Around the Verse: Episode 1.59 (2015.09.03)

3 September 201500:38:45864 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

00:00:02
tonight on the Empire report a dream comes true for the family of long-haul trader Marcus Modi but was found nearly a year after his disappearance will give you the story behind how he survived after his ship crashed on Bremen one was an asura woman short sighted or scammed after finding her Drake Harold tank she sold it cheap only to discover the graffiti was courtesy of cognate oh and could be worth millions she joins Donald Joseph to share her story finally the Ellis system prepares for increased traffic to noble as tourists rush to catch the rare simultaneous eclipses of its two moons if you're on your way we'll give you advice on where to go and
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where to avoid all that and more on the next Empire report at 2200 s ET hey everybody welcome to episode 59 of around the verse I'm sandy Gardner and I'm besnik the social module is out yay yes cool I actually got kicked out the other day but we're back I got back in so for those of you out there come join me yes we're having a lot of fun with
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social module we're really glad to have it out there the guys in Austin guys behavior did an amazing job putting this together commuter we actually has been fantastic we are just so stoked i think stoked is know what is the word of the day exploring area 18 on our color yes sir area 18 is your first step outside your hangar it's the beach head into the persistent universe basically we're to show you what we've been working on how you interact with the game and there's there so much more to come but as you've seen there's there's a crazy amount of detail in area 18 there's their shops to explore just keep looking there's there's cool stuff in there dark alleyways are scary yes and are we gonna get scarier and Toto Newser avec the precision universe director put out a fantastic road map on friday that tells you exactly how we're going to get from
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maybe a social module you're playing today in our quark to the whole persistent universe over the next coming months check that out all sorts of information in there and he also left us with a sneak preview of the next area you're going to be exploring Knicks in the delmar system check it out you
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I really like that music it's it's pretty cool video in general it's nice to see what's coming next oh boy alright we kicked off the Vanguard variants you can pick up a harbinger or Sentinel in the pledge store now we're very proud of the Vanguard and the variance as you know we should kick this off as kind of our twin-engine fighter based on aircraft like the mosquito the measurement 110 from World War two and to do the variance we we looked into other roles that those aircraft would have performed such as night fighter which is our award the Sentinel they would do bomber conversions a fighter bombers so we did the the Harbinger with torpedoes and we specified all this in the the design post on Friday you can learn how the different variants work
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what they're capable of it with some fantastic are provided by Girma check them out even if you don't want another ship it's it's worth learning about how the star system world works anymore document that's what that is yes along with the the Vanguard release we we design put together a document about how electronic warfare is going to work in star citizen back in a recommender one point oh we released information about signatures ships put off they put up heat they have cross section of a variety of different kinds of information that cloth over ship and now we're taking advantage of that to make a recommender more strategic you're going to see you know countermeasures and hacking but EMP missiles are socially cool stuff that's coming online this was the first in a series of ewar posts the
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the second will be about hacking which is development now let's kick it to the studios for news from around the verse go boom that's what I big that's your Rockstar talking hey everybody and welcome back to the Santa Monica sunny Santa Monica office to Sonic it wasn't Sonny last week though but we got the Sun back yeah it's tomahto you're here with i'm eric kieron davis and this is elwin bachelor junior is our lead vehicle artist here in LA and you'll notice a few things happening here one we don't darien during the sick
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we miss him we hope he feels better the other thing is this man is wearing a hat why is he wearing a hat well some of the things we're working on our characters for upcoming releases right it's 142 they'll have characters in it and one of the pieces is we do a lot of marine type work so we got some cool unique garb to do for get reference for shooting reference and taking all kinds of scans and all kinds of work the other thing we really want to talk about was ships in general since we have to leave you Carta so tell us what's going on with ships you're not well we've got two ships currently in production we've got the herald which is being led by Paul 40 cool also being worked on by Daniel kaminski and we've got the Reliant which is being worked on by me and that's exciting because I freaking love that chip yeah that's right and and they're coming along pretty nicely they're all looking really good I mean the herald right now is currently in what we call
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gray box stage so that basically means that we've gone through all the gameplay checks to make sure that everything actually functions properly and now the artists are actually refining all the geometry so we're moving into a really art focused work right now and our own Kirk to me is trying to get that level right getting the herald in there and do some design actually he's he basically has it fly ball in a white box stage so it's not pretty but it's viable it's glad to get that's what we want that's exciting um and for the Reliant I'm actually going through the white box phase right now so hopefully in the next two weeks or so we'd actually be able to fly it Joe this is exciting times alright cool then again you're with air karen davis and i wouldn't watch it yet thank you for your time and see the quick hey guys Jay cross here associate producer the persistent universe and I'm
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here with you this week flying solo once again to talk about what's coming up next for social module so you guys have now had a chance to play social module we got a live last week so we're really proud of that and then everything that we've accomplished with that release you know we have multiplayer our cork chat social emotes I should say and play your loadout switches in the in the hangar in in our corp so next thing is we're going to be looking at focusing on our persistence getting actually actually getting persistence as part of our persistent universe so that will be our next big big target Jason Neely will be working on that app now that he's kind of wrapped up his work on the generic instance manager any bugs that come up that you guys kind of run into on the live service will definitely be looked
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at first so we can get that smooth and working for you guys but persistence will be the next big thing so we've also got Tony working on some top-down layouts for micro tech and Crusader we got the UK helping us out with top down layout for Hurston so I mentioned this before but we'll be working on getting those into white box phase as those environments so pretty soon we'll be able to have a full-blown announced system of staunton we're doing we have multiple landing zones from fly on the space you know interact with things on the space different points of interest and then land about on the planet so that's that's in the works but for the immediate term will be will be focusing on persistence getting some of the the shared hangar functionality working so that you can actually invite players to your hangar and go and do our any
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commanders matches with them and then yeah so that's that's kind of our next big big ticket items so that's what we're working on this week so I got for you don't take hello my name is David Bohm Gil I'm a UI engineer here at CI Guk I'm Stefan boss lead programmer at behavior in Montreal and today we're talking about the UI unification which is why we've got some of the guys over from behavior interactive which is in Montreal and some of the TIG la guys over to one of the things we've discussed a bit over the past few weeks was how we can make all the different they are systems
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connect together and making sure we're using as much as we can in terms of engineering and code for example all the different systems lay on the the base idea that the engine needs to be able to query the entities around the player and define if those entities are able to either be displayed in a tactical visor in a social module AR context and we just wanted to make sure that not every studio have their own little implementation of that so we're sort of putting all of this together to make sure we have a unified system one of the other systems were looking to unify is the electronic access interface because now we've got the star marine coming online as well as a rena commander we want to present the player with like a more consistent interface which will be the interface for electronic access and that would be consistent across all the games that were presented in electronic
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access like you're playing a video game inside the storm and star citizen world another topic that we've discussed quite a bit over the best view a few days was Moby glass basically for this we want to make sure that every studio where every UI engineer is capable of implementing a new feature or a new application for that so then spend some time on the floor between the engineers that we brought over from Montreal as well as David and Simon the UI engineers at sig UK to make sure we're all capable of implementing new features in the future and it's been good to talk to you thanks a lot hope you guys enjoyed it it's been a pleasure to be there hey guys brian chambers from the frankfurt office i'm here with i am done
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trifling senior assistant designer this week team's been busy like all the teams run through play kind of some of the stuff different departments have been doing on weapons we recently had a lead weapon artist join us Toby he's been digging through the style guide and making sure and reassuring that all the weapons from all the manufacturers have different kind of look and feel to them shaped language and so on on the AI front our lead AI programmer francesco was in austin for a few weeks working with the pu team working on improving the synchronization between animations over the network core engine team busiest hallways they've been working on physically VA model which is a refined way in which the the player will be able
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to move through zero-g working on grid refractory it allows huge objects like a kilometer asteroids and have proper physics proxies and the size and scale nose is pretty nuts they've also started our indie work on procedural planet generation tech which is actually going to go a long way and play out different places in the game and they working closely with design on that so yeah come tell you much about it but the stuff we're trying to help them with is providing assets and or organize prefabs and think of ways we can generate the some organic looking cities and mountains and I guess moral more on that will come as we as we have it another thing we're working on is a police fear
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and life support systems inside the ship for space stations and thinking how we can have a hug bridge equalize pressures between room how what happens the iron players when that happens one other thing we just started is prototyping designing hacking and we're just trying to make it a bit more complex to just go into a door and flipping the switch to open it it's going to it's going to be a pretty big scope for this where you can start with a small door and then hackle the way where you have a ship you hack it all its shields down you can act atmosphere and they vent into space and they just die so we're it has a big good scope for this but beyond that cinematic steam has been crazy busy seeing good progress as
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I said earlier we should be able to see the first stuff in citizen Khan wish we could show you more now but we can't so yeah it's a press thanks for watching and we'll see you next week see you guys thank you towards news from around the world great work yes thank you and James had a chance to sit down with our design director todd papy thanks guys i'm here with design director todd papy todd how you doing man good to meet you great meet you thanks for coming on how's it like how's it feel being back Santa Monica great um you know being able to see old family and friends and then being able to see what these guys are working on and obviously being in frankford which is nine hours ahead it makes communication a little bit harder than than what I'm used to I was at Gamescom co like last month I the nine-hour difference became very apparent very quickly jet lag is a
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killer so how's it goin over there we've had some check-ins with Brian of the past couple weeks and it's been nice to get a little more in depth what's going on but yeah house has a studio how does it feel over there it feels good I mean a large number of us have worked together for a amount of time some of us longer than others I think I'm the young in with only a year working with that team we're building the studio we've I think we're about up to about 27 people now and you know it's it's coming together and you know out of there we've got engine we've got fps and then also we have cinematics so you know it's we're slowly getting there and just making sure we're hiring the right people for the game are you would you say your studio more focused on what will become the persistent universe or what is squadron 42 as la is more focused on dog fighting
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and kind of building of ships and I know some of that's being done in the UK as well but more more focused on FPS so so hero navigation yeah and then what are those heroes doing what kind of shipment what kind of weapons are they using what kind of suits do they have how does it work with EV a and zero g so anything that's really player related that's what I'm focused on and also moments moment gameplay and then Tony's got the big pu and a continent economy and servers and all hey I yo subsumption and all of this wonderful stuff that he wants to do and then s42 is really just UK oh yeah it makes sense that you guys would be of some FPS because a lot of the team as obvious SBS pedigree mm-hmm house as it like taking that team you've been with
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you said for a year they're gonna get it for a while has the transition been nice you know with any team one of the hardest things to come together and you can get right is the chemistry yeah so since a lot of us had worked together before we we knew each other and we knew strengths and weaknesses of each other and then like you said you know we do have there at that studio we do have some FPS pedigree obviously we've got guys in the UK that have that experience and bender here he's got that experience from animation standpoint and then same with Sonam Austin so it's it's just trying to find you know who can I pull from the UK so for example John crew and I you know we we talk about weapons all the time and and since he has the
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experience from from crisis and crisis multiplayer and home fronts then basically he's been invaluable resource and in vendors experience with with crisis as well as home front and my guys from level design perspective and also systems designed so it's where wherever we you know can find the resource to help support us then that's what we look for yes how is kind of coordinating all of our designers on like a global scale was what is the hardest part about doing that hardest part is probably communication I mean obviously with the time differences and then just making sure that if we're working on a system say for example like calyx he started the grabby hands and kind of cargo system versus UK was starting to do a looting system and in reality those
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should be combined and work together because you're putting something into a box you're taking something out of a box or you're holding something and then now we got to figure out okay well how do we do that in space you know we understand how we do that on the ground but then it will be pulling the designer from each discipline or each area and saying okay how are we going to pull this together and move this forward so what was it about stresses and physically the interest you what made you want to come on board for me it's the scale and scope of the project I mean there is there is that ambitious nature prior projects I've worked on are fairly ambitious and you know the way that's in talking to Chris and Aaron and understanding their thought process on it and saying okay what's cool all right well this is what you know and it's going to take this
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long let's say it's it's five years okay to build that out at previous game companies it's it's know you've got two to three years you know or four years or whatever and then you've got to take your idea of what school and shrink it versus what they've talked about it is okay what's step one what's step two what's step three and then let's figurine let's make sure that we're figuring that out and building towards those things and you know once we get to step one we get it out to the community then you see you start seeing what they glob on to and really enjoy and then from there that will adjust how we get to step two or it will just step to completely and then from there you know it's just that back-and-forth process with the community and ideally make this
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a very interactive experience is something that I've never done you know yes I was about to say it's am I like how I imagine you've gone your whole career where it's a just set this is what it is right here you release something and then you see what the reaction is you still have your vision of what it's supposed to be yeah but there's room to move and see what people actually want because these are the people you're trying to bring the game to right and and so this to me is again it's it's the the new school way of thinking and and adjustment and so I'm learning you know I'm learning you know okay well alright well we got to get this out it's more likely it's more it's earlier than what I'm comfortable in showing yeah um you know because again what I've been you know taught my career of know that is perfect when it goes out
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the door and verses it's pretty good yeah but it's not perfect and then you know from there we start singing again what what they enjoy and what they latch on to and then we we just yeah that's us it's a cool thing about this project I don't ever seen before yeah I'm oh thanks again for coming on again todd papy back to you guys cuz he's todd papy oh wow exciting where you're going to go with that one thank you James thank you James nice to have taught in Santa Monica for a bit so we were super happy with just social module of guys in Austin did a great job yeah she um now for episode in Chinese so we are
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absolutely thrilled with the reaction communities having to social module stops stuff is the word yes we're done yes so let's check out some of the guys at austin who put it together we're gonna see what it was like the last hours before release hey guys J cross here associate producer the persistent universe and here with you today to talk a little bit about social module by this point in time it's live it's out in your hands so you guys had a little bit of time to kind of run around with it bang on it a little bit find some bugs that we didn't know existed and get into things give you shouldn't but that's kind of the purpose
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of it getting it out to you guys so you guys can kind of bang on it and see a sequel what we've got plug for you guys the entire process starts with all the concept powers going in and making everything making all the ideas into a tangible 2d image and then it goes to the 3d artists and they go in and make everything in 3d and then it goes to the level designers they put everything together and then it comes to me and I have to do justice to everything else l by work I'm done for to make sure that everything looks pretty as possible we've been putting every detail humanly possible into this for the fans for the backers we have had an incredible time and experience creating a universe creating a city basically that you can run through from the most miniscule things from paper on the ground to
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bowling paper two ships flying through the sky we went through a lot of work to make sure that every little detail in those ships was there from the exhaust make sure that looked like it was a live city not including that but also the shops that you get to walk into the work that were might did in regards to the MVC optimizations that allowed us to dramatically increase the number of players that can fit within a given map we have some core back-end technology you know multiplayer instances and our corp capped it at 25 players per for instance but we're looking to increase that over the coming months as we get a little bit more stability there was all of the artwork that behavior put in a lot of long hours on to basically generate the type of visuals that we're after brought in in Reese wit sir and
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Lee American reduce lighting and VFX pass respectively and those guys knocked right out of the park you know that the lighting is just beautiful makes it look to them takes it to that next level and the VFX is really awesome as well there was all the back-end service network encoder that was done by local programmers here at ATX to enable all of the player routing to Leo to our corp to actually function as expected so it was really a very much a group effort on the part of a large number of people and it's difficult to pick any individual thing and say that one was you know larger than the resume probably the biggest challenge is making sure that everyone would be able to run social module because I mean we have a lot of really really high end graphics and a lot of stuff in the level and so we had to make it sure that everyone who got their hands on it could experience the full demo and everything we want them to
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see because in a few years everyone's going to have a lot better video cards which is going to allow a lot more wallace running up the software it's obviously a very big level a lot of big pistol shots very open area so getting it to function at a higher frame rate trying to make things as cheap as they can still trying to preserve the ships flying around we ended up doing a lot a little trickery with that but didn't have a a shift from the round getting things with your random you know when they're a little more spooky i was definite challenge we would put new stuff in that we'd also have to make room or adjust existing props or assets that were in the level and ensure that nothing was out of place nothing looked weird there was no problems or errors or bugs or visual issues which came up
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surprisingly every day we would have to go back and make fixes and make adjustments and by the time it was done we would go through and we would just look the most my new issues to fix and there was always something and they're probably always will baby but it was a blast it was an experience and it's I'm just so grateful to be a part of it luckily we had a lot of time to polish and get everything really smooth so we had a lot of multiplayer kind of play tests within the office to get that working as smoothly as possible daily we went through and worked with behavior I'll make sure that every detail was taken care of and every T was crossed and I was dotted that there was no problems in this city and it also that it ran smoothly and that it was
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optimized as best as possible you know we really wanted data rate very quickly on this to get to do all the bugs and then you know just moving a lot of data the game is large and so trying to upload it and you know spin up that was mini machine the kind of time in the past speeds that the get everybody all the different parts videos on for playtests and then everything else was just a large task this release had a lot of overlap with working on the gamescom demo continued star marine testing a lot of advancements with our generic instance manager so we've had jeffrey peas and Austin's been monitoring that trying to get as many players we could and make sure everything runs smoothly I'm and additionally just coming out with the module as big as the social
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module there's just a lot of features and a lot of stuff that we would need to come in we get new builds daily and we need to make sure that all the different mechanics and features were tested we were doing some local focus testing just kind of an how stress testing and we get 25 you know 30 players inside of our corp running around and the impromptu kind of like dance parties and we'd all get shoved in the bar and we hanging around the bar and just it was basically like almost as if we had seen the environment for the first time even though we kind of knew this place like the back of our hand anyways it was a it was very nice enjoying the village we went through several iterations on the screens mainly the billboards one billboard took me 6 15 hours to animate I think it was just making the world come to life really in the medical Bay there is an easter egg of one of the
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employees to x-rays if you go into the medical medical Bay of this first really good players to be able to chat with in the game someplace outside of our phones so they could actually go load up the game and talk to each other can we have fun and it kind of brings the community together this is a nice step over for us trying to add all of the cool emotes as they were coming in when we were working on this we were still getting fresh no cab and just getting it all in in time for this release was sort of challenging but of course we did it and and it still it's still going on we're going to keep adding emotes so the work isn't done but i'd say that the timeline rush was pretty harsh well i'm really proud of the way the the backend services have a
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bottle over the past number of months however that's not something that players really see we now have the ability through the gentleman since manager to carve out I'm excited for them to see this level as large as it is as accomplishing it as it is it really brings you in and you walk around you really see an amazing environment that is as far more fidelity than I've seen in many other levels in the past and games there is so much detail in here that it it will blow you away yeah that's the only thing about the pu stuff is like us showing you guys it's like you guys get to open your presents early and that's cheating but will show it to you because we like you so I hope you
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guys dig it the milestone list going forward I think that it's been a long stretch of time where we've had to set up a lot of the basic foundation for the game a lot establish a lot of the underlying technologies that we're going to make a lot of this stuff possible over the course of long term and there's no way to really cheat the developments of these systems so they require tremendous amount of upfront development time at which point you slowly start to crest the top of the hill and reach the point to where you can start to generate outside results in very short periods of time and so the most exciting thing is therefore what we're going to be able to start showing off over the course of the next three four five six milestones going out because that's where I
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he will finally start to see how all the bits and pieces come together and make star citizen you know you know this this comprehensive whole of the entire game a lot more than the sum of any of the individual parts thanks for backing us as back on myself I love working here yeah that's the team here in Austin and the social module for you so we hope you guys enjoy it and we hope that you'll enjoy what we got coming up in the future great job to everyone over there in Austin we are certainly pleased that you've put in all that effort to get the social module out there and here it shipshape it's very serious haven't kind of experimental so stoked but no that's why I want guards okay hello everyone and welcome to this
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week's episode of shipshape this week we're going to be talking about the white boxing step in ship creation showcasing the reliance since it's in this stage right now so the white boxing stage is the very very very first phase of modeling before most of the modeling images I had shown you earlier those tended to be gray box when the ships built out a little bit more and we're actually shaping it white box by contrast is the very first time there is a 3d anything representing the ship in game it's very rough and it's mostly for prototyping and spacing to catch any major spacing issues to make sure that all of the design needs work before we go into more detail now we have some white box images of the Reliant to show you here today the first challenge when
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we were beginning white boxing this ship was spacing out the inside now this is a pretty small ship as you guys know and we needed to make sure that it was wide enough for characters to actually walk through the thing at first it wasn't so hence make sure that we were spacing things out correctly so that players could actually walk through the second challenge was to make sure that we could also have enough room for cargo in the ship since this is a mini hauler this is pretty important and they wanted to make sure that there was enough space inside of the ship not only for the character to walk through and navigate and interact with everything they'll need to interact with on the ship but also for youtube carry cargo in a way that makes sense we've also got a top-down white box image you'll see some red blocks
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these are where right now we're thinking the components are going to be placed on the ship now one of the things we're working on right now in the white box for the Reliant is testing out animations making sure that everything moves correctly has enough space and again makes sense with the dimension of the interior of the ship versus the exterior versus where the character is going to need to go you'll also notice the opening hatch and you've got an image here to show not only how it opens but how it opens in relation to the size of the character again to make sure that they can get out and last but certainly not least you'll notice the spinning pilot seats these are one of the coolest unique features of the Reliant and one of my favorite things about the ship we have the white box animation for these again in reference to the size of a player so you
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can imagine hope they will be able to walk up to the seats how they'll fit into them and then once inside how the seats are going to move thank you yet again for joining me on ship shape this week guys back to you sandy and Ben that's about it for around the verse this week but work on starches and continues the August 2015 monthly report will be available tomorrow along with the weekly star marine update from the team a telephonic and now sandy and I are leaving we are heading to Atlanta for dragoncon so if you're going to be out there we have a panel on Saturday and run a couple other pedals forms Sunday a big start using QA Saturday 530 in the hilton will be there we'll have some swag to hand out we'd be happy to answer your questions look for us on the
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floor to wee-wee you know feel free to interrupt us we're not scary we love chatting spaceships oh well I might be in cosplay so we'll see how scary that is yeah that's not scary and this week's MVP we always need a drumroll okay Wow who wrote this one Elton bread ash Elton has a fantastic thread of all new proxy everything's fantastic viously great thread in the forum so he's created all sorts of icons to folks can use both on the forums and various other starches and communities please check it out the link below and congratulations congratulations so you're our MVP and we can't leave you without an art sneak
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peek check it out where did we put that hard sneak peek oh hi there what do you mean where do we put it oh that was part of you wow be sure to tune in to reverse the verse tomorrow at 11am pacific on twitch where we'll be answering your questions about that sneak peek and everything else starts as it related I won't be here because I'll be on my way to Atlanta James P will be out so it's all going to be Jared so give him he'll thank you to all our subscribers for making this show
00:37:50
possible we will see you next week on around the verse that's it just like window-washing nice the dancer mote from the socialize yeah hi guys

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