Star Citizen: Around the Verse - UK Studio Update

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:15

   Hello and welcome to another episode of Around the Verse. I'm Sandi Gardiner. And I'm Chris Roberts. Star Citizen Alpha 3.1 went live last weekend with a character customizer, service beacons, improved UI, five new ships, 10 ship weapons, and two new FPS weapons officially entering the verse. Yeah, that's quite a lot. And along with that, we have improvements to frame rate and visuals. So, if you haven't been to the moons of Crusader recently, go check them out. Yes, go check them out. And a big thanks to everyone in the community that helped test 3.1 on the PTU, as well as all of our incredibly hard working teams across the globe who made the first quarterly release of 2018 possible. Yes, a huge thanks to all of you. And as we look forward to the rest of the year, starting with Alpha 3.2, we are taking into account the background input

2. 00:01:03

   collected in the survey that went out last week as we shuffle some things around and continue to build out the road map. We'll have a full road map update soon, but this week we'll hear from our studios in the UK. Yes, also we'll see what the teams in both Wilmslow and Derby have been working on lately with Lux at involving AI improvements, weapon tuning, procedurally created space stations, and more. After that, we'll get some insight into the newest versions of the mobiGlas feature, which continues to change and improve along with Star Citizen itself. But let's go to Ricky first for the UK studio update. Hi, and welcome to the UK studio update. Starting with the environments team, work has been underway on our next generation of space stations beginning with the rest stops. Rest stops are

3. 00:01:50

   unique among the space stations we've designed so far as they are created semi-procedurally. This will allow us to populate the PU with many variations of them easily. And to do that, we put a lot of focus on developing the right tools and workflow needed to achieve it. There are three main location components we've been focusing on to achieve the first iteration of the rest stop space station. The first component is the exterior. The unique silhouette of the rest stop's exterior is designed to maximize readability from a distance, while also allowing for individual personality and variety with the ability to vary layout and architecture. Varied building materials, color schemes, and ad placement mean that a great number of visual possibilities are achievable throughout the modular

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   construction of these stations, which allows us to automate layout generation while maintaining artistic control. Hangers have also undergone plenty of recent development work. The rest stop will be the first station type to fully utilize this type of hanger, which we are terming a common element, and can be used in every utilitarian hanger in the game. Even though every hanger of this type will share the same core design functionality, they are built to allow for mixing and matching of walls, entrances, exits, and service modules in a variety of ways and styles to achieve varied looks across different locations. The third location component we've been focusing on is the interior. Developing the procedural layout tool used to generate these rest stops has been a big and admittedly challenging project. We

5. 00:03:27

   are now at a stage where we can automatically generate large numbers of layouts using the tool and a set library of room and connector prefabs. Maintaining visual consistency and coherence while still making locations appear different remain artistically challenging for the tool and the team. Much like the exterior component, the trick is to randomize a lot of smaller choices like prop placement and lighting rather than alter the larger room forms. This method allows us to maintain artistic control over the main spaces, flow, and form. Improvements have been made to the prop team's entity system within DataForge, allowing for one entity to contain both gameplay features and visual keys while being set up and controlled using one

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   system. This means that once we set up an entity, we can drop it into any level retaining all working functionality. This also makes for easier syncing between animations and material effects such as glows or UI elements. Consequently, the number of lights needed to fake glowing materials or flashing lights during different stages of animation has been significantly reduced. We have revised our metrics and template assets for useables and interactive props, making them easier to understand and allowing for improved scalability and functionality support for these item types. Building on these tech improvements, we are now able to create destructible props that mesh swap and also update environmental effects such as lights, VFX, and audio accordingly.

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   These aren't being implemented in 3.1, and we are still in the early stages, but these tech developments are laying the foundations for future releases. A new set of low-tech medical props is being built out along with some new medical dressings. Both are planned for use throughout the PU as common medical elements. We have also been working on the sub items that will be used to customize the performance of ship components and making sure that when that feature comes online, there is a wide selection of visuals to support the gameplay. The missions team has been replacing the existing AI with new subsumption behavior. Still fairly early in its development, we've been focusing on balancing and implementing wild lines into the game for the AI-controlled characters. For those that might not know, wild lines

8. 00:05:51

   are lines of dialogue which play systematically when the AI receives some sort of trigger such as receiving damage. Okay, there's a favor and back. These go a long way toward personalizing each player's experience as the AI will communicate with players differently depending on their relationship and history. As the AI continues to develop, we've also taken the opportunity to reassess the Vanduul and Pirate Swarm game modes within Arena Commander. They have been rebalanced with the focus on delivering a satisfying experience rather than extreme difficulty.

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   Something we're really excited about is the creation of a prototype scramble race event which can work in space or planet side. In these death races, opponents battle to collect randomly generated checkpoints and more fundamentally to stay alive. The race relies heavily on dialogue, and we have upcoming recording sessions planned to supply this ahead of release. Finally, we've been rebalancing the reputation progression system as it became apparent that there were too many ways to accrue a negative reputation while attaining a positive one was too challenging. The UI team has been researching ways to improve performance by analyzing where the CPU is spending its time. Optimizations made to the code of the ECG graph and the visor significantly reduce the CPU cost without affecting

10. 00:07:30

    visual quality. The ECG graph has a buffer for the heartbeat value. With every update, the game would add a new value to the front of the buffer while removing the oldest from the back, causing expensive memory shifting. To prevent this, the team now uses a circular buffer by just storing an index to the oldest location in the buffer. When the index reaches the end of the buffer, it loops back to the start in cyclical fashion, which is much more efficient because memory is only written to rather than being moved around. The second optimization applied to the ECG was to stop redrawing the whole graph each frame. Instead, we add the new value to the right-hand side and move the whole graph along to the left. We use a clip window to ensure only the essential parts are drawn, and the

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    graphics data is recycled in a similar fashion to the circular buffer. The graphics team has been working on some major performance savings when rendering characters. Each of our characters are split up into many different meshes, not only for swapping out clothing and armor, but also so that we can hide individual portions of an object to avoid interpenetrating geometry. Our shaders, textures, and geometry have now been organized in such a way that we can render multiple adjacent meshes in one go, which vastly reduces the CPU cost of submitting the work to the GPU while maintaining flexibility. To improve the quality and legibility of our various UI screens, we've been working on two new shader effects for the render to texture The first is an edge highlighting effect

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    which we use for the ship targeting displays, and the second is a drop shadow effect to help make sure icons stand out against bright backgrounds. Graphics has also been collaborating with the VFX department to improve our GPU particle system. Our ambitious VFX artists are implementing lean production techniques to prioritize the features that will provide maximum impact. A couple of examples would be improved spawn inheritance and curl noise, both of which were requested to allow us to create better, cheaper electrical and plasma effects for things like the coil interior and EMP weapon improvements. They've also been working through a fairly large snag list for the 3.1 release, doing things like toning down the dust mote opacity in certain

13. 00:09:56

    environments that have undergone lighting updates and re-adding planet moon effects so they work correctly with the planetary tech improvements. Tech design has been finalizing 3.1 release work implementing and tuning new weapons like the Gattsu ballistic Gatling, P I R R distortion scattergun, and A M R S laser cannon while supporting the conversion of existing gear to weapon 2.0. They also have been re-balancing a lot including distortion weaponry following fixes to allow items to affect items as opposed to just shields, countermeasures to make them more effective post item 2.0 implementation, continued iteration of flight balance especially atmospheric landing turbulence, and the re-balance of shield setback and regeneration rates.

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    At the other end of the pipeline, they've also been working with art on some exciting new ship concepts which will be revealed throughout the year on Around the Verse's ship shape segment. Also contributing to the game's ever-expanding fleet is ship art team. The Aegis Hammerhead's interior is mostly set out with the exception of the crew dorm and kitchen area while the cargo bay and bridge are currently in a detailing pass. Another Aegis ship, the Eclipse, is now back in full production. The current focus being the exterior. The team is reinforcing its stealthy appearance by tightening up the palm panel line details, enhancing the materials, and making sure all the movement parts are operational. The weapon audio system has undergone a substantial refactor and work has begun

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    on designing full N L P C weapon perspective sets along with specific sounds for various distances. An environmental weapon report or tail layer has also been added for a weapons on planet side location to better reflect the environmental response of

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    the weapon fire. Recently, members of the audio team took part in a sound effects recording session at Oscillate Studios focused on vibrating various metallic objects using transducers that respond to low frequency sounds. The metals were simulated via synthesized tones which were performed using a MIDI keyboard playing with the pitch in order to impart different resonances and sympathetic rattles to a diverse range of scrap metal objects. Jazz. It's a bit like jazz. The primary focus of the session was to

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    create source material for our ships partly inspired by the sound production team at Warner Brothers who worked on the Christopher Nolan film Interstellar. They used large scale subwoofers to resonate the fuselages of aircrafts to model the behavior of spaceships under duress simulating atmospheric entry, strong gravitational fields, and so on. The Derby office continues to expand its operations. It was a pleasure to welcome a number of our valued backers during the recent Imperator Subscribers event where the developers demonstrated core elements of their workflow including facial animation, motion capture, and technical animation. The tour also offered us the opportunity to scan three more faces and we look forward to seeing the lucky participants in the verse.

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    The gameplay story team have been getting all the required scenes for gameplay story organized in shotgun and are working with the design to get the first few scenes implemented in game and up to standard. Progress has been made on R&D for the Vandal face rig and internal facial rig technologies along with iterations to female rigs in Maya. The new one-to-one conversion updates to the rig will break a lot of animations that use props so we've been developing an automated solution to fix the animation files we have without an animator having to manually go through and re-animate everything. And finally, the facial animation team has been busy finalizing animations on various P U shopkeepers, bartenders, and mission givers. You doing all right? Everything good?

19. 00:14:53

    Make an uncertain world a little more certain. That's all I can say till I know if you're in or not. Hurry and get to your ship. I'll be in touch before the race. This includes blending all the animations from the same facial poses so they all play seamlessly from one another. That's it for our UK studio update. We're looking forward to a fun day at CitizenCon this year on the 21st April in Manchester. Aaron and Brian will be there along with others taking part in Q&A panels and many more of the team enjoying a day of interaction with the community. They're running a raffle with some great prizes and tickets are still available via the link in the description below. And of course, thank you to all our backers for continuing to support the development of both Star Citizen and

20. 00:15:42

    Squadron 42. Thank you, Ricky. Uh so it's pretty impressive to see just how many areas of Star Citizen that the UK studio is working on from big procedural stuff like the rest stops to polishing and fine-tuning audio, facial animation, weapon balance, and combat, and even updates to Arena Commander. You also saw some of the optimization improvements they've been working on with focus on the visor displays and personal manager app. Yeah, we continue to fine-tune the PMA improving its look and usability from what you saw in 3.0. Let's take a closer look at the PMA in this week's feature. In 3.0 we released the MobiGlass just kind of like our first iteration into the kind of new UI that we had envisioned for it. It was an improved

21. 00:16:29

    version but it was it still had a lot of issues in terms of the usability. Basically how it fit in the world um and how it had some kind of issues with your mouse cursor um when you breathe you would run into these issues where your mouse would be on the button at at one point and then be off and then be on again just because of the breathing. Um so we took a look at some solutions to fix that and uh what we have now is is a you know a much more uh intuitive and usable interface because of the new way we actually attach it. So we actually right now attach the MobiGlass via an IK uh solution so what we do is we specify where an IK target point is relative to the player's camera. So uh once we have that point

22. 00:17:19

    then we can just procedurally animate the arm up and we'll have some offsets that we can actually tweak uh to really kind of cuz it's especially very very pixel per pixel uh you know pixel perfect. We want to be pixel perfect with the stuff. And and have it be just the right size like if it's just too slightly too big then you know we'll we'll we'll really want to adjust that. So now we've got the actual control to uh specify these offsets for the MobiGlass and it really allowed us to really dial in the scale and the positioning that we wanted on screen to facilitate an optimal user experience. So the other benefit that came with that is now in all these different contexts whether it's an EVA or whether it's on foot or you're crouching or you're in these various different ships actually now that we have a single target point

23. 00:18:06

    that's relative to the player's camera the UI is now in a much more consistent place. Uh so the positioning and the scale is much more consistent now in all of the different contexts uh because before what had happened is that you'd have specific poses uh that that animators had to hand animate and when the animators are animating this uh they actually it's very hard for them to actually see their um positioning is going to actually end up in the engine. So they they think it's Maya. I'm not actually sure what they they work in but when they try to integrate in the engine it's usually like in a different place so they kind of have to approximate it. And so before all the MobiGlass poses in the different contexts were all approximated. So you you ended up with maybe in in crouch like part of it was cut off or or angled a little bit more. So now we can actually have

24. 00:18:55

    a much more control and uh fine-tuning of of that sort of stuff. So it's it's been really great and it really helps in addition to all the other changes that we made in terms of utilizing more of the screen real estate as well. One thing that we did in in looking at the current 3.0 vehicle manager and player manager was the kind of awkward menu. So we basically have a an accordion menu system whereupon you have to drop down lists and then when you click on something that then transition to a whole different window and if you wanted to change another part or something to view view items in another part you have to go back and then drop down another menu and then select that. So it was kind of a lot of user clicks in order to actually you know get to where you actually wanted to go. We had the kind of the list on the side this

25. 00:19:43

    concertina list with the 3D model that you could see where like rotate it around see where things were. That concertina wasn't didn't really work for us. There was too many items in there. It kept collapsing. So, we needed to fix that anyway cuz it just wasn't as usable. But really we weren't using a lot of the the screen space and I think that was a problem that we saw very early on with the Mobi in general that was like, this is really cool thing at any point you can open it up and see what you've got, but there's a lot of screen going wasted. So, from a readability standpoint because it was a lot smaller on screen, we really wanted to bring that out. So, making it bigger, filling the screen was a big thing. And then once we had that extra screen space, we didn't need to keep collapsing things down. That was really it was a space saving um choice. So, by putting two separate

26. 00:20:33

    columns on the left, you could pick your hard point, and you could pick what you put on it, and it's still got plenty of screen space to see your character model, see the details on the side. So, by bringing the view in, all of a sudden it opened a lot of doors from a from a usability standpoint. So, another great benefit that actually just simply fell out of this approach that we're taking is that now we've solved the flickering cursor issue. Now that like the UI is much more full screen and it's and it's much more straight on to your camera. So, it's much more usable. However, one of the things that we're concerned about with that is how much more static the UI was going to seem uh with that approach. And you know, we thought we needed might might have needed to stop the actual breathing. So, you know, you'd just be like a statue. And so, we really

27. 00:21:21

    we didn't really want to take that away, but at the same time, you know, uh we you know, we needed to improve the overall kind of usability. So, what actually fell out of the approach was that we can still have breathing and and as you run, as you maybe after a long sprint, you can pull up your MobiGlass and what you want to see is like yeah, you're you want to be able to feel that your character is out of breath even, you know, whether you know, regardless of the context you're in. You still see the UI moving, but your the cursor position is always going to be in in the same place regardless of the movement. Even though we have the cursor is actually on on the 2D plane in front of the MobiGlass technically. So, it's it's a it's it's much improved for sure. For a lot of the apps now, we've also done a massive push

28. 00:22:10

    to unify the layouts across the vehicle loadout, the player loadout, and the MobiGlass. And we wanted to unify that kind of UI with the loadout uh the UIs in in Star Marine and Arena Commander. We're also going to reuse that for the shop item as well. So, the shop item kiosk, essentially, we can really reuse the same system. So, we really get a lot of return out of doing these efforts in terms of unifying uh the UI in both the code base as well as the layout cuz you also want to unify the layout uh because you establish user familiarity. Um so, once a user is familiar with one thing, then across all of these other interfaces, they can they already know pretty much uh 90% how to actually interact with it. And and

29. 00:22:59

    they're in you know, that's a really a great thing for us uh in terms of development as well because that's means less work when we have a unified code base. We've always wanted to unify the all these different UIs. Um so, you'll notice in before in in 2.6 like in in 3.0, we had this very specific Star Marine loadout screen that was different from the AC loadout. Basically, you had a very specific, you know, here's your primary weapon, here's your secondary weapon. But you know, as things expand, as we want to add more hard points, you know, you want to be able to attach uh like a scope to your gun or different different attachments to a particular item. Um you know, we need to be able to scale that. And what we have right now, you know, can accommodate any kind of additions and uh

30. 00:23:48

    uh um future uh future that we want to we want to actually um you know, introduce. So, we already had the code base for the vehicle and personal managers. They were already using the same code base. All we're doing really is changing the 3D model the the way that we build players really is the same way way we're building ships. It's a it's a skeleton with hard points on it, item ports. And you put a piece of armor on that player or you put a a gun on that player or you put a uh missile launcher on a ship, it's all the same hierarchy essentially. We're just changing what's what's up front. Technically, to update Arena Commander, it already had the same code base. We just needed to put a new layer on top, but Star Marine required completely ripping out a whole old system. So, it was this kind of rotten bit of wood and everything else

31. 00:24:35

    is working. So, that was the the biggest technical challenge was to pull out the way that we set up our characters cuz they were all having bespoke loadouts and and systems that. So, that needed redoing. It also meant that if we were switching over to a new system, we needed a way of tracking what I was using in elimination versus what I'm using um in last stand. When you're picking one team versus another, we needed a loadout system, which is something we hadn't had in um the PMA currently. So, that needed adding. So, there was a couple of new systems that needed to go in. Um but that gives us a good groundwork now for what we plan to do with 3.2 moving forward and expanding um loadouts in general so you can save them in the future. Bug fixing as well. So, I mean if there's something wrong in the base

32. 00:25:23

    implementation somewhere, then we fix that and that propagates to anywhere where we have that where we have where we use that code base. For testing obviously, any change you make, we have to test across everywhere where that UI is used. So, not so much for testing, but uh definitely for future development, we can just hey, let's use let's use this unified code base. We can use it for we can use it for the character customizer, we can use it for uh shop item kiosk cuz in the shop item kiosk, there's something that's that we're going to that we're that we're planning for the for the next release is essentially being able to pick any you know, pick any port on your ship or or hard point and see all the valid uh items that are available in that particular shop. So, it's just filtered differently, but it's the same actual

33. 00:26:10

    interface. So, the other thing too is, you know, we can also, you know, it's not doesn't necessarily have to be bound to oh, you pick a hard point and then you see the items. We can also do the reverse whereupon we see all the items and then we can see what valid hard points there are as well. So, there's both option. We would we would want both options there cuz there's use cases for, you know, both. So. So, long term this means in Star Marine, you can save a elimination a last stand for marine, a last stand outlaw um loadout. It means that we can prep the ground now for player created loadouts. Not just not in Star Marine, but in in the PU. So, if the player's got their favorite uh exploration loadout or they've got their favorite combat loadout or they've got their favorite stealth loadout, they can

34. 00:26:58

    set what they want, save it, and then when they move up to a a locker or something, they can quickly switch their gear and it'll remember, oh, you want this helmet and this undersuit rather than having to manually go through each. So, by the the need that we had for Star Marine to have those fixed loadouts, it means we had to do the work up front to be able to save and then load back up loadouts. So, moving forward, we should be able to start implementing player created loadouts and um and that's quite cool. Skinning-wise, uh obviously they can be branded. We have a branding system at least in the kiosk that we've actually have uh in the commodity kiosk where we right now it's just branded uh at Port Olisar. And we actually have a different brand for GrimHEX where it's, you know, more more like a dust terminal. So, it's it really

35. 00:27:46

    kind of fits into the uh uh kind of the the feeling in the environment uh much better. So, when we have those different skins, obviously, you know, they're just different skins, but under underneath it all it's all the same. In the short term, we're going to be hopefully seeing a lot more usable um MobiGlass. It's full screen now. There's a lot the icons have been brought down to the bottom. So, it should be a lot more readable, um a lot more intuitive. Players should be able to quickly see where things are, what they can fit on things, and be able to read the text a lot clearer. So, for 3.1, we wanted to make sure that it was better under the hood, but also a lot more convenient to use. So, yeah. It was it was largely dealing with all the problems we either didn't get fixed for 3.0 or

36. 00:28:34

    all the feedback that we could got to address and say like, let's make sure that this is great moving forward because there's a lot of other apps, the map and mission manager and things like that that we want to tackle that that need bringing up to a a better level. So, this was kind of the first step at at an iteration that I mean, throughout Star Citizen, we talk about we put things out there, listen to the community, improve things. This is that in in action really. It's putting something out there in our first pass, getting that immediate feedback, but it actually being able to then quickly turn around rather than waiting three, four, five months to be able to say, right, let's get on that immediately because this is this is a barrier for people enjoying the game. So, let's let's get that fixed. So, in terms of what's going into 3.1, um so, in terms of the yeah, there's a lot of stuff UI-wise, um but you know,

37. 00:29:23

    when we're talking about the MobiGlass, a new overhauled vehicle manager app, a new overhauled player loadout app uh is going in as well as a um new contracts manager as well. It's largely the same kind of functionality as you as you saw previously. It's just a much more streamlined user experience. Yeah, for 3.1, we've been focusing on making it all usable. On the Star Marine and Arena Commander loadouts as well, we've been using the same system. They kind of separated. We had the one that was on MobiGlass. We had a bespoke system solely for Star Marine, and then we had the old system on Arena Commander. And what we wanted to do for 3.1 was bring those all under one roof. Make sure it's a single code base. It all looks the same, so the player knows exactly where things live and what they can do in one

38. 00:30:11

    they can do in the others. It meant that any bug fixes we do in the future that's all taken care of immediately. Um so it makes moving forward a lot more streamlined. And Zane can then have a singular design vision. If we add one widget on one thing, it's it's everywhere. Bringing the Star Marine loadout and the AC loadout in line with what we're the work we're already be planning to do for personal manager app and the vehicle manager app. That was a kind of a big overhaul that really sets us up now moving forward. It's a game within a game, so a lot of the user interface kind of felt like it didn't need to be one in the same to what was in Star Citizen itself, but it meant that we had two ways of doing the same thing. So by and large, the end goal of kind of let's consolidate these needed doing sooner or later. But what we got in for for 3.0, and it's been there for a while

39. 00:31:00

    I say I think since 2.6 brought in Star Marine updates, that user interface did exactly what we needed to do. But as we're looking to add more items that you can buy with REC and improve the experience in Star Marine, that needed to grow. And the the interface in Star Marine just wasn't able to add new items and and things like that cuz it's it's all very handmade. So it needed updating. And as we were fixing bugs, we had a whole bunch of 3.0 bugs that needed to look at. It became very clear that we're fixing these bugs twice. There's two There's a bug for this and a bug for that. And so it became very clear that instead of just doing all this, let's just do the work up front that we needed to do eventually anyway. Let's just get it done now, and then it's it's taken care of. So for MobiGlass on a larger scale, we want to look at the star map more. That's that's got a lot of work to doing

40. 00:31:51

    to kind of make it more usable, more readable. Use the space that we now have. I think that was kind of constrained before. So we've got a lot more space now, so using the space better for the star map, so it's it's more intuitive because I think that's going to be once you've got your kit and you've got your ship, finding where to go is is the next big thing. So we've got something that works, but making that better. We've also got things like the journal and other secondary apps that you're not going to be using all the time that we want to make sure work really well, so they'll be coming through um down the line. And then in terms of the VMA and PMA, those apps, they've still got a whole bunch of stuff that needs to come in. We want to improve um the stat readout. At the moment, there's just kind of basic information and basic size information, but there's a whole bunch

41. 00:32:38

    of stats and under the surface that aren't being read into the screen yet that we want to show. So you'll be able to compare this gun to that gun, that piece of armor to that piece of armor. So that when you're deciding, do I want a big heavy piece of equipment or a light piece of equipment? It's like, well, this protects for more damage, but it's going to slow me down or it's going to take longer to to aim or to move. And so players can make conscious decisions about when they find a a derelict and they find a piece of equipment that's just floating in space, do I want to take this with me? They can compare stats immediately, which is also useful in the market. It's also useful when creating your favorite loadouts. So there's a whole bunch of additional features that we want. Now that we feel like it's a usable system and and that flow has been sorted, layering in now personally created loadouts, stat comparison, new features that the that

42. 00:33:28

    we think are going to enhance and make people use that more and and get more value out of it. So another thing that we have going into 3.1 is an overhauled Arena Commander and Star Marine loadout screen. So Star Marine is no longer a bespoke UI. It's it's using the same unified system uh that we set forth with the personal manager and vehicle manager in the MobiGlass. So those all have been unified. We have a character customizer UI, the the first iteration of that at least going in for to 3.1. Um obviously um looking to expand into um much more robust features later down the line. Of course, as is with everything, new overhauled mission manager UI, largely the same functionality in terms of missions, uh but just streamline user experience and streamline um user interface layout. And

43. 00:34:16

    addition to that, service beacon functionality. So the ability to create service beacons uh and user generated missions that you can accept um and you know, you can view other players' missions. Uh so you know, there's a lot more player generated kind of content there. Obviously, we want to um you know, later down the line introduce more filters so you can have you know, I want missions just of this rating or or more. Or I want only contracts of this type. So you will have all of that functionality to implement later down the line, but this is now kind of like our first iteration of that. So it's as we get new features, they're they're really um kind of rudimentary um and and basic, but they expand over times. Now obviously, it's great to have the screen

44. 00:35:03

    real estate to be able to expand into. So um you know, another reason why we're happy about um the foundation that we set with the new MobiGlass and layout. Um there are also uh some new improvements to the ship UI and HUD. Um so now we have feed much better feedback for the user in terms of where they're hitting their target ship or where they're getting hit. So it's it's it's more obvious. Um and we brought back some of the functionality uh that we were that was missing from the visor, including like EM and IR signatures that you can now you can now see. Um Uh later down the line, there's a whole lot of improvements that we want to make to the ship UI. It's definitely not in a like final state that we see it. So we have um you know, improvements that we still need to make for that and that

45. 00:35:51

    we'll we want to look for look to do for for 3.2. So But for now, one of the major improvements that we made was to you know, how the uh ship model renders. Um so it's you know, more efficient um and uh you know, kind of easier to see. So in Star Marine, the kind of the loadout presets were necessitated cuz you have different loadouts that you would need to use whether you know, depending on what side you're on. But base foundation of that is actually uh going to drive the idea of loadout presets where you can save a particular configuration and just quickly uh you know, change into that loadout. So you don't have to just do it everything individually. So we'll have you know, you know, you'll be able to set your own loadout presets. So it's much more easier to access um what you like and you know, for different roles

46. 00:36:39

    like stealth and so forth. So making sure that it's not it's not like a mobile phone where you've got 700 apps and it's like, where is the thing that I actually need? Make sure it is cuz you don't want to be playing the game off off your wrist. You want to be out there in the 'verse playing it properly. So striking the right balance between what's too much information, what's not enough information, and and a lot of that's going to come from community feedback, listening to what the fans say, more of this, less of that. I find this quite hard. I'm having trouble with this. And and that's worked really well from 3.0 into 3.1, keeping that going, keeping our ears open, and listening to that feedback as we constantly keeping an eye on what the community says on Spectrum and on Reddit and and other formats. We get a sense of what they want more of, what they want less of, and we can

47. 00:37:26

    say, does this align with what we want? Does this Does this make sense? Yeah, that would be a good use of Mobi. This wouldn't be a good use of Mobi. Even if people want the fastest point from A to B, and sometimes that mean let me just buy my cargo from my MobiGlass. Because why do I have to get off my ship, go into the thing? And but sometimes that's not what No, because we want you to physically go there because it's part of the experience of of traveling. If you could do everything from your wrist, you'd never leave your cockpit. There's some things that don't suit MobiGlass, and there's some things that absolutely do that there's no other way you could change what gloves you've got on other than physically, which would be horrible. So it's what do we streamline, what don't we streamline? But yeah, listening to the community feedback, what is what do we feel like that's important? And also do we hear this a lot or do we hear it from one person? One person really wants

48. 00:38:15

    a feature and like, okay, that sounds cool, but realistically, that's going to be 2 weeks worth of someone's work to get that in versus 60, 70, 100 people have asked for this one thing. Okay, well, that's a big win for us and and it's something we want to do, it's something you desperately want. Let's let's put that into the game. It's finding the right time to put that in obviously, but because we have kind of quarterly cycles and it's something we're constantly looking at, we can just okay, let's let's drop that in, let's drop that in. So we're looking at the mission manager on the side whilst we're also looking at the VMA and PMA because it's it's it's right there. It's like, oh, we just need to just change a bit of this flash, and then it's in. Great. It's a day's worth of work, and then we've we improved that feature as well. So as work comes in, we can just keep evolving the design, so it's it's no longer a

49. 00:39:03

    case of it's MobiGlass 2.0 or 3.0. It's it's the living MobiGlass. So while we've made a lot of these improvements um and we're able to accomplish a lot in terms of improving the UI for 3.1, there's still a ton of stuff that we that we wanted to get in that we haven't yet. So we want to be able to view stats on the player. So and and be able to compare items when you're actually using this loadout screen. So that's a whole another thing that we need to build in still is is the stat comparison and you know, if I equip this uh component to my ship, how's that going to affect my speed and my acceleration and so forth. So we don't necessarily have too much of that right now, but that's something that's definitely we we're looking to going into the future cuz, you know, it's a pretty vital especially in the loadout screen. And just general kind of

50. 00:39:53

    uh effects as well. So, you know, we we we need to have a much more improved highlighting of the different uh items that you're focusing on on the character. So, that just comes with uh shader improvements. Um and yeah, just the the general um feeling of it is just going to be iterated over time. So, I think we sort of lost the zooming and panning functionality, but we kind of we we still, you know, in this unification some stuff sort of got lost as they were quite bespoke, but now we want to be able to obviously have that come back and and, you know, have this nice feeling of the the ship or the character and you you kind of zooming out to the the port and that kind of highlighting very nicely. That's something that, you know, obviously

51. 00:40:41

    uh would be really nice to have, but wasn't really necessarily critical uh for 3.1. Um but definitely going forward we uh we want to add in that polish for sure. The PMA improves with every release. Uh we still have a little more work to do with the item previews, uh but we're getting closer to the finished article with every release. And that's all for this week. Remember, if you're out there in Alpha 3.1 and you're interested in checking out new ships like the Reclaimer, Terrapin, or Cyclone, our flyable ship sale is still on through the end of this weekend. Yes, and Citizen Con is coming up in October in Austin, Texas. Uh we're finalizing venue details now and we'll have more details including ticket information soon. Reverse the Verse airs live tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. PDT or 5:00 p.m. UTC on our Twitch channel with developers from the UK audio and props

52. 00:41:28

    team stopping by. And if you missed this week's episode of Lore Makers Guide to the Galaxy, tune in to learn more about the mysteries and dangers of the Nul system. Mhm, that nothing system will see. Yes, and check out new episodes of Calling All Devs every Monday where your questions could be answered by a member of the team. Thanks to our subscribers for sponsoring all of these great shows. Yes, thank you. And we have some exciting stuff on the horizon for subscribers starting with new usable in-game flare like the weapon finishes debuting later this month. Yeah, these are looking pretty cool. Uh and thank you, of course, to our backers. Without your dedication, uh we wouldn't be able to do any of this. No, we wouldn't. And until next week we'll see you around the Verse. Thanks for watching. For the latest and

53. 00:42:52

    greatest in Star Citizen and Squadron 42, you can subscribe to our channel or you can check out some of the other shows. And you can also head to our website at www.robertsspaceindustries.com. Thank you very much for watching.