Star Citizen: Around the Verse 3.3 - AUSTIN

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:13

   [Music] hey everybody Welcome to season 3 episode three of around the verse I'm Sandy Gardner VP of marketing and I'm Chris Robert CEO and project director of Star Citizen and Squadron 42 uh so on this week's news on the Star Citizen Alpha 2.5 front we just opened up the early P2 to a wider group so we can get a little more data on the bugs that require a larger group of players to show up regularly it's one of the big advantage of having you guys out there helping us test this thing uh be on the watch for an even wider PTU push later today or tomorrow with the hope of going live next week uh so this week's around the verse uh it's Austin's turn to show us what they've been working on headed by John uren who's our Austin Studio manager and VP of online operations Austin's uh the center of our online publishing operations it community support and is the headquarters of our

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   global test group uh as you probably know Austin's Dev side is headed by Tony zerc who's been spending a lot of his time in all four of our Jos this year working closely with the teams around the world to bring the Pu to life um which we're working very hard on so um let's kick it over to Jake Ross uh over in Austin uh for the Austin Studio report hey guys Jake Ross here producer of the Austin studio and uh here with with you this week to talk a little bit about what's going on here in Austin uh we've got a few updates for you this week that uh hopefully you guys haven't really seen before something new so uh I want to first uh hand it off to David Swafford our director of public relations to talk a little bit about what's going on in his world as we approach Gamescom I thought I'd tell everybody a little bit about what I do in the world of PR for cig I I do manage the public relations the media relations

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   for the company all over the globe from all of North America U Asia also a lot of Europe Germany and in the UK very important markets including several others there in Europe but if you see things like uh for instance this Edge magazine cover you may have remembered that one The Edge from the UK and also a more recent cover this one with Mark Hill on the cover Gamestar magazine in Germany these are the sorts of things that I'm responsible for so I deal a lot with the media they they want uh pictures they want interviews I facilitate that sometimes it involves a trip to one of our Studios we set things up with all of our Executives with Chris and Aaron and so forth and others and it all comes together in ends up in something like this and more recently I mean very recently we' have a cover on PC games magazine in Germany uh and in fact that particular magazine is sort of

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   a preview of what we'll be showing at at Gamescom to the press and also to our backers so if you're in Germany and you see that on the news stand pick it up and read it I think you'll enjoy it but in terms of gamec Gamescom and what we do there are uh meetings that we set up with the Press with Chris and Chris details some of the the cool technology that that we're showing and so uh you know they enjoy that and and and write about it and get their pictures and their interviews and then you'll see that come out uh about I don't know anywhere from that weekend of Gamescom to the following week maybe two weeks out and so we'll get a lot of coverage as a result of that and that's all my responsibility so we're really looking forward to it it's going to be an exciting Gamescom I hope you you watch our live streams and and in our other events that we have on our on our website it should be a real exciting

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   time all right all right good stuff thanks David so uh now I want to pass it off to Brian Brewer our lead uh animator here in Austin uh he wants to give an update on the female character animations hey guys we're going to be taking a look at the female animation in our game where we're at right now where we came from and where we're going we have rebuilt the skeleton to now fit the new female mesh which you guys have seen in previous versions of around the verse and kind of here she is in all of her glory so what's happened is the technical animators have come in and they've given her a skeleton which you can see by this little pink structure they've skinned her they've given her to us and we have come in and we started testing animations out on her and here she is playing something called a a ROM which stands for range of motion this is something that we capture at the beginning of pretty much every motion capture shoot that we do it's kind of

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   just a little calibration thing that we need our actors to go through before getting data back and solving but to kind of tell you about where she came from uh we've had two previous versions of the female which we've or a lot of work on and have already done a ton of animations on and this is kind of what she looks like right here so you kind of get an idea of kind of what she looked like before and what she looks like now uh we've gone in and we've made her a little more heroic she fits seats a little bit better she's a little bit more in line with the male and she'll be fitting all the metrics in our game and if you remember from last episode with all the other animators talking there's a lot to do with metrics in this game a lot uh which is basically uh trying to get everybody to fit in the same universe without having to adjust things uh for every animation for every

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   character and if I uh come in here and turn a couple of things on you can see uh these red markers these red markers are actually the motion capture markers used on our actor when we're on stage and we're basically doing a test making sure that she's following the data that there's not going to be any issues that uh nothing unforeseen or unexpected is going to happen all right thanks Brian uh lastly I want to hand it off to Justin Benford director of QA uh to mention a little bit what QA and here in Austin have been focusing on recently hey guys we've been very busy in QA we've been splitting up our time and resources to make sure we cover everything coming online in the near future we have processes in place to handle multiple test beds at the same

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   time we start each day with a team huddle where we gather around QA managers and your hess's desks to discuss our daily daily plan as well as any challenges we may face while we continue testing Squadron 42 and preparing for Gamescom we're also heavily focused on patch 2.5 2.5 introduces a lot of new features some of which include the uh flight ready Argo and Reliant as well as the pirate base Grim heex we're really excited to get this out to you guys we've also been focusing heavily on testing the FPS game mode star Marine which involves cross Studio play tests between our four studios in preparation for patch 2.6 hope you guys enjoyed that update uh there's lots of stuff going on here in Austin especially as we approach Gamescom keeping everybody busy uh until next time thanks guys see you around

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   and in other news the new Weekly Newsletter was released this weekend packed full of info as well as a sneak peek so if you haven't already RIT be sure to check in your inbox the monthly report also went out over the weekend which is a good read and a long read y but a good one there you go track jackets and polar shirts are still available your last chance to get a track jacket as they are making way for squadron 42 hoodies by popular request and the Gladius is the August free fly ship for subscribers and the subscriber flare is the Reliant model which will be attributed at the end of this week and it will go live in the game with the release of 2.5 now let's go over to Tyler Witkin for this week's MVP hey everyone Tyler Witkin Community

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    manager in the Austin Texas Studio here to bring you this week's MVP a huge congratulations to DJ brazzy for creating some incredible stylized Vector artwork we have a shared folder that cig staff uses to share awesome screenshots and art created by the community for us to use for our desktop wallpaper needless to say these all made the cut so great work congratulations again you're this week's MVP back to you guys that was cool I'm always Blown Away by the community's talent enthusiasm for the universe of staris and so it's awesome um speaking of universe let's hand you over to Tony zerik for a little Fireside game design chat we're aiming to release the first

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    MPC in what's currently called 2.7 in late 2016 in limited numbers at first and then gradually increasing in quantity the initial set of characters will consist of things like shopkeepers store patrons maintenance workers uh entertainers tourists uh and vagrants and they'll be found predominantly in the larger of Landing zones Area 18 port olsar leevi and Grim heex we'll be looking to fine-tune Performance animation quality and usable functionality in particular with the focus on really amping up the diversity and variety of their actions a bit farther down the road that first wave of MPCs won't have a lot to say but you can expect them to get progressively more talkative in subsequent releases uh at the design level most of the gameplay systems are unified under the aices of subsumption which means

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    that conversational logic will be able to easily interpret and Branch based upon your reputation in a given area uh your personal history with that character whether they've given you any tasks to accomplish and how you fared uh and other things of that sort the longer term objective is to inject as much dynamism as possible into areas that will be populated with NBCS one of the ways by which we mean to do this is via the addition of dynamically constructed daily schedules to the NPC population this is going to allow them to vary what they're doing and where they're doing it based upon the time of day if you arrive at a landing site during the day then you might find Shoppers hunting for a good deal and workers just going about their normal business uh if you touch down late at night though you might see fewer characters on the streets and a

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    greater percentage of partygoers entertainers drunks and criminals another way by which we intend to add some EB and flow to the environments is via taking into account what's happening at a macro level within the system and factoring the results into the algorithms that determine the composition of NPCs that you'd see at any given time if business for example is booming you'll see more well-to-do characters and less crime whereas if a location has fallen on economic Hard Times uh then you'll see more vandalism and begging if a war is Raging near a planet you'd expect that its medical facilities would be getting a lot of traffic lots of limping and bloodied pilots and Marines should be going in and lots of patched together characters would be coming out

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    ultimately what we want is for the various Landing zones to feel like living breathing environments and not static portraits the ability to hire an NPC crew to help with the many tasks that operating a multi crew ship present is actually seen as a fairly important aspect of the game as it's going to allow solo players or just a group of friends that are missing a critical position or two to supplement their ranks as necessary this feature isn't going to arrive in 2016 but I can talk a bit about where we're heading larger Landing zones are going to have a Personnel shop where you can peruse a library of available characters each of whom uh is going to require a daily salary based upon their skill set and current demand NPCs then can be rented but never actually purchased

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    retaining them is just going to be an ongoing expense NPCs that may serve in a crew uh will have attributes associated with them that denote their Proficiency in a variety of disciplines this is going to include things like for example how well they can pilot operate a gun turret control a tractor beam or repair damage to your ship we're probably going to wind up tracking a few psychological components uh like aggression and intelligence as well and using those to influence how that NPC behaves in various situations most NPCs are effectively going to be Specialists with a notable capability in really only a single area although there will be some exceptions if there rating in one of these fields is beyond a certain threshold then they may be assigned by the player their employer a compatible

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    responsibility on a ship a combat Marine then could be assigned to patrol an area and engage any foreigners that are detected but since they wouldn't likely have any engineering knowledge they wouldn't be able to be told to repair any damage that occurred to the ship every MPC attribute is going to be attributed uh associated with another value that determines the character's maximum potential in that area this determines in essence how good that character can ever become at that particular discipline and a character does more of something they will naturally improve their abilities up to that potential it's up to the employer the player then to decide when it's time to give an MPC that looks to have prematurely peaked the boot so that they can try their luck with another uh Gunner with poor accuracy then might well be worth keeping if they're fairly

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    cheap and they look to be steadily improving the basic idea here is that you're going to need to invest your time and attention not just your money if you want to grab ually build an exemplary crew the real NPC Superstars the guys that can repair damage in a fraction of the time or that can hit targets with Stellar Precision they won't be found looking for work in the local personnel office they'll be discovered by players that are willing to take a chance on them before anyone else realizes you know their true potential some of the NPCs that you encounter during your travels May depending upon how the conversation goes uh offer their services to you this method of recruitment will be considerably more timec consuming than flipping Pages at the local personnel office but often times it's also going

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    to be where you're more likely to find a bargain or a multi-discipline MPC or someone with a higher than average potential to excel keeping track of and controlling your crew uh is going to be fairly straightforward your REM Moi glass will have an employment application that allows you to see how many characters you have uh working for you at that moment what they're costing you what jobs they're capable of doing uh what you've currently got them assigned to do and overall how they're performing some of the first duties that NPC crew members would be able to perform would be things like operating the scanners and weaponry on a ship uh serving as onboard security of a designated area or acting as a general

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    purpose engineer capable of affecting repairs farther down the Road uh would be more exotic functions like acting as pilot for which we've already done a lot of the groundwork AI ships are already quite capable of engaging in combat and Landing but they don't yet know how to position a ship when the objective is to retrieve ejected cargo or how to hover over the surface of an asteroid body taking input from the scanners which would be identifying valuable pockets of ore such that the beam and cargo operators would be in a position so that they could do their jobs the intent ultimately is to give the player the ability to direct their crew when necessary in very very broad strokes but to avoid defocusing the game and injecting too much micromanagement we don't want to become Sim citizen uh

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    much of the time you won't need to do anything other than hire an NPC and assign them to a ship a doctor for example would spend most of their time in the ship's medical facilities if such exist and automatically heal any injured crew members to the best of their ability there are some positions though that will on occasion require more frequent communication uh a ship's pilot for example needs to know where you want to go uh or whether you've decided that you want to break off from a particular encounter engineering efforts on the other hand uh they could be prioritized so that you're able to dictate what you want back online first propulsion uh Shield or weapons we are predominantly focused on ships

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    with smaller Crews at the moment in order to make some of the larger ships really feel occupied though you might need many dozens or even hundreds of NPCs to that end we're probably going to allow you to hire a base crew from the personnel office while specifying only a few key things like whether you want a skeleton or a full crew and the average level of competence cooks and janitors and security guards then could be hired in Mass allowing you to focus on hiring just the individ idual Specialists as you typically do on the smaller ships to really customize and enhance the control and efficiency of your ship senior crew members uh you might even call them your officers are really an enhancement of your character in your ship uh they're an extension of your overall capabilities once you've sifted through the rubble and found an NPC with

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    a lot of potential and also invested the time and money to allow them to really Bloom we want them to matter to you as such and given the difficulty and EXP of replacing them then we might allow the concept of ship Insurance to be extended to cover senior officers of your MPC crew for an additional charge commensurate with their demonstrated capabilities there you go I can't wait to get more MPC life into Star Citizen live it's going to be pretty damn cool and just so you know Tony and Franchesca Ruchi who's our lead AI engineer uh have been making great progress internally on subsumption and our new mission system so watch for further updates in the coming months uh on that uh so in this last segment uh we're going to have a look at a ship I think you'll all really like bear in mind it won't replace your current one if you have it if you do well enough in Squadron 42 you may very

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    well get the opportunity to fly so here's Chris Smith our Austin lead vehicle artist to tell you a little bit about it hey guys not too long ago I received the awesome task of creating the new Hornet s7a ship which will be featured in Squadron 42 I recently got done with the modeling and text uring portion of the ship build and I would like to show you guys the process on how we created The allnew Hornet s7a the original Hornet s7a MK1 was created by cgb and it was used in the first pitch video by Chris Roberts the s7a is going to be featured in Squadron 42 so naturally we were looking to do a complete update for the Hornet since the mesh being used in the game as of now is still essentially the old CG bot model from 4 years ago

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    the idea here was to keep the original horn F7 MK1 Series in the game and then at the f7a MK2 model model completely new from the ground up with our latest techniques and pipeline procedures Chris thought it would be cool to have the classic Hornet and the new version run side by side and players would have the opportunity to keep the old MK1 as a classic collector's item we were also going to revisit the MK1 one last time with an update on materials and damage systems to have it mesh better with our current assets while we wanted an updated and new Hornet we still wanted to keep the essence of the Hornet line of spaceships rugged and relatively simple yet very effective also I had to thought that

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    from a distance one should be able to tell that the ship is a hornet F7 essentially I wanted to update the lines of the MK1 Hornet and also bring the mesh up to a higher Fidelity and functionality level we also had a list that we gathered from fans with issu issues and complaints about the current Hornet ships from that list I gathered the most important problems and most of them were already on my list as well I tried to remedy as many issues as I could the initial blockout went well and quick I took some inspiration from a few of the original Concepts from Rob McKinnon and also jet fighters like the F14 f19 F22 and so on I started with the front nose section I made it Slimmer with more aggressive and aerodynamic lines also I took great care to enhance the visibility of the canopy as this was

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    a main concern for the fans of the original Hornet I did so by eliminating the site Mulan alt together to create a great panoramic view with only the two main bars obstructing the view now I also lowered the sides for improved visibility out of the cockpit I then moved on to the air duct which I slimmed down and tucked in considerably to improve the overall lines of the ship the landing gear and the wings were moved to the body of the ship underneath the wings much like the F-14 Tom Cat setup for a cleaner overall solution for the wing setup which rotates backwards at highest speeds the bottom of the ship received a big overhaul and I decided to close it up as opposed to the open design of the original where you can see the bottom of the ball turret this way the Hornet feels more put together and less disjointed Chris wanted to have the missiles hidden and then deploy as

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    opposed to a wing mounted setup since I had close up the bottom I was able to move the missiles from the air intakes and have them then deploy from the bottom center of the ship which is a much cleaner setup and makes more sense the maneuvering thrusters were also moved for optimal thrust location and they were designed to be equal distance from top and side from the center of the ship the main body of the ship has been made Slimmer overall and it's much lower as well in order to accommodate the rear top maneuvering thrusters from there I made it a smooth transition to the rear Rings which are Slimmer in profile and more aerodynamic for the cockpit I work closely with Zan to to ensure correct implementation and design we like the original cockpits unconventional nonsquare screen designs and tried to incorporate this design Spirit into the new cockpit I also took many cues from

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    Modern Fighters such as the F22 and other fighters from here I started with the first burun of details of the ship working my R from part to part and also started to incorporate the big hit decals that Define the ship from a small distance I reused the existing Gladiator textures to create unique materials for the f7a and it worked out great as I saved a great deal of production time while staying within the manufacturer style from consisteny on smaller ships we break the ship colors up into three main colors that can be changed in the ship's material to create different variations and paint drops in a quick manner since the f7a is the military variant it was decided to go with the Green version based on the original color scheme of the pitch video that's where we are with the Hornet f78 Mark I we hope you enjoy flying it in Squadron

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    42 I think a lot of people will be excited to fly the mark 2 in Squadron 42 I certainly will yeah me too and as a reminder there's no show next week we will be streaming live from our show floor Booth sponsored by Intel with bad news Baron twerk 17 cap Richard and DJ Knight so that'd be really cool and there's also the Gamescom party live stream popup events will be on Wednesday and Thursday night and the Beer Garden on Saturday yeah which is a perennial yeah and there will also be a free fly over Gamescom and goodies to pick up at the booth so come visit us yeah we'll see you there yep and be sure to tune in to reverse the verse tomorrow morning at 11:00 a.m. Pacific it will feature one or two of the devs from today's show for Q&A so jump in there and ask all of your questions there you go with that thank you to our subscribers for making this

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    show possible and thank you to all the backers out there for making star s and Squadron 42 possible and we will see you around the verse bye thank you for watching so if you want to keep up with the latest and greatest and staff citizen of Squadron 42's development please follow us on our social media channels see you soon