Around the Verse: Episode 1.40 (2015.04.16)

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] coming up on the Empire report last month's slavering bust has meant hundreds of former captives returning to their homes but find why one woman may have to go to court to get her life back and could an outer system be the next Real Estate musthave here what has the rich and Powerful pulling up stakes and staking claims plus why a Navy Surplus May mean it's the perfect time to buy a new ship we share how the you E's loss might be your game all that and more on the latest Empire report at 2200 sat hey everybody Welcome to to episode

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   40 of around the verse I'm Sandy Gardner I'm Ben Lesnar can you believe we've done 40 of these no I have cannot believe we've done 40 you of these great and uh $79 million as well uh yeah congratulations uh everybody out there for uh getting us to this point uh it's really incredible I know I say that every time but it is really incredible star citiz an alpha 1.1.1 is out and that is what we're officially calling it now um Chris posted a letter from the chair chman on Friday uh basically explaining we're going to call Star is an alpha to keep people from being confused that this is not the uh releas candidate yet but uh 1.1 add 1.1.1 adds a whole mess of interesting things including the very first bit of multi crew if you land on a uh platform

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   in free flight mode you can get out and man the turd of another ship I've heard of people getting as many as three four people into their cut list and flying around so it's it's just the very earliest dling of uh what's possible you can pick up a Super Hornet or a gladiator this weekend as well another thing we hearing about 1.1.1 is uh folks asking about the balance whether or not everything is locked down now uh especially wreck balance and uh I think the auroras were nerfed a bit um no that's not final we we experiment with different things to try to get uh get everything just right expect to see it swing in the other direction as we go forward and back again we also put about a design post on FPS stances and breathing I am I'm really excited about some of the mechanics they're working with there to make FPS is more complex uh I think just the idea of having to

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   think about your breathing when you're firing our weapons is really interesting um I know I know there are some games that have done that before more hardcore FPS games but I think it's going to be very interesting in the Star season setting now let's go to the Spectrum for news from around the verse take it away Spectrum [Applause] greetings Star Citizen fans and welcome to around the verse I'm Daren borick I'm Lisa Hanan and we have some updates for you so number one we're finishing up concepting on the whole series it's

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   really exciting it's looking great it's the next concept that's going to be coming your way so get excited about it we're also working on polishing our character pipeline to make sure as we're gearing up into character creation our the our processes are efficient and all of our characters are coming out looking really badass we're finishing up right now specifically working on some of the character concepts for the citizens of Tara so we're flushing out what they're going to look like the upper class the mid middle class all of the subcultures and it's looking great really excited to share it with you guys so on the arena Commander front um before we start releasing 1.2 which is the FPS patch um you may or may not know that we've actually got a an in between patch which we're calling 1.1.2 uh so many numbers so what we're doing to this one is introducing the

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   tutorial system for arena Commander kind of get new players or even possibly some veteran players acclimated to the control systems how to do some of the in-game operations but it's also a lot of our uh setup for when we finally do the FPS in 1.2 so as we're doing that as we're preparing for the FPS um as you know with 1.1.1 we finally released uh some of the multi crew Tech that we've been working on for the Super Hornet the cutless and the Gladiator so at this point now we're just kind of fine-tuning that technology working out the bugs uh making sure everything's working smoothly and we have seen a lot of the bugs that have been reported for this so at this point we're just getting it right before we finally roll out the full multi Cruise system for the persistent Universe yeah which which is going to be awesome yeah so I think that's all we got for Santa Monica yeah signing off I'm Daren vck I'm wait I I

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   think I'm am at least Daran I'm Ron Burgundy Stay classy Star Citizen fans hi I'm uh David langelier senior producer at El phonic and I'm Travis day I mean Chuck brungart president of Il phonic and we're actually sad because uh Travis isn't here with us today uh yeah it was good having him here uh helped us out a lot and uh had some good times got to see him a little too drunk a couple times that was fun too uh so I guess today we're going to talk about uh sat ball uh which we've mentioned a couple times before uh but it's uh zg sporting mode that we're putting in the FPS um that involves

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   grappling hooks and and uh a ball that you have to shoot into a goal and uh all zero g movement using the push pull system um yeah it's actually really cool we're pretty excited about some of the stuff we're working on with it um a lot of what we're doing is we were you know we mentioned we're preising uh some of the movement zerog G stuff trying to get that better um we got that to a pretty good state where um I would say most of the previs went really well with Chris he was liking kind of the movement and everything the way it was looking uh uh there was some more updates we were doing to kind of previs out a couple of the other mechanics which were iterating on a little bit of feedback right now but for the most part it's uh it's looking great and basically now we're kind of in the process of chopping all that up so uh part of my job now is uh helping the guys actually I'm taking on

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   some coding tasks right now to kind of help get some of this stuff in quicker so we can start um really playing it and seeing how it feels and all that kind of stuff so it's uh it it's coming along good um you know a couple of our other programmers that would be good for this kind of work they're a bit tapped so I I wanted to help where I could to kind of get us a nice start and then they'll be rolling off their current uh work now and then moving on to help me with this so yeah um we also been doing some Network profiling and uh finding ways to cut down the network to get better performance and um been doing some really cool things on that front and having discussions with some of the other Studios and stuff like that to kind of see how we can maximize everything but we've isolated a lot of the the problem areas we're having at least on the FPS side so we're we're

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    excited to get all those fixes in as well which will'll be rolling in you know probably over this next week and uh next week as well so yep yeah and just a couple of the other things that have been going on with satb ball uh that we've been doing so one of our animators here has been uh preising a a crumple jump is what we've been calling it uh so um you guys may have seen in some of the previous footage from Zerg that you come up to a surface with your hands uh and crumble jump allows you to kind of rotate in zero jeta so that your feet are facing towards the surface and you kind of look above your head and uh jump off in a in a direction that you want um and so I think we're getting to a point where that's looking really good and we're probably going to start implementing it soon here um and then Chris has also been requesting just some tweaks to set of ball in terms of uh the

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    color scheme it looks a lot better now um and the size of the ball itself we had it kind of this massive beach ball thing before um and so we're scaling it down a little bit to be a little more manageable for players um and uh yeah other than that uh just work continues and uh we're cranking away here so um thanks for stopping by and uh we'll see you guys next week hey guys Jake Ross here uh here with me I have Patrick Thomas Le artist Mark Skelton uh awesome artist EXT I don't know what the hell I am he's our art director couros global environment Tech lead and I'm Ian Leen the global

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    environment Le and Ian's here visiting this week this week we have our environment Summit going on here in Austin uh guys what do we hope to get uh out of this week environments environments summed up done done I about that yeah so the main reason for this week is just to make sure the road map for this year we're building environment for squadron 42 the Pu and then Arena commander and the FPS are all following the same system um now because obviously we've got the studio here in Austin we've got the studio in Manchester you don't really get good communication times with emails and Skype so you're always going to need this everyone sitting around together making sure we're on the same page uh and they're just super helpful um our

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    the way we doing our environments they're quite complex and we just need to make sure that we're all following the same system and when we put a set into prodution for example it's going to get the the most bful book uh for all Studios yeah incredible I'd say do explain on that too because we obviously have Squadron 42 in the UK and pu here in Austin it's also a good chance to try and see what everyone's working on too not just obvious compatibility yeah we got guys coming in from eonic and behavior here later in the week and we're going to go over their sets make sure everybody's on the same page so that's what we got going on here this week so um and it's a good chance to share treats like Welch cakes M delicious barue and barbecue with our

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    our British friends so yeah it's good all right cool thanks guys we'll see you next week see you bye hey y'all the name is Michael doston I'm the new guy here at Foundry 42 uh I've just joined the QA team very happy to be here and very happy to be appearing in my very first episode of around for verse anyway we're just here to give you guys a little update on what we've been doing over the past couple of weeks uh first up we've been obviously monitoring the RSI forums quite extensively since the release of the SC Alpha 1.1 one patch uh the uh QA team over in Austin have been working very closely with the devops team over there in order to get to the bottom of some of your network and and matchmaking issues that we've been seeing arise quite a lot uh Steve

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    Brennan one of our main guys here has also been trolling the subredit and looking at some of your Twitch streams in order to kind of once again get to the bottom of these issues as it stands it looks like the server is basically allowing too many players into the game then the game rules will allow therefore causing all kinds of connection problems with many people involved involved uh there was also a kind of people believed for a while that getting into a match with the dying star map was much more likely than others but that in itself has proven to be a bit of a red hering but do not be put off by or any of this it is still possible to get a game there are we still early days issues will still arise Steve's also been collecting a lot of you your guys feedback uh bringing it to us uh obviously some of it's been positive some of it's been negative but all of it's been helpful and it's all going to the right place every week he gives us his report every

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    week he loves giving us those reports and anyway if you've got any more questions for us here at the found Foundry 42 QA then send them straight to Steve and he will relay them to us when he can uh other than this uh as usual the majority of our tested has been concentrating on the arena Commander portion of the of the game um and now the focus has actually moved on to the tutorial aspect of the Arena Commander uh I'm not here to give you a early state by the way before you get excited what this means is we've been running through a number of various test cases on the uh on the tutorial section of the game basically trying to get it into a completable state because as you can imagine the development uh process is difficult and we get into a lot of problems uh but being here side by side with the dev team in Foundry 42 it's been really exciting to see it Grow from the ground up uh from you know obviously

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    a boogy mess into something that is playable and is doable uh it's been great to see it coming along it really has and the great thing about this is that you do get to interact with your very first NPC just remember to follow follow exactly what the NPC does rules are there for a reason uh finally i' just like to quickly talk about the FPS module which has been getting a lot of testing over the past couple of weeks also uh one of the main drives is to get regular cross cig studio uh games on the go so basically we can stress the stress the the servers and stress each other out by basically shooting each other in the face because who doesn't want to shoot their friends and family in the face in a virual sense of course anyway uh this is me signing off now uh it's been great speaking to you guys hope to see you again in another around the verse episode uh so I guess I will see you in the verse and remember to always praise the

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    sun ejecting stand by for reintegration thanks for all your hard work guys let's go over to Daren who is uh talking with the newest member of our production staff Lisa Ohanian hi I'm Darren borick a production coordinator over here at the Santa Monica office of cloud Imperium games I am sitting today with Lisa Ohan one of our new production coordinators we're here to discuss what she does and find out a little bit more about her how you doing Lisa I'm doing pretty good how are you Darien we're working on 1. two and it's

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    it's pretty intense so just we just released 111 and I I think a lot of us are glad that we finally gotten out the door so uh now that we've had some time to kind of you you've been on on the round the verse with me a couple times already and there have been people asking about like who's this new production coordinator where did she come from where how did she just suddenly appear on camera so why don't we start and just telling our backers and players about a little bit about you so what do you what do you do here uh so I am a production coordinator uh right now I'm the only uh producer on the art team which is uh a little bit scary but I think we have another one coming on soon so that'll be nice um majority of my day tends to be uh I do a lot of work with our art outsourcers so making sure that uh we're on the same page about

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    what we're doing at Sig and what we're having to work with other contractors for uh keeping track of all of our approvals as they come in for ships for characters for anything art related really to make sure that our production director our art director Chris Roberts all like the direction that we're going with everything I also help keep track of the character pipeline which is undergoing a lot a lot of work right now as you know you're laughing and uh the ship pipeline as well for art so up until recently I mean that's that's pretty much something that's been shared not only just with the LA office but kind of haphazardly done um we had an Outsourcing manager before uh and after that individual left we were pretty much left with a lot of balls up

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    in the air as far as like who's doing what Contracting work where are we at um so you've also taken on the scheduling of of our ships so how do you think that is is at least going to help us improve how we release our ships I think it's going to be really helpful to have all of that sort of in one place because we do have certain parts of certain ships that we will give to outsourcers and if you don't have the same person sort of on the same page with where things are coming from it's hard to know how to slot them into our schedule for example uh the ship block schedule that you've seen where we sort of uh ballpark all the different stages of development and who's going to get what when it's going to this person it's a lot easier if you have a sense of where people are coming from because if I'm looking at how I

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    need to move certain things around I can say well we can't give this guy more time because his contract ends this day and he's unavailable for a while or knowing the strengths of different contractors and how we can give them certain things switch them between different pipelines even sometimes so it just sort of uh it's useful to have that that knowledge of where of all the pieces are coming from when you're determining how to move them around at a later stage in the game so that that block schedule that you that you've inherited created by Alex yes so it's important that we have this because we've never really had a form of I don't say we never but we it's a much more efficient form of what we what we're tracking now yeah as a producer that's exciting stuff to us because we get to organize everything when when Alex was handing it over to me I saw it only one a few weeks back and I I said where's

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    the rest of it he's like no no I started this a few weeks ago so what what can you tell us about that schedule I mean what exactly is it how how do you use it to keep track of everything so uh there's there's a bunch of different fancy tabs a lot of different stuff in it a lot of it inherited by Alex a lot of it updated or created by myself uh the two big ones are the the backlog and the actual schedule itself so when we know for example we need a new ship I'll go into the backlog and I have a list of all the different phases the ship has to go through from concept to when it's flyable and ready to sell and sort of a uh a ballpark of how long each area should take and of course different ships might take longer in one area or longer in a different area so so I always try to take that into account as well uh I create all of these tasks in

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    the backlog and then as soon as we get to a point in the schedule where we need to start planning what ships are going to come down the pipeline next I'll take that I'll move it over to my big schedule tab on my on my giant Excel sheet the schedule tab is sort of a uh it's actually pretty simple once you know how to read it it's just a list of all the different people that we have on different art stages from you know concepting to final pass to graybox to you know all of that and uh I I take those pieces and I put them under people's names and it sounds really simple but if you don't have something where you can see across the board 10 different people what they're working on at a certain time you might not realize that this guy's not going to be done some with something in time to give it

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    to this guy in order to hit the state here that we're aiming for so it it sounds simple but there's a lot of value in something simple and easy to read where you can see so many pieces at once that's important to us as producers because well I guess making order from chaos and it sounds like something so simple and yet without it where would we be yeah you would be S well you wouldn't be surprised cuz you're a producer too but uh you you would be surprised how many times I will get curveballs just from people seeing that because you know we're producers we kind of live by what what our dates are and what our you know Milestones are but not everyone does so so you know this you know this just as much as I do uh so I try to have a

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    weekly meeting with a bunch of the different stakeholders in the art Pipeline and get them all in a room and just go through and say so is this what this person is working on is the next do they need any more time than is currently on their schedule what do you think is going to be something good to put on their plate next depending on their bandwidth and their strengths and weaknesses and you would again the proverbial you would be surprised how many times you'll get someone saying oh no no no wait we can't we can't do that there because this is probably going to change and this guy is going to be grabbed by this whole other team to work on this for a while and you know it seems really straightforward but when you get other people in there looking at it uh it moves around a lot and it can get pretty tricky yeah it it's it's pretty much a leing breathing yes document Chang by the day and it's incredibly valuable um that actually brings up another Point um Outsourcing

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    uh not a lot of people know that we actually contract a lot of third U third party individuals or even companies to actually design a lot of our assets for us yeah uh and that requires us to not only keep track of what they're doing but pay them as well so I mean you know I don't think anybody wants to work for free so you take care of that as well yes I do so kind of go through what exactly you do with our Outsourcing third party companies okay so one of the most important things I think is like you said we give it to a lot of we do a lot of work with outside contractors sometimes at pretty early stages uh the tricky thing there is that we have a really high quality bar here and Chris has a very specific Vision so you have to be very careful when you when you give things to outsourcers to make sure

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    they're on the same page about what the ship is what the function is how it fits in the world cuz it's easy for them to go off and create something we've had this situation before already and it comes back and we look at it and we say well this is really cool but you know this isn't the kind of ship that would have guns why there's so many guns on it yeah they don't take into account that this is the kind of game where people are going to be walking around inside of this ship and because it looks cool on the outside when you're on the inside you know does it match up does it make sense for what that ship is is the scale correct so that that that very early stage is one of the most important I think also again a lot of coordination determining what different people's strengths are when they're available what we can give to people when making sure that we have uh I

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    actually initiated this uh Daily Review system for all of our outsources who are interested where you know we have certain Milestones where they have to deliver things but we really want to be involved in the process so I encouraged them I gave them their all their own specific uh you know file or protocol system and and ask them you know well offered them really if you want to drop anything any day we will look at it the next morning and give you feedback that day so they know if they're on the right track right I've actually seen a few of them I've actually sent l a few few of my suggestions on that yeah and it's important because well as you said Chris has a very very specific vision for this game and because a lot of our outsourced artists they don't only just do work for us but they work on other projects externally as well some of them do like special effects for movies some of them

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    I've worked before so that actually brought the next question was this requires a lot of communication with the design team as well such as our design people writing up designed briefs uh how much of that communication do you actually are you a part of on a daily basis between designers artists even Outsourcing just to make sure these ships kind of come to fruition so designers I like I said you know I'm the only producer right now on the art team so I try to let you handle the design things as much as possible but as you know I do try to check in with them to make sure that like I said the function matches up to everything we're doing and that what we're creating is something that you guys can work with later on so I do have a lot of check-ins with designers although I try not to book large chunks of their time and dictate what they're doing for the day

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    you know that's what I do I know exactly that's what you do um so so you know I check in with them but I try to keep that to a a functional minimum uh that being said once I have that information I work a lot with um our production designer director Rob and I work with our art director Lance a lot to make sure that they all know what those goals are and they all they they're invaluable because they have a really strong sense of Chris's Vision yes they can look at something and predict what he's going to say and and predict where he's going to think it fits in the universe what kind of changes are going to be made so a lot of times we'll have our contractors again this is the ideal pipeline for this uh they create something and they say hey this is due in a week I hope it's on the right track they send it to

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    us uh we have background information on it from when we sent them the creative brief we got all of that design information and I look at it with just uh with just Lance and Rob and we look over it and we send them feedback sometimes and ask them to do something different or try something new uh or sometimes if it's good enough we try to have periodic uh meetings with Chris Roberts as well so he can look over the things that have already had iteration and we think are something good for him to get his eyes on so I work with everyone at different levels yeah so what's what's the hottest thing you're working on right at this moment so I think the coolest thing I'm working on right now is the character pipeline because there's we've we've done a lot of work on it but there's

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    still a lot of aspirations that we have for it as well so it's really cool being in some of the early meetings and seeing what we thought went well and changing our pipeline before we start you know cranking on it um and and it's also awesome because we're just starting to get a lot of concept art for some of the characters and some of them are you know bigger characters there's a lot of vand concept art coming down the pipeline and there's a lot of I find this really interesting just character artwork from people on different planets just the people who are going to be around the planet not necessarily a major character and that is so interesting to me because as we're refining that I'm getting a much stronger sense of the worlds and not just what they are on paper what their name what their history is but

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    their personalities and that's uh that's the coolest thing to me right now if you think about we've got 900 years of future history where every planet is going to have its own independent culture yeah and every planet is going to have its own independent culture uh own independent sense of fashion and what's the norm so that's that's a lot of creative and and on that note you you come up with a good point we don't just have one style for all of our planets we have like we have the regular class we have the the frontier people we have the upper class we have the counterculture we have so many different subpersonalities of every planet and and that's the coolest thing to me probably because the variety there really makes it feel like it's coming to life already I want to work on that well too bad uh So Lisa thank you for taking your

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    time to spend the day with us or spend this conversation with us so once again I'm Daren production coordinator over here in Santa Monica and we've got Lisa Ohan thank you guys bye Captain's Log stardate 26544 two the USS communa prize is returning home after a 6month nebula survey Mission my crew has performed extraordinarily well and I am proud out of what they've accomplished here Captain sensors are picking up an incoming ship on screen Mr Lando uh they're unresponsive to our calls Captain our Shields are down hold tight Mr Lando Captain Starfleet regulations state that Shields must be raised when encountering an under liutenant Captain is very aware of

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    regulations incoming torpedo [Laughter] auxiliary power Captain incoming transmission on screen Ben T Lesnik we meet again I wanted you to see who it was who finally defeated you you thought you were so good mocking my dog fighting skills but now it is I who will have the last final laugh say goodbye Ben

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    fire Sandy Sandy spare my crew it's me you want I'll beam over and we'll have one last dog fight very well Ben prepare to meet your end ha ah ah come on Ben as good as Ben not so

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    good yes damn it I keep missing you're still here we go yes ah you're going to die you're going down ready yes M died you got me I did it so proud of myself better than Ben all right all right you got me but I will I will have my revenge in Space Marine you will not cuz I'm very good at first person shooter I actually did know

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    that about you Gamescom tickets are still available although they are going fast hopefully there are still some by the time this airs uh but if you want to go to Gamescom with us pick up your tickets quick we are going to make it a very fun event there's quite a few of us going from the LA team yep Sandy and I are both going to be there we will be there and James will be there Jared will be there Tom will be there be there the ladies Alexis and yeah can't forget about those girl and uh eron a couple of other guys from Manchester maybe some Frankfurt people and Chris Chris Roberts of course oh yeah of course we forgot about him it wouldn't be a party without Chris robs citizen con details will be available next month I'm looking forward to that one too that's going to be a fun event um the last two were great this one will be even greater or it sounded so cheesy we shot a series

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    of new Empire report segments last week and we'd like to give backers the opportunity to create their new backdrop yeah several people have asked about this can can we try to create the uh the backdrop that we put in the green screen for the Empire report and uh yes we're going to let you give it a try we'll put the details for uh what kind of file format and image size and all that on the forums and uh we invite you to submit yours yes so please give be russom Allen Wo and cult L Grande a new backdrop cult L Grande is new but he's great mhm we are unlocking racing ships this weekend pick up an M50 Mustang Gamma or 350r or unlock them with wck and let us know on the forums what uh what ships you'd like us to unlock next time around we want to do this regularly

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    to let people have some uh variety as to what ships they fly and we hope you're enjoying the arena Commander footage we've added to the show it's from our backers and you can submit your own on the forums my favorite was the uh the constellation one last week where the guy was trying to stick the m 50 inside the constellation so uh keep it up and now it's time for our sneak peek check it out and if you'd like to know more about

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    what you're seeing in the sneak peek tune in to RTV at 1 pm after the uh airing of this program on Twitch on Twitch yes thanks everybody for watching and to subscribers for making this show possible we will see you next week on around the verse should we do that again a