you're bringing in um supplies or getting ready to go out on a long long journey into the depth of space you can you know utility vehicle drops the cargo off and you can load up pretty efficiently decontamination area before you get into the what would be the engine

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    room very different feeling like we talked about compared to the the rest of the ship yeah it's the thing with agis we we sort of looked at a lot of real world um scientific I would say you know hydren colliders nuclear reactors CERN um was a big sort of inspiration with a lot of the paneling and and general sort of feel and that's continued in in The Gauntlet and um a lot of the other age ships that you'll you'll see then there's a you'll have seen them dotted around in the corridors but there's a lot of uh wall panels that hold all the components so once we do have some big Capital size components like the in the engine room there's a lot of sort of secondary redundancy with all these extra wall panels dotted around so if one area of the ship goes down it's not completely SCU you can still root power

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    around yeah it's the interesting thing in the original design document John where if life support systems went down on the rear of the ship there's actually sort of like large bulkheads that close that section of the ship off so the rest of the ship can survive so again you know thinking about sort of multiplayer aspect um if you were to try and Ambush one of these things I think there's going to be quite a lot of fun to be had yeah those bulkheads I think you probably will have seen some of them in the corridors big yellow orange yellowy orange yellowy orange okay the layout as well the engine room you'll notice is pretty much if you were boarding the ship from The Hanger pretty much the most well protected room um of

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    the ship um again with that multiplayer feeling in mind I think going off do you remember Titan Mode Squadron not Squadron Battlefield yeah really just trying to create this sort of layer up up on layer up on layer until you get to the Eng of room to to make that quite difficult to ultimately disable the ship like we talked about the there's a lot of flow in the interior but there are those areas that have very distinct choke points to get to like the bridge is one whilst there is multiple ways to get there they're quite well defendable and then the engine room is the other so those are two two areas you really don't want people get into Uninvited there's a few ways you can go up to the bridge there's obviously this

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    lift um but there is also a set of staircases either side so you have the sort of tactical stations at the back flanking each side down on the lower level from the the main Bridge area I think uh thing I'm I would say most proud of on the bridge um there's been a lot of rework done but you'll notice here the view out it's pretty spectacular removed the what would be you know the cross frame which went across the front of the uh the ship so you got completely unstructed views out to space um but it still feels chunky and weighty uh which it needs to which is you know success so that was a little bit of a director's commentary on the Idis which hopefully you'll have seen and

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    experienced as part of the event that's been going on in the persistent Universe recently and as great as the ship looks in the video and the events there's there's still quite a bit of work to do before we can give it to players to have for real um things like Resource Network multi crew gameplay all these things that make it an actual living breathing capital ship that you want to run and own that's that's pretty much it for now yeah to Echo what John said um hope you enjoyed what you saw um you know still a ways to go um with regards sort of delivering you know the ship as a whole uh for the Pu but I just want to give a shout out to all the teams that have been involved in working on it I mean the list is endless artists designers concept artist lighting crew social design level design I mean it it's huge there there is literally hundreds of people involved in um delivering such an

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    asset um to yourselves and and we really hope with the limited time that you get it that you really enjoy it yeah I'd be surprised if there's people at the company that haven't touched it in some way or form over the years it's it's such a big part of the uh experience so what we learned this week well we learned that the address is a delight to behold inside and out that it's benefited and continues to do so from years of iteration in Squadron for 42 that there's still lots to be done beyond the currently fantastic art to bring the game playay to it that it and its owners deserve and that when all that is said and done this is going to be one heck of an addition to the persistent Universe for inside Jared Huckabee oh oh no is ADD just the ship

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    you've been looking for for inside Star Citizen I'm Jared hucke thanks for letting us share the process of game development with you and we'll see you all here next week some weeks you have it some weeks you don't stupid