Star Citizen Live: All About Spaceships

21 May 202101:03:091,807 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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hi everybody welcome to this episode of star citizen live all about spaceships military style i'm your host jared huckabee and if you've never seen star citizen live before it's where we take about an hour out of the end of our week and we chat with some of our developers and we put some of the questions that come from you the star citizen community to them uh this week's show in celebration of our the launch of invictus launch week today we are doing a show themed to military vehicles so basically all questions related to military vehicles we put we put a threat up on spectrum earlier in the week and collected some from there we'll also be taking questions live from folks who are watching this on twitch right now if you're watching the replay on youtube hello from the past how's the future
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things better let's hope so uh joining us on the show this week uh we've got two members of our esteemed vehicle teams uh john no stranger to the show we'll start with you who are you what do you do for star citizen hello uh my name is john crew i'm the vehicle director for cloud imperium the vehicle there oh look there's two of you in there that's black there we go move that over there uh john is the vehicle director what what what what does that mean because we're going to talk to ben he's the vehicle art director here what does the vehicle director do so i look after the five vehicle teams in the company so we have two content teams one in the uk one in the us and then we have the the three more feature based teams so we have the vehicle feature team in the uk
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the vehicle experience team in the uk and the vehicle technical team in the us so it's it's not just looking at the actual content side but looking at across the the whole spectrum from looking after the concepts production vehicle features such as docking the experience such as um missile operator mode and then the the back-end low-level stuff that the vehicle tech team does yeah the whole spread and ben who are you and what do you do for star citizen i'm ben curtis i'm the vehicle art director and the weapons art director for star citizen i guess i um i look after the vehicles but purely from the visual side of things and uh basically yeah
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john does all the house and wires and whens and things and i do that just what does it look like um and i look after the yeah the uk team and the us teams fair enough fair enough uh so yeah as we said uh if you're watching live you can submit your questions live uh we will we will be attempting to focus the questions this week uh exclusively towards military vehicles there may be a question here there that apply to all vehicles in general but for the most part you know because this is invictus and we still have iae later in the year and everything this one is we're going to try to focus this one entirely on military vehicles so with that in mind let's start off with a kind of obvious question here what actually separates a military vehicle from a civilian vehicle is this only a lore thing or does it actually have some
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role in design and even art uh i'd like to start this it's it's no one thing there isn't like a single defining uh feature that goes this this makes this thing a military ship it's a it's a combination so um let's talk about gameplay side first uh traditionally they are obviously more military-minded clues in the name so they they tend to be more focused on uh either offensive firepower than the equivalent civilian ships so they might have more guns they might have a larger size like equipment of guns the the good example we have is the f7a mark ii hornet which is in squadron uh that is on the face of it a a snazzier sharper looking hornet but
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actually all of its weapon mounts are plus one size so it absolutely rinses through targets and then you also have the defensive side so they might be more armored they might have more counter measures again they're designed to be used in military operations where you are expected to be both attacking and being attacked so they're geared for that uh on the the law side and maybe a little on the the actual art side that military ships in the real world now have very different things to like uh maybe ships is we'll use ships as the the analogy um on a military ship you would you'd have the captain's quarters and the exo's quarters and a brick you're probably not going to have a
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break on a civilian cargo hauler because that's not not what civilians do so the the facilities on board are different they they will bring gameplay in the future um but it's it's that combination of stats role uh their usage and what is inside them essentially yeah and i think you know from a visual point of view you can john's already touched on it but i think um with the military stuff it's a lot of the functionality is kind of what drives the visuals a little bit more than first civilian stuff where we can take a few more sort of um a bit more freedoms in terms of you know the stylings and obviously each manufacturers still have their particular stylings but we have manufacturers that make all sorts of ships um but i think the the thing for it is that yeah we
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always try and put the functionality more the kind of like a higher priority um for things like okay you know i'll be great if we could move this room here because it feels a bit nicer to walk around but you kind of think well actually what does that mean if you know if you've got people um that uh you know in crew cause they need to get their uh their positions quickly and then that sort of stuff so you kind of get a little bit um i guess a little bit more thought goes into that side of things yeah a good example of where some of the lines can get a bit blurred as well as the carrick um in law that was originally like the military i don't know if it was the explorer it was the advanced um [Music] scout forward base thing um but the one you have is like the
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ex-military stock so it still has those military features on board but it's used for civilian purposes so it does have that dedicated captain's quarters but the crew they're all in a big bunk room with shared facilities where um you look at like the some of the more civilian ships that everyone has individual quarters because that's you're not in the military you're not conditioned to being bunking with your entire crew you want your own little bit of space your own facilities on board that you can just tuck away yourself okay the uh all right so so so yeah so basically it's a mix of you know just all manner of things it's a role and look and history and and to some extent even design and capabilities yeah okay uh
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the number one most voted on question that we had from the thread what can you tell us about future plans for more military ground vehicles obviously we have the nova tank making its way in with alpha 313 one and pretend and uh so what can you tell us about more military ground vehicles and maybe even potentially alien military ground vehicles people love their tavare and prowler yeah um it's something we definitely want to do but i'm i'm not in a position to to give any specifics at this time it's certainly something that we we are looking into yeah i think from my point of view um you know quite a lot of work went into some of the setup on the the nova um you know a lot of women into the tank treads
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and it'd be great to not just have that done for one ship and to be able to be able to build on that and i think there's loads of exciting stuff we can do um you know when you i know when you see a lot of ground vehicles kind of working and working well um it it kind of um inspires to do more um i like ground pickles anyway so i know a lot of the team they're they're you know a lot of fun to work on um so i think yeah yeah yeah i think a lot of the questions that came up in the thread were are you going to do this or are you going to do this you know this type of vehicle that type of vehicle and unfortunately a live stream on a friday is not where we would typically announce
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a new vehicle or our intentions to do a new vehicle in some way shape or form so while we do appreciate all those questions that came in uh these things do have very specific rollouts and stuff and plans and stuff like that throughout the year so that's where we don't announce them on a on a q a live stream that's not where we do it like like ben said though we don't want to just do work for like we've done the nova tank that's going to be the only vehicle in the game that's ever going to have tank treads we want to want to have some use out of it i think if you even look at the old nova tank concepts there is a hover version in there originally which would use our existing gravlev so ben's eyes go very wide there so there's certainly lots of options we can pursue and i think yeah yeah as we were producing the tank even in our review meetings and things you
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know a lot of ideas were thrown around like yeah it'd be great if we could do x and great if we could do y and it's like yeah yeah it would be like absolutely so uh yeah and everybody knows the way that we prefer to announce our ships is to have them data mined from game files so uh how rare are military-based capital ships like the polaris supposed to be and is the rarer and is the rarity even a factor anymore after they've been made made available year after year after year um i think the the only aspect of that that i can touch on in my role is like the the factor of it from from a design and sort of gameplay experience side
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it's not something that we we factor in because if we take the current scenario now imagine a world where we we'd released a ship that there were there was only 50 of them ever created um and from a gameplay side we have to consider the scenario that all 50 of those would turn up in the server right now today and not destroy everything and have an equal and enjoyable experience so from from my side is the the gameplay side the the rarity of them is is not a factor we we have to consider those sort of scenarios and of course as the scale of the game changes you know year after year as we as the game continues to grow as as more tech comes online as more
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backers enter the you know more backers into the community and stuff all of those scale numbers change and shift and they they grow along with it uh i know it very commonly you know throughout the throughout star citizen's history there's been you know there will only be this many ships and then two years later there's more and then there's two years later there's more it's like well the because it's a you know it's a percentage of the overall population that we're aiming for and as the population grows so too can the number of these ones that are offered to the community so ah let's see what else do we got from the chat let's look for some something from the chat uh when you look at the list of military vehicles that are in game right now uh oh scroll by uh what do you see is still missing or needs to be filled out more uh we obviously have a lot of military
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ships in the game uh it's one of the questions that people asked me quite a lot i was like why do you have so many combat ships and um they are they are popular things and people enjoy playing them but in terms of stuff that's missing there there are a few gaps that are less populated them than we'd like because we we want to provide choice for for players when they're they're playing a game and if you've only got one ship of that type then that that's no choice like a good example would be the the nautilus that's quite a niche military role in being a mine layer and we only have this sort of very large ship capable of deploying one size of mine so there was naturally an opportunity there to both expand that in sizes each way we could do a much larger
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one we could do a much smaller one or something to do with the actual mines themselves i mean i'd quite like to see um i quite like the smaller ships anyway i think yeah i enjoyed the challenge of um trying to get all the functionality and features we need into a a nice small package um so i think doing like a little kind of single-seater reconnaissance like vehicle um something that isn't you know isn't necessarily armed to the teeth but yeah you can just get in and get out i think it'll be quite quite fun yeah military merlin military merlin terrapin on wheels i i honestly wouldn't mind a terrible wheels just unless you stick the wheels on the
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bottom of the thrusters just let it roll around like that uh okay okay chat i'm gonna do it uh is the banu merchantman a military uh i'm not a law person so i don't even know what the banner you do in terms of military for classification but it is more a civilian thing therefore i can't talk about it on this show i tried chat i tried it's not a military sorry uh uh yesterday we uh we uh introduced the community to the rsi scorpius uh the the the new two-seater uh uh fighter
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from from rsi uh a couple questions in the chat about the scorpius can the uh scorpion turret or what does it have like an actual name to the the type of turret it does have a in law name in the in the brochure i can't remember what actually this is a just a remote terror on a on a track can it be slaved to the pilot if there's only one person flying if you slave it with a blade like any other turret um any other remote turret it'd be the same functionality so if the pilot chooses to do that if they want to solo it um then it would be slaved and it would be locked in the upper position in a forward arc where you can look which is pretty much the consistent rule for all
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scenarios like that okay let's see do you think it looks more like an x-wing or a star fury from babylon 5. i think more star fury honestly i think it looks way more like the star fury the very obvious first reader yeah at like first glance it is very x-wingy and then you you notice the the differences in like the the swept wings and just the angles it's not quite as much as it seems on first glance yeah there was actually there's actually a uh there is a very popular account on twitter called the space shipper we're gonna throw a little plug out to the space shipper there uh
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wonderful account that that tracks the development of spaceships in all you know genre and media and stuff like this and i actually uh reached out to him and i asked him how many different x you know ex-solo edited ships have existed in sci-fi and he sent me a list of 11 different uh x-shaped sci-fi ships going all the way back to 1929 and the le fem which is a french sci-fi film that whose name i just butchered so a very common uh silhouette in sci-fi and i'm amazed it took us this long to actually get to one but we had to hit at some point so luckily it looks as cool as it does but yeah definitely i think more star fury than x-wing personally ah what else we got from the chat here all right this this isn't from me i
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swear when the genesis starliner was first introduced there was a mention of a military troop transport variant as well as mentions of the star seeker and star hunter variants as well are these actual variants plans or just ideas to be considered it's a very torturously related question just to talk about the starliner in here like like whoever this is knows that that they were gonna get their question asked because i'm a mark for the starliner but that is not from me um we have a lot of ships in law uh that vary from like quite in-depth explanations on the galactopedia and just one line mentions in uh sales text or like uh one line in a law piece somewhere and
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whilst we do have a lot of ships we're not going to make every single ship that has ever been mentioned in law first and foremost we'll do the starliner as as was promised and then after we've done that then we can always look at actual variants for it yeah i really like the crusader stuff yeah i can poke john a bit about it yeah see what we can do we come to tackle it it'll be the only one left after the end of this year the crusader ones uh well no there's still the aries the end of this year oh oh so you're you're saying something there i think it's on the road i hope it's on the road if not well there's you there's your spoilers i actually don't know if it's on the roadmap i'm going to go look at the roadmap now the roadmap doesn't i don't use i don't
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work on the roadmap uh it is on the roadmap you're covered good job um i imagine the the the starliner which was the very first you know crusader ship that was introduced and before we had further refined that uh uh the crusader style i imagine it's probably going to go through some revisions when it's time comes no no not a military ship but i don't care it's my show you were saying yeah everybody said yes yeah yeah to us we'll have to have a discussion about it when we get to it i think you know we we have just because um a man of fact like like take the rsi for example we have
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you know rsi ships that look very different compared to what we've done with the scorpius and i think you know i think it's fine um as a um as a universe with all these manufacturers in it to have different uh ages of the same manufacturer yeah you look at um you know 1980 fords versus ford's today and that's in a relatively short period of time that they've been making their cars um and yeah i think so um i i don't want to be in a position where all of our ships look you know like variants of each other yeah yeah exactly but i do think it's really important that we have kind of common language and you know the the kind of like the key the core kind of elements of the design
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language for a particular manufacturer to be you you want to be able to walk onto a ship and know who made it right like from the start if you know what i mean um and i think i'd rather focus on that side of things than making things you know always feel like let's say just a variant of the same thing pulled out of it and the wings have been made a bit wider and stick a lot more seats in it and job done um oh yeah now to your point like it's like a 60 like a 67 musta ford mustang doesn't look a whole lot like a 97 ford mustang and doesn't look like a 2007 ford mustang those are only 20 year yeah i mean and we've got 100 year gaps in some of our ships so yeah i i hear you and then even in the present time like a company like mitsubishi makes you know a 3000 gt makes an eclipse they also make an 18-wheeler
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you know a long-haul tractor trailer and they make tvs and they don't look anything alike so uh all right fine chat i'll ask what can you tell us about the polaris anything what ship sorry the polaris i don't know don't know what it is it's another rsi ship it was upcoming it's like a torpedoes oh that one um so i'll give that the other popular answer of it is not in active development right now of as of this second as i talk um but we have done a complete uh concept update pass on it when it is ready to go into production it is it is all there all worked out all all the corridors and rooms have been
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brought up to to modern standards for all the metrics or the usables um we've pulled in a lot of reference from the bengal uh interior into it so it's all the rsi interiors like um the the mantis took inspiration from the connie and you can see it but they're not the same and it's similar between rsi's larger capital ships bengal polaris and between those two that is the madison constellation and the other thing that's the big change on the polaris is it did get a bit bigger as as all things do but the trade-off for that is now the hangar is to the standardized metric for the the fighter size class that it's supposed to hold so it's not it's not a um very weird size that it
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was it is a standard like i always forget what's the the player facing category is but internally dev side it's an extra small one so that's that's your gladys is sabres that they will all fit in there and a scorpius right so the so the scorpius will fit inside the yeah and it's in its folded wings back position right don't try it i mean it will fit in if you put it the other way you just might not have your wings left i know what people are like um all right so yeah it's it's many of the questions we're we're hitting that part of the show here where a lot of the questions and the threads were can you give us an update on this ship and can you give us an update on this ship i do want to say uh using john's answer for the polaris as a baseline year not every ship is in active development
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at all times so sometimes when you're not hearing about a ship it's because there is no new information to give about the ship it's not an active development so keep that in mind when measuring your expectations for some of these answers here it's very much kind of dependent on on you know we we may have few big ships in that development or we have lots of little ships in active development or some ships we might jump on do a bit of work on and then oh actually something else comes in and so um yeah that's that's a good point there i think it is carry it on the the the road map track of the i see the comments on spectrum read it a lot of oh this this ship on the the road map stops in this quarter that means they're finished that doesn't necessarily mean we're finished we we quite often pause things to go work on something else like from an art point of view you know
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you might have um a you know at the early stages ship you might have three artists working on it but then as we get towards kind of you know further through the pipeline it's actually you know it makes more sense actually if we bring in five artists onto this ship now and then we can close out a little bit quicker or we can you know we can spread the work out a little bit more evenly and you know so things do stop and start and you know sometimes even you know you you work on a shift and then you're like okay well actually we've got to a point now where we need to hand over for another department to see their work but they focus on another feature so it's going to be a while before we get their work done on it and there's no point in us kind of like steam rolling off into the sunset to develop everything and then at the end of it go oh actually we need we didn't support this feature in that feature so you know we kind of um work on a quarterly process and our planning is
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quarterly so we react quickly as well and for those asking so what ships are in development check the public roadmap the public roadmap is basically how you can if it's listed on there it's an active development and if it's not listed on there uh let's see what else we got so we did the polaris let's do let's do the pegasus that's the other big one that's all throughout chat what can you tell us if anything about the pegasus escort carrier uh not a huge amount it's it's still a thing um it's still primarily going to be used for squadron um but it's not in episode one so there's there's no active movement on it okay uh have you ever considered a military ambulance land rover that's a
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very specific question have you ever considered a military ambulance land rover that's that's someone who spent a lot of time in the military ambulance almost certainly almost certainly uh yes we have considered it is that the short answer actually i like i like ground vehicles okay pallet cleanse uh anything you can tell us about the uh antennas and stuff with the for the carrick the antennas the the bridge sliders uh the stuff that was that's uh still outstanding for the carrick uh the the jump antennas will will be there when we have jump points uh the the shutters i think we're still
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we when we did the model of it we left them off because uh we weren't quite sure how we wanted to do them we modeled them out proved out in concept but we never transitioned that to actual in-game and we have been doing some performance work on the the carrick which maybe ben can talk about uh what what and why we were doing it um yeah i think um so part of the um i guess what we're talking about before yeah we have we have times between ships and one of our artists um we decided to kind of put a bit more of a focus on to looking at our ships in our processes and working with the the graphics team the rendering team to see what performance costs we can save the i guess one of the um uh
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in our game like like john mentioned there can be points where you could have a large number of the same ship turning up or you might have you know a number of completely varied ships turning up into kind of one player space and what we're finding is that um whilst our ships were okay when you were kind of up close and personal with them when they were kind of off in the distance we were hitting some not great performance budgets um so we kind of just took a step back take a look at it worked out what we could and couldn't do and just through um sort of a better understanding of the way our engine works we kind of made significant improvements on the the carrick um the carrick was it's not by any means our kind of worse performing ship but it was kind of middle of the ground and we've got a lot of ships that
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actually off the back of that we've then kind of looked into going oh actually you know what these are actually they're working pretty good and they set up well and we're quite happy with this um but a lot of the things as well is without well again i could probably talk about it for like an hour so i won't but um a lot of a lot of our kind of like initial kind of budgets for our team and our um you know we have kind of the the rendering cost budgets that we set out like really early on in the project and then over the years as more features and more kind of complexities have come into it we have to kind of go back and revisit those and go actually yeah is it achievable to deliver the ships to the visual standard that we're aiming for and that support all the functionality that we require and still be those original budgets and the short answer is no
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um you know by the time we kind of go in and even just things like the dashboard interaction system that you know separating off all those individual elements into their own um interactive buttons i think that adds costs you know if you look at what we've done with the gladius recently and adding in all the kind of um the ship component panels and the access panels and that's all work that we've kind of got marked on to do for our other ships um but that all impacts costs so what we need to do is yeah we don't want to just be piling in piling in feature work and then suddenly being at a point where yeah we we've completely tanked the performance um so what we're we're kind of trying to do is every time we're adding something in we're revisiting the way we create the assets and see where we can make savings and with the carrick stuff like i say a lot of it was just
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um really digging into the the kind of like um we we know where we can save performance but it's really spending the time and uh kind of getting into the details and and a lot of it's you know to do with our um like our lighting setup our biz area set up the way we you know do our lods and and you pull really far away from our ships you know a lot of the details that um when you're working up close on a ship and you're you're manually doing these lots um you kind of you can get a little bit kind of tunnel vision on what you're working on so it's kind of actually looking at things and how they're going to be used in the game uh so i'm rambling uh yeah we're making some great performance wins on the carrick uh that was our first one um and we'll be rolling onto more as we as
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we kind of chip through the backlog yeah hopefully players don't even notice a a visible difference on it either if if anything we've we've been improving the visual pop and the the kind of like the the lots as by just spending a bit more time thinking about exactly what the player sees and to give i think a rough ballpark number uh it you can now have two carats on screen for the costs of one of them previously and and most of that's gone into 313 one i think there might be a little bit more coming in 314. yeah there's one or two things you might notice we didn't quite get time to kind of uh close out in time for 321 but it was better that we put it in with the
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performance gains that um we did achieve and there might be one or two things that we just have to kind go back and tweak there's a little window that doesn't quite look right and yeah just minor minor details but um yeah mostly went in uh a bunch of people in the chat i i know the answer this one but i i want to see if i can prove a point here a bunch of people in the chat are asking about the crusader jupiter carrier that's what i thought crusader jupiter yeah no no it's a ship that exists in the lore goes back to our question that we had earlier uh there were there was there was a portfolio for crusader industries in last year maybe march march or april depending on when it came out i would i read it
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when we were proof reading it before but it was march or april uh that goes back to the things that are you know that created for our lore and the flesh out the universe is not synonymous one-on-one with ships that are in active development with the ship team so so i thought i would ask specifically to prove that point that we just made before we're not playing with you or trying to hide anything they're separate we can pull from that you know for inspiration and stuff you know at times but we're not going to create every single ship that exists in the lore of our universe when you create a galaxy there's has to be thousands and thousands and thousands of ships that populate it so uh separate worlds uh that said uh during invictus this year and then of
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course with xeno threat before and stuff we are now seeing idris's and javelins making their appearances in the persistent universe with invictus people can now tour select sections of a javelin for the very first time does this simply does this mean that the ships are finished and are ready to be flying around in the verse with players no all right okay yeah um so i guess um you know most people have probably seen um you know when we originally released the uh the japanese one of them into the the um pu that people were stealing it and glitching inside it and you know you can probably tell that um the interiors aren't
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aren't done um you know if you look at the um the javelin um you know it's a bunch of work to get it to where it where it was for the tour um but beyond that there is some areas of the ship that are complete some that that just are a little diagram on our internal compliments page to tell us what's going to be in that area um so yeah the yeah we wanted to get these in and get that kind of player experience with the um the exteriors but we there they are there's a little bit of work you have to be done um yeah there's a lot of interior there uh like ben said there's there's bits that aren't done because these these ships are primarily squadron so we the the thing we've said a lot is we want
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people's first experiences of them to be in squadron where it's this this living breathing environment and there is a marked difference between what is needed for squadron inside those ships and what is needed for a a full fat release in the pu where you uh where you have to get to all these components and do things to these components and have interactions with all the seats and the setup for doing all of that if we were to release them as they are now as to to players they they would probably be very disappointed with them because you couldn't use them as a capital ship they'd just be a overscaled uh single-seater fighter um a lot of corridor space yeah so that there is a a lot of the need for squadron and the needs for
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the full release of the pu it's really cool seeing and i love it it's just there's a an awful lot of work to go into kind of um finishing the capital ships to a point where you know they um you you you get the gameplay you deserve out of it rather than just getting like say right shell with some corridors i i don't think that can be understated it's a ship is not a ship is more than just the art ship is more than just the art the art is an essential hey no i don't know it's an essential and crucial part of it certainly but especially as they as you as a matter of scale a capital ship requires so much more as far as gameplay and the expectations of experience and
00:36:27
we definitely want to get those dialed in before we we put them out there it's like you said it well we don't want it we don't want to put a javelin out there and have people just basically just flying it around like it's an enormous hornet yes i know people want to do that but that's not what we want right let's see the the tavarn prowler stealth capabilities are less than ideal is this something that will be addressed when the new radar and scanning systems come online uh yes um the the new radar and scanning system is a quite a large change that sort of i don't know how to frame it it doesn't
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reset everything but it makes makes the whole system nothing like the current system and as a result all the ships are going to behave differently within it to how they do now and we do want the prowler to be stealthier but obviously with such a huge change like that it's probably going to take a few patches to get everything where we want it to sit there's there's a lot of big changes coming to to vehicle systems in the next few patches and they they are all requiring across the board uh balance changes so whilst the initial release will you'll notice a big change um there's probably going to be a few outliers that we will need to hit in subsequent patches okay uh someday star citizen is going to have
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more planets with oceans uh are you already making plans for ocean-based vehicles maybe maybe it's we could start the eternal debate of does the spaceship work underwater does a spaceship work underwater i don't know no there's a spaceship underwater a submarine or as a submarine in space a spaceship this question's going to haunt me for a while yeah uh here we'll do one easier then what was the rationale behind removing the kitchen from the m2 hercules the hot topic um so
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the the original concepts layout for the ship i don't think ever had it's certainly never had like the the full um kitchen that the c2 now has in there because when we came to build these ships we almost entirely changed the interior design and layout and having the full kitchenette for the the c2 was something that we we built in and then we sort of take it away for the other variants to make it fit in the space and we probably went a bit too far in taking things away so it will be looking at in future patches uh a way of getting food making facilities yeah back up it won't be the full kitchenette like the c2 has i can guarantee that but there will be something on there there's been some wild suggestions barbecue um it is it's a little bit odd
00:39:45
as well because uh i was actually doing it today but um haven't quite got to it yet but uh the the looking at the different modules we have for all three variants and what we share between all three variants oh yeah okay this feels kind of like quite natural and then you're like oh no but that in the next variant puts it you know right next to the ammo or why why would you want to be like oh you know making your coffee getting you armed up maybe that works um but but yeah trying to find like a natural place for it to fit is we'll work something out yeah the m2 and a2 again is a another problem where there is very limited like commonality between the two of them internally at least we've got a toilet next to the seeds just a hot plate that sits on top of the power plant
00:40:34
yeah yeah exactly pizza oven with the physical damage model there's something we've been hearing about for a while now with the physical damage model uh the strength of the ships will the strength of the ship's armor be defined by oh geez okay sorry i'm trying to re with the physical damage model the strength of the ship's armor will be defined by material and thickness our special materials for military and civilian armor is planned and will we be able to change the armor of our ships that's a few questions in one there yeah yes there will be different materials for military and civilian ships and it can even we can even go down to the the
00:41:21
granularity of like this variant of the ship has a slightly hardened material that gives it some improved properties uh in the first version of the the physical damage rollout we would not be letting you swap these things out um whether we change that in the future that's that's up for debate internally um but it's gonna be such a uh apocalyptic change to to how the game plays when that comes in like uh as as people have predicted and we've talked about all the existing meta for combat and damage and gameplay will be null and void with it because you'll be moving away from this uh dps race of just
00:42:09
decreasing a thousand hit points to zero and winning to moving to targeting specific areas and disabling ships and doing something with those disabled ships think about like this sort of like the sports car analogy and you know you get um you can get a porsche that you know is all aluminium or all metal and then you get the you know the top version the the gt3 or whatever that is you know completely stripped back and it's got the carbon yeah it's got carbon fiber body panels and carbon roof or whatever it might be and i guess that's a similar approach we may or may not take some of our ships and as far as the people in the chat asking uh when uh keep an eye on that public roadmap folks that's basically all the best
00:42:56
information we have about when is there on the public roadmap and a lot of folks go through to to make sure that's as accurate and updated as it can be so check that out uh and if it's not on there then don't expect it in the time that it's not on there uh medium fighters have been in an awkward place for quite a while they don't often offer enough firepower to be worth taking over a much more agile light fighters nor do they have the ability or agility to make up for their smaller components and lack of firepower compared to heavy fighters and larger ships are there any current plans to make them more viable i agree with everything this person said and this is another thing that we could probably spend an hour alone
00:43:44
talking about um i briefly mentioned it earlier with the radar and scanning stuff so there there are other features coming it's what's to refer to as capacitors but we're probably going to rebrand it slightly to something more better player facing because capacitors can give a slightly slightly different impression on what they actually do but as a result of that we are literally changing the the stats on every single spaceship so they are all having changes done to not only handling but health all the weapons are having some changes done to them in terms of lethality uh ballistic weapons uh having changes done to their ammo counts so again it's going to be a huge change
00:44:33
and all the the ships are going to have a big shuffle around in terms of their their combat prowess and hopefully as a result of that certainly from our internal testing it seems to be the case that those those medium fighters are in a better place because yeah they're they seem to get overshadowed by the light and the heavy fighters everyone just goes if i want agility light fighter if i want to go tankiness go heavy fighter and the hornets in the middle are like what about me yeah and i understand there's some discussion going on right now about the the ship archetypes and like light fighters medium fighters heavy fighters like maybe those designations will change in the future or something yeah they they might change in name uh but the roles won't roles won't really change but they might just sort
00:45:20
of get lumped together in more clear-cut categories right we're gonna see if we can't uh dive a little bit more into ship archetypes and stuff maybe next quarter for folks who are wondering is it still being worked out at the moment it would be irresponsible to talk too much about it right now but when we get to get it more in line we'll cover that uh the nova's main gun has a range of 1.5 kilometers and that's way too short will you consider adjusting it yes so we did some very last minute changes before 331 went live to to fix some issues and it sort of it fixed those issues but didn't hit all the goals we wanted and the the lack of range was an unfortunate casualty of that so we will be looking at that
00:46:08
again um as kind of a follow-up to the physicalized damage question there what is the time to kill supposed to be like when all is said and done we talk a lot about you know the changes you just called it an apocalyptic change you know i'm sure i'm gonna regret saying apocalypse oh yeah there are there are they're already memeing it um so when we talk about when the new radar when the new scanning when the new physicalized damage when the item components when the archetype switch over happens uh when all is said and done what are we aiming towards what are we working towards what uh are how how long is it supposed to take to to kill something like a constellation versus something like an idris and i'm not asking for like specific seconds or anything but just in general talk to us about what we're
00:46:56
working towards here it it's a very hard question to answer because there are so many systems at play there um even with those two like examples of an idris and constellation like if the idris hits you with that railgun fully charged out the gate it's going to be seconds if they miss then it's going to be much longer but as a general general broad extremely broad don't hold me to this in in many patches time the it is not going to be the short like 15 seconds that we we can experience now in those scenarios where it fights that over before before you know it and if you get two good players together they might stretch to a minute or two uh dog fighting um it is going to be longer than that
00:47:45
but the the experience in that combat will be um whilst it might take a greater time the actual combat within that time will be a much more intense and exciting thing yeah i think you know obviously this is really one for jon to answer but um from you know from my point of view i guess the egg player skills gonna play a massive input into it um like you kind of just said um yeah i'm an old world of warcraft player and you know you think some of the boss fights there you get you know some of those can take a decent amount of time but then by the time you get it down you know exactly what you're you're doing that that you know can you can speed run most most things um but it's that that's you know it's gonna be really exciting when we kind of yeah when we get all these
00:48:32
systems on and you can actually you know have a a group conflict with you with your mates you know against kind of i always like playing a bit of the underdog if that so you try and take out some of these these big mean capital ships it's gonna be awesome yeah the the the combat now is definitely not how it's going to be with not even the next few patches but let alone with physical damage because that the combat till then is very much time to kill like the outcome of combat is somebody explodes every single time and that's that's the only outcome there is at the moment and the chance of that happening with physical damage is radically reduced because that's only going to happen like if you
00:49:19
do a critical hit to their power plant and it explodes you're much more likely to then have a disabled ship that either needs boarding or salvaging or um tractor beaming away and then on the flip side of that it's you in your disabled ship figuring out what you are now going to do as a result of your shipping damage because previously you'd just be dead and there's there's no choice there but do you stay with your wreck do you fight off the uh attackers do you hide on board your ship and hope they don't come and find you do you call for backup that is just gonna change everything yeah i think like physical damage for me is really exciting but also really scary um because like from another point of view
00:50:06
it then does you know the the way we make our ships has a real impact on on their performance and yes yeah we will be balancing things with the materials used and that you know um that will be like you know how we kind of balance the ships out but you know if if we always get a little bit of stick for oh there's a big empty bit of space behind this wall and and that's what's happening like well that might not necessarily be such a bad thing when you get to proper hole thicknesses and physical damage and um you know having all your all your main systems exposed across the main core of the ship and being there right for the picking versus having them nicely tucked away in the belly of the ship you know can make a big a big difference to the way the ships are gonna uh behave and how combat's gonna feel um so yeah it's super exciting but a little
00:50:56
bit scary yeah there's a lot of content changes will will be done to support it and like even if it was just like a data behind the scenes data changed it's a big change but the content side just makes it this this huge huge thing right um remind folks in the chat that today's show is about military vehicles so if you're asking about things like the constellation and stuff that's not for i will say uh do you have anything planned for the gladius it's kind of in a sorry state right now uh the gladius no not gladys jeez gladiator i feel too sorry no no the gladius is great the gladius is great do you have anything planned for the gladiator the gladiator um yeah we but aware of where it sits um it's not ideal
00:51:46
uh a few patches back we did actually do sort of uh it wasn't particularly publicized but it did have some behind the scenes tuning done on it to try and uh boost its ranking up the analytics and it did actually have a a good impact on that um especially with xena threat where torpedoes became a menace um it had some very big flaws that were in the set-up that had gone untouched for a while so the the bombay doors they only had like 50 health which is a stiff breeze and so when you shot them you lost half your torpedoes because they were attached to the doors uh so we we buffed them up uh we buffed some of the wing mounts like the not the mount the gun mounts on the wings but the actual weather wings attached to the body because again they had far too lower hit
00:52:34
points uh and uh just a strafing shot across the ship you could if you do it from underneath you would hit the bombay it would lose all of its torpedoes you'd hit a wing blow that off you've lost half your guns half missiles so we we did do that pass um from an outside i think the turret probably is the the biggest offender of uh it's very much uh our old methodology of doing turrets where you are you're sat in a turret and the pitch is your neck which isn't a great experience for keeping everything in view um compared to our more modern ships where you sit in a almost ball turret and it moves and for me personally uh that's where i want to go with all our turrets is is have that because it provides a consistent experience across the board you don't have these
00:53:22
weird with turrets where i'm in this turret and i look up and down and my neck moves or my neck moves that way because it's fixed but you're keeping it one-to-one with your inputs don't like to just cause headaches yeah than the team to solve yeah pretty much jd binge the m50 is the m50 a military ship she's not a military ship it's a racer it's it's a it's a racist interceptor yeah i don't think that makes it a military ship though i don't remember it half a question by being half a military uh what can you tell us about the m50 anything all right planned for it i know it was going to get it was going to get different engines at one point yeah we still have those second engines to make but it's just gone down the
00:54:09
priority list of things like the art is is done but they require some work from the tech team um because we we have two ways to set it up and one is a bad way of setting up that we get it sooner and one is the correct way of doing it um the problem being it has two thrusters on the back and swapping it out changes it to one thruster so we need to make sure ifcs handles that scenario which is not a common scenario where we tune a ship and then by attaching an item you'd lose half your main thrust so it needs to work with that and we want to do it the proper way because then that will allow us to do it to other ships in the future okay we've got five minutes left so let's let's see if we can do something let's see if we can do some lightning round stuff here see how many of these we can
00:54:56
squeeze in before we're done uh what's missing in game to make drop ships necessary to carry troops nowadays you can carry like five players in the back of a 100 eye or even 20 in a cutlass black so why would anyone use a drop ship the classic clown car question uh the the big thing that will stop this or maybe not stop because i know how tenacious people are doing things um that will disincentivize it will be the the life support system so the ships are all going to have a life support item on there and that life support item is going to be tuned for that ship and that ship's crew so it will its life support generates the oxygen and scrubs all the carbon dioxide out so it will be filling it at a rate that the designated crew can
00:55:42
consume so if you've suddenly got five people in the back of your 100 eye that's only designed to take one person you're going to be using the air five times quicker than the system can produce it at a very basic simplistic level so i guess the air is going to run out and you're going to be sucking your spacesuits and then you're gonna use your spacesuit air and then bad things are gonna happen it looks a lot cooler as well rather than like trying to just farm a bunch of people out the back of a 100 to actually be like proper drop yep force force reactions are the other thing and we've seen more iterations of that come in where um if you crash into things your person gets thrown across the floor or you're when the ship's banking you're yeah you're staggering and you can't move so if you're not actually strapped
00:56:29
in the seat and a bad player hits a hits the ground a bit too hard and their drop you're not getting checked i myself personally i have been thrown out of in a design play tests where someone's been doing low flying and we've clipped the ground and i've been stood on the back ramp foolishly and it's just thrown me out the ship and i've died when i probably should have been sat in the sea okay okay chat you want me to waste some time on this okay kraken anything you can tell us about kraken it's not a military uh i'll take time thinking about that but though no there's no no more news it's not an okay guys it's got a theme uh is the saber raven considered a military vehicle
00:57:18
um i not for me that's not to say there is a line of law somewhere that says it is a military vehicle but it is uh for me is not to the same military standard as the um base sabre brain completely gone there yeah uh let's see will the nova fit in a with your upgraded hanger uh if you can load it in from the top somehow i guess uh let's see let's see uh our attachment coming yeah um now that the nova has treads will you revisit the vanguard landing gear that's a deep cut yeah i was gonna say yes but john
00:58:07
sounded a little bit more hesitant so maybe not it's uh yes but it's a low priority it's we want to we got rid of them in the original vanguard and then we brought them back when we redid it and it's the same with any ships that have wheeled gears we want to have them actually function like like they look so you could do rolling taxiways but it in the in the grand scheme of things it is very low down the list to spend programmer time on uh why does the terrapin have two seats pilot and scanner but only one bed because it's a one-person ship um you're not expected to fly and scan with that big radar dish at the same time how come when i run over players the tank it doesn't obliterate them that sounds like something for the actor feature team
00:58:54
uh uh let's see all right last one um how is player facing modularity progressing player facing modularity we intro you know we introduced the idea of it what was it back in 2015. um what can you tell us about that lots of ships yep there's there's uh quite a few ships that we've promised with it they're they're all still going to have it we in the near future are putting uh the vehicle tech team on actually doing the tech to allow this and we're going to start with the retaliator and they are they are simply working on the tech first and we want to get that functional and then we will work out when we release the actual modules uh they may not be
00:59:42
the same timeframe you may get the tech in first and then spend a quarter or two working on those modules to because they were done quite a long time ago they're like the seats are not quite to the the current standards so um we will do that um the the technical issue with it at the moment is we need to have object containers for these rooms that swap out they need to be items that swap in and out but we need to have that link between the contents of that room and the parent ship so on the retaliator you have those torpedoes so they need to be self-contained within this room you detach it and you can put another room in there because if you did that at the moment you just have these two torpedo arms dangling through your recreation room so it is planned we're still working on it it's not it's not a cut feature like i see plenty
01:00:30
of people saying that we're never doing it again and uh we just do it in select circumstances not not every ship is going to have a modular feature yeah okay so okay so that kind of touches on the you know um the the feature team may have time in their schedule to be tackling some of this stuff but that might not necessarily align fully where possible we're always trying to line this stuff up but the company's pretty big and everyone's working on a lot of things at once so it's not always a case that we can go okay cool the future team is is finished on you know x week and then why week we just start on on the ark because sometimes you know while we might be two months away from closing out a capital ship or you know a single seat or whatever it might be that we actually know we need to we need laser focus on this and we can't afford to just like up and leave to finish
01:01:20
priorities all right gentlemen that's it thank you so much for taking the time we are actually over time now so i got to let you go i know you've got reviews to get to um folks 313 1 is live on the live service now invictus launch week begins today if i'm not mistaken sometime during the show earlier the new trailer for invictus went out and checked that out too uh be sure you log into the game uh every day over the next week to check out all the different events be sure to check out spectrum there's there's a bunch of uh different uh contests and and activities going on along with the in-game stuff and of course across all social media so there's lots to do this week check it out um the scorpius should now be available to everyone who's interested in that so
01:02:08
we showcased that on isc yesterday you can check out the website now to learn more about that and of course come every day this week there will be new manufacturer days throughout invictus and who knows what's coming i i actually don't i'm saying who knows i i'm not part of that anymore i don't know so check it out uh and for those asking yes the pico balls are real i wasn't like lying last time there's nine of them there's nine of them there's nobody still found them yet uh for star citizen live i'm jared that's ben that's john i'll see you next week everybody take care cheers

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.