Around the Verse: Episode 2.33

26 May 201600:54:541,255 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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[Music] this week it's an all pirate edition of around the verse we sit down with designer Matt Sherman to talk about designing the next great pirate fighter and then Ben Lesnik sits down with a claimed concept artist Jim Martin to tell tell us how the buccaneer came to life all this and more on this week's around the verse okay we're about 20 wapita get ready guys you're going to start self-destruction in 5 seconds I'm going to start countdown 5 4 3 2 1 zero countdown I'm so confused the was that someone
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cheated this is the same group that put together the vtron videos a couple of weeks back 42 the ultimate question of the life universe and everything that is correct welcome to this week's episode of around the verse a weekly look at star citizens development I'm Sandy Gardner VP of marketing at Cloud Imperium games and I'm Zan bian UI creative director here at foundry42 we're filming ATV from Manchester this week as you may know as Zayn is now resident in Manchester how's it going here it's going great uh I'm really loving that out here um I'm really especially liking the long days now daylight till 10 p.m. almost but yeah it's great daylight till 10 p.m. but
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it's not quite as warm as Zay is making it out to be at least not for me wearing this nice Foundry 42 hoodie that I got given um can you give us a little hint as to what you've been working on recently certainly uh we've been working a lot on 24 because it has a lot of UI requirements um everything from shopping to um Port modification uh and there's just a lot of uh small features here and there that we've got to support uh but aside from that we've also been working on a lot of Concepts uh for the overhaul of that we're doing for the holot table uh as well as the Mobi glass and just writing some tech to handle uh what we plan for for 3D interface
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and it's looking really cool all out of my technical knowledge um the as didn't you say you're doing the asro cryo something cry asro cry asro yes Zane is working on a lot and speaking of 2.4 2.4 is on the way we are currently testing it with on the PTU with quite a few of our testers and they are doing a great job for us so we thank you very much for that and we will be going to the live servers very soon and we'll keep you updated on it we know 24 has taken a little extra time but you know of course there's a really good reason for that uh you know when we're putting in a lot of these under the hood changes uh like persistence and and so forth uh there's a lot of unforeseen bugs that you know come up and we have to really tackle them uh and
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you know resolve them in order to make it feasible for a live release in addition to the beginnings of persistence 2.4 includes a host of updates and changes ranging from the openings of shopping on ARP Court to the additional first large fly multi crw ship the starf farer the buck starts here and thank you to Jared or Ben for writing that for me our latest concept sale kicks off tomorrow so be sure to check out the com link for all the details on Drake's latest fighter and stay tuned later in this episode to hear more about some of the people behind the ship we asked backers to retweet a spectrum message intercepted by the Drake heral on Twitter to get a first look at the buccaneer uh we're happy to announce that 2,000 backers were able to share the message and unlock the first image in case you
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missed it here it is subscribers have had their mate flare distributed this month it is a space Cactus the space Cactus will be available in your Hangar alongside 2.4 and be sure to wear gloves jump point is live as well and subscribers should check out their areas for the latest issue of the magazine this time around we have exclusive fiction about the Taran war from our very own Adam Weiser and we feature something on the misk prospector and more some of the team has already moved ahead on Star Citizen 2.5 which will be our next patch 2.5 will have plenty of additions but it won't be as much of a change as 2.4 so hopefully it won't
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require as much testing or as much of a weight um and we'll provide more details as the time gets closer with that let's check in with our Studios from around the world and let's see what's happening in news from around the verse hey everyone welcome back to Los Angeles California I'm production coordinator Darien borck today we are joined by our newest Tech designer stepen Hosmer so on this week's update we've got on the tech design team we've got the guys looking at uh the item system 2.0 and seeing how that works uh kind of with the rest of the ships on how the design functions the power plants uh generators coolants uh cooling systems uh things like that so Kirk is Kirk Tomy our lead designer he's he's kind of spearheading that with KX and
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Renault and Matt Sherman looking at the Drake caterpillar I'm trying to think what else is there the ReliOn the heral we've got a lot of ships over in La uh on the tech content side M inary kind of took over one of our tools called our asset validation tool and what this does is a program that was originally being handled out by Austin but since it it's now in our plate when our artists and developers want to submit and check in a a brand new ship or any kind of ship U it cross checks whether those assets are being entered correctly whether it uh maxed up with the material properly um and if it does not or if it finds some kind of error it will not let us check in that particular part of the ship so it just kind of the checks and balance on um Trying to minimize how many bugs go into
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the game uh on top of that so like I mentioned we've got our brand new tech designer who actually just started today yeah so any idea what you're going be working on the tech design team um I'm going to be working on ship design and implementation and balance there you go so uh as always you know we're always looking for for new and exciting talent and uh we're we've got some more talent coming in and this is our latest addition to the team so uh hopefully we'll that means we'll get content to you guys out faster keep our fingers crossed uh so that's all we got from Los Angeles once again I'm Daran gck and I'm Stephen Hosmer there you go thanks guys hey guys Jake Ross here producer of the Austin studio uh sporting a new look for you if you admire that there you go
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uh I wanted to give you an update on what's going on here in Austin so uh first off persistent ueec so we have a a uh Alpha currency out on PTU right now uh as part of our first shopping release where uh it's a test currency it's it's there with sole purpose of being able to test things with it and uh and and wipe it whenever we need uh but we want to be able to to get you know actual persistent ueec in the works um here as soon as possible just so we can get closer to what we're actually going to be releasing in the full game so uh we're kind of you know there are things to consider there that that are you know we don't want to mess with people's with inventory or or or their actual real world hard-earned dollars and stuff so uh we want to make sure that we have everything in order on the backend side of things before we even attempt to put
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out some form of persistent ueec uh so we're working on a a plan and uh to schedule in the work to actually get persistent UE in place um so that way we can we can get it out to you guys with as little hiccups as possible um so there's that's that's in the works um we also uh I talked a little bit last week about the the additional shops that we're putting in place for um for the the new pirate base that we're working on um so along with that comes new inventory so uh we are um design side here Robert Gaither and Rob Riner put together a list of um of clothing assets that we want to see in the in the next release for uh for that for that shop so uh these these clothing assets are a little bit more piratey in in nature um and they uh they will be you know a
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little bit more rugged a little bit more Frontier like um as opposed to the the kind of cleaner cut clothing assets we have right in the in cassaba right now so uh in addition to new assets for cassaba new clothing to sell there we'll also have some new uh cool new different types of clothing for this new pirate shop so um so that'll be cool uh the freelancer ladder um has been put in game so uh it was done a little while back but for I think I forgot to mention on the show we actually got uh our ship animation team here Daniel Craig uh to to put in the freelancer ladder for you guys I know that's something that that you guys uh I know a lot of you wanted to to be able to access that s ladder so if you haven't noticed it's there you can climb it now if you own a freelancer go check it out uh special thanks to Daniel Craig for getting that in uh last thing I'll mention is a full-blown
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lighting pass uh will be done uh we're prepping for that uh it's going to be done across the board uh AR Corp Crusader Port bsar um and the shops everything's going to get um a lighting pass on it um just we we got some new kind of techniques that we want to we want to include um so we want to bring up bring your lighting up to um up to the standard that the the rest of the game has uh not that the lighting right now is bad but it's it's just we got um some new things that we want to add to it um and make sure that it's the best it can possibly be so um yeah that's all I got for you this week guys uh thanks and I'll see you around hi everyone this is Mickey over in the UK I've got Andy Nicholson here with me today who is the ship balance designer
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and he's going to be telling us what his role here is at Foundry 42 okay hi everyone um so I used to be the QA manager here at Sig for for a while so ship balance is quite a new role new role to me especially um but something born out of necessity um so what I do is uh look look over the ships in game at the moment and and basically tweak with a you know a goal in mind of making everything feel balanced and fun um so that's addressing old ships that are in now and new ships that coming through oh cool um so I believe that you have been uh in charge of the control system that's recently changed um so I'd like to ask you a little bit more about that yeah as well as breaking the ships I've been breaking patrols that that's that's
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a twoof front attack um yeah so in 24 we wanted to address uh what we kind of thought was a big problem with with the control schemes for Star sits and know the control mappings were quite um hard to to grasp across different aspects I mean star sit into a game now now that we have the on foot sections in the FPS elements and flight we wanted to you know take a stab at making everything feel more cohesive and unified so the idea was to approach it from uh yeah making it easy to easy to switch between those three modes so we took Eva FPS and tried to run with it as much as we could with the flight controls so mapping wise you know we we wanted we experimented with jump
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also being strafe up yeah Crouch being strafe down and the strafes left and right also translating into the ship controls um which was yeah I think mostly successful I'm happy with the changes we've made um we got some good feedback from yes the uh the avocados yes um so we made a few changes on that in the last week MH and hopefully by the time you hear this you'll be playing it and giving feedback as well um and we'll take that on board as much as we can uh the old control mappings are still in game so if you want to use them go ahead I wouldn't recommend it um I think that's everything we've got time for this week so we'll see you in the verse bye hey everyone Brian from Frankfurt uh
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this week I thought I would show you around the office space since we're filling up I keep telling you we're hiring new people and then I'll also show you some new stuff we have going on so U this week I'm also on my camera so audio and video may be a little bit different there's Jason thank you Jason welcome um so when we first moved in here we were occupying just pretty much one corner which was basically this space um now you see we pretty much have most of the desk filled to some capacity um I think overall there's wuchi say hi um I think overall we have uh we have 49 deaths here and we have 45 current uh
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employees here's the tech guys I got to walk fast they don't like being on camera um this is Enis say hi Enis hi uh here is our kitchen SL Lounge we try to keep it as clean as we can and then what I want to show you although it may get a little noisy is some new stuff that we have going on right now since we're just about at capacity and we're almost out of desks um we have agreed with the building management to give us some additional space so we are just now starting construction on a brand new space this is cool of course they're drilling now right there you're looking at is where
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they'll cut a hole we'll cut a hole there make a door and that will lead into our current space um small offices small rooms it's going to be really loud now so that's basic in there will hold about another 25 employees um we should be good and have that all sorted by August 1st um and then we even have the room to expand a little bit more if we want um I think another 9 to 11 employees at that point so just wanted to show off the space exciting news enough people are interested in the game and excited about
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what we're pulling off here in Frankfurt that we're pulling in more and more people enough that uh we need to make some more space so cool awesome talk to you next week this episode is all about the buccaneer so we sit down with two of the people who are behind this ship first up designer Matt Sherman and secondly concept artist Jim Martin take it away Jared thanks guys and welcome to this all Buccaneer edition of round the verse uh I'm your community manager Jed Huckabee and with me today is technical designer Matt Sherman hi everybody how you doing man doing good good uh now you're the designer in charge of the buccaneer yes okay uh just so uh just to
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give some background uh when we do a ship uh they tend to get assigned out to different designers yep you don't by you don't design all of our ships and whatnot so what is it mean to design a ship so this is sort of taking uh you know we we'd get a rough uh almost like a paragraph blurb to sort of seed what this ship is going to be what its place in the universe is going to be and then you know we we always have a a big meeting where we kick off what we want all the goals to be and so it's also you know design art uh Community like everyone's involved sort of like nailing down okay this is the core idea of the ship and once we're all happy on that uh then I sort of take that the results of that meeting and it's like okay what does this actually mean in terms of uh how many hard points for weapons does
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this ship get how much cargo does it have how many people are on board the ship what components do we have to put on board to actually make sure it it delivers on its intended purpose from that meeting uh sorting out hey do we need to develop or Implement a special gameplay for this you know just answering all all the looming questions that would come up with let's make a spaceship all right and what were some of what was the original brief do you remember that original paragraph brief for the buccaneer want I mean in general it was to to to give the Drake manufacture a a complimentary fighter craft that would pair well with uh the entire rest of the Drake family um I mean that's been a big thing the the LA office out here we've
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been working really hard on defining like the look the style and the feel of Drake ships uh you know we're currently working on the caterpillar and so we really wanted to make sure that the buccaneer was a fleshed out member of the Drake family and not something almost built built in its own little vacuum of oh it's going to do this but it didn't it wouldn't have made sense with the rest of Drake so everything the buccaneer does goes with Drake ships operating together in concert all right let's talk a little bit about that then uh the Drake ships operating in concert the caterpillar yes how would you describe the role of the caterpillar in the Drake family caterpillars the you know the the home base ship um lots of lots of cargo space inside you know from from the walkth through you and KX did
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last week uh lots of just eventual options and room for growth that we're setting the ship up for so uh I know there's always talk you know of modules and different options so while we don't have any a full list you know locked in of this is exactly what the caterpillar has we have a lot of potential for what that list can entail so I can really flesh out build the whole family together and serve as that you know main base uh centerpiece all right uh the cutless the cutless is kind of that uh mixed skirmisher uh hauler so it's it's always had more of a uh unique history in the game and I mean it's it's definitely not exactly where we want it to be or even
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where I think a lot of people envisioned it being initially but uh now as the as the Drake line grows out we're going to be able to make sure that the cutless has its its solid place in the world so uh unlike another ship that would hold about as much cargo so I want to say like the the Reliant and the cutless can hold roughly about the same amount of cargo when you max them out um the cutless is going to have a lot more guns it's going to have a lot more Firepower that's constantly bringing to bear it's going to have you the the dedicated turret Gunner on that uh versus just the remote pilot seat on the Reliant um and even though they're a bit different in in size and scope it's still how we're making sure that you know even after any reworking the the cutless is going to have that weird fighter fused with a
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holler description that was in the the original blurb way back in 2012 so um we're definitely going to re recapture that and you know fun with work ahead okay uh the Herold the Herold is the it's almost like the drag racer out of them all um because info running it's going to be about you know Gathering that Intel getting that Intel from point A to point B um although making sure that Gathering is more the the meat and potatoes of the activity where it's not just like oh here here's your item go go to a fetch Quest it's like oh no getting that item in the first place is going to be a little bit more involved on and once you've got that that Intel well hey
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someone found out you want to get out of there fast and those giant engines are going to help deliver that you're not going to be turning that well at high speed and at Max Cruise speed but you're definitely going to be able to just point in a Direction go fast get out and long range surveillance and stuff you know you know you you send the Herold out first it gets there first takes the pictures what bugs out fast exact pops the radar okay what signals who who's around what can I find out about where this place is where we are now capture all that data bring it back to your friends you know show them okay this is what we've got going into this next place so so so so if you're in a a merchant group and you see a a random Herald show up for for two seconds for two minutes before it disappears you might want to man turrets yeah yeah you may want to be like oh um yellow alert
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some somebody definitely saw us and they oh they got a scan off yeah let's let's be a little bit more cautious and now we're adding the ha the buccaneer correct adding the buccaneer and what is the Buccaneer's role in that the buccaneer is more that dedicated Interceptor fighter support for the Drake family so is very much uh combat over cargo um you know no actual discrete cargo on the ship uh we're instead you know using it serve as a launch point to look more into to how we want to approach smuggling gameplay into the future we've still got some unanswered questions on that so we can't go into the exact details but we're making sure that the the buccaneer is poised to be able to leverage that as soon as we've got all those systems you
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know ironed out approved everything's set so once we do get cargo gameplay and it's like Oh no you're not just being a legit businessman you can you can take those Shady deals and move Contraband from point A to point B and and have purpose to that in how you're you know hiding that stuff in your ship so right off the bat it sounds like you're not meant to be a oneman pirate force in any of these ships no you're it's very much going to be about working in tandem with others because I mean even even an old pirate ship in the romanticized you know Caribbean era it's like no it wasn't it wasn't Blackbeard by himself on that ship it was Blackbeard and his crew crew of other crazy people who are just going to jump overboard like go to the next
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ship steal that ship well we got two ships now why are we going to sync this one let's go keep raiding other guys um and so it it's definitely going to be a type of activity where uh and not necessarily large groups it should definitely be something that small groups of even you know three to five players should be able to get a really cool pirate experience out uh even just you know a Buccaneer and a cutlet paired together should work really well together because you're going to have the more agile uh Firepower that the Buccaneers is going to bring to the table you're going to have the more just durable and rugged ship that the cutless should should eventually you know evolve into um you know because I mean it is that is a bigger ship so it should be taking more hits than it is currently um
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and so when you have both of those together it's like well you're going to be really distracting by that Buccaneer CU it's going to be harassing you but then that cutless still it's going to have enough Firepower on it where if you get too distracted and it starts pointing at you it's going to start tearing holes in your ship so making sure that they both just work great together now this weekend we actually released the very first image of the buccaneer through our social media uh we had folks retweeting and and un scrambling and that picture has generated a lot of uh a lot of response and uh after this segment you'll see an interview with uh Ben Lesnik and Jim Martin who will talk more about the art um people have been trying to decipher the load out from that image so what can you tell us about the loadout so uh just working off the image you've got a pair
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of fix size one guns on those outer wing tips uh then inset a little bit more into those wings are actually size three hard points that are going to come stock with a gimb size 2 weapon on it uh underneath the main body of the ship uh there's actually uh in the concept it's a a twin link size two gun so that' actually be a a size four mount underneath the ship uh and then you know in the concept the the two size twoos on there uh but even that underbody mount is going to have a handful of options because it just being a size four it's like well okay let let me put a a Revenant on here instead or let me put one big gun on so we we want to make sure those are going to have some some really good options to it so so if I if I understand it correctly you you can actually if you wanted to go
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with an all fixed Loadout for whatever reason you'd have a size four fixed two size three fixed and then two size ones correct that's a heck of a lot of Firepower yeah now with the gimbals though uh you you have two gimbaled we size twos on the wings yeah those are the underbody wings or the underbody guns on the wings so you know you see them sort of sticking out uh you know little bit in closer over to the engine side um but those are size three hard points with size two guns mounted on them and what kind of firing Arc are we thinking with those uh for those it's going to be more of like a a frontal firing Arc so like 30 to 60° um comparable to what we have on other you know Wing mounted guns for the fighters uh the more interesting one's actually going to be that underbelly gun
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where um it now it's not going to be the most 100% of the time utilitarian thing but uh something that we actually have on a few of our other ships not many people really encounter it is some of the the Canard turrets they can go turn around and so if you use the look behind key uh now you're doing your rear viiew camera and you start firing well your Canard Mount weapons will start firing directly behind you and so that big siiz four Mount has that capability and so say you've got a bigger guy you know chasing you that oh he's he's just a wide Target I don't need the reticle to really get hits on him um you you can put a little bit of pressure Beyond just oh not just launch counter measures no launch bullets that way fire backwards and does it does it just go around or
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does it actually go down at all it would be a rotation well so uh the the plan is the big size 4 is going to have a 360 Dee rotational Arc um how much it pitches up and down we still have to sort of uh work out because we also want to make sure you know if it pitch 90° down that none of the gun is starting to cut into the body so some of that is going to be seeing you know what exactly looks clean but also what what gives the ship enough uh both benefits and also weaknesses you know we don't want to make it oh it's got 360 de spherical coverage at all times with every gun because that's kind of cheap you mean sometimes we put weaknesses into ships on purpose is that game balance allegedly all right so so you have a size three
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gun on the bottom gimb mhm and what not uh I I know the the cockpit has it's it's at a glass Co glass floor on the cockpit so tremendous visibility you you can gimble it around you can use the look behind key to track things behind you yep uh you still keep the reticle if you if You' got something locked on uh not currently with the look behind uh just cuz that goes to a more abstracted third person camera and so we we traditionally cut off any Hut elements when you're looking at a third person um but it should be something where uh you know if when you really get to know your ship you you can pull this off uh like even right now uh Hornet pilots and Mustang Pilots can sort of take advantage this with their uh nose turrets and uh and one of the things
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that one of the talking points for the buccaneer has been its maneuverability MH so what can you tell us about its maneuverability so uh we want this thing to be very agile uh we don't even in our current concept pieces we don't have every exact maneuvering Thruster the ship's going to need fully placed out because we need to make sure that when we start building out the the final model of this for the game uh that we're really being meticulous in placing these but because we don't fake the calculations we do it real yeah yeah like where everything is positioned around the center of the mass on a ship absolutely dictates how is how is this thing going to handle how is this going to perform uh how much are you or How likely are you to black out because if you're sitting off center of mass and the ship's tumbling around you uh what's that going to do to you at you know 800
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meters a second in Cruise so it's uh it's definitely going to have the the handling it won't be like a drag racer fast so it's not going to be as quick as a Herald but it's going to be able to weave in and out of a fight really well yeah I noticed these engines are pretty pretty sizable here oh yeah when it needs force and when it needs to do more of a straight line kick it's going to have that uh it should handle really well on like pitch based you know maneuvering so pitch roll are going to probably be its two strongest uh movement axes uh y'all still be pretty capable but it won't be as you know spinning as other things or you know
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other setups on it could offer um but just making sure that any any of the translational directions it's it's potent and so even it's uh strafe so you know when you're if you want to just basically try and sidest step someone with your ship uh you should absolutely have that kind of maneuverability and response to it um uh now Drake doesn't build everything just for pirates we we've already seen the advocacy uses Heralds for their own reconnaissance and message delivery uh uh the police the cutless Blue version you know for police forces uh for someone who's not interested in being a pirate uh why should they consider the buccaneer even as a defensive ship um like like we were talking about earlier
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in this segment uh we want the Drake family of ships to feel like a cohesive family and so if you're if you and your friends you're running a full legit we are just a cargo caterpillar operation we're hauling Freight from you know Stanton to Nicks or to wherever well you're not going to want to do that alone you're not going to want to just you know risk the elements as it were and say oh my cargo ship will get get there without any problem you're going to want some protection for that and we want to make sure that Drake ships feel like the the Natural Choice to you know defend other Drake ships to work with other Drake ships um for that weapon on the bottom the size four yeah uh are there other attachments for that besides your your standard you
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know minigun your I mean what else can we put on that so we're definitely looking at some other options for that um although a couple of those options drift back more into the very pirate themed um one of the biggest ones that we were definitely hashing out right now is an interdiction weapon so we don't have all the exact of that mechanic uh locked in right now but we're still it's one of the things that we want this ship to have where it's like well yeah we we need something that's going to pull you either out of quantum or pull you out of jump or disrupt your ability to go into those fast Transit modes and so we're we're looking at the buccaneer being the the Drake ship that that carries that load into battle so um then even in a situation where you have a couple you
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know say you have two Buccaneers in a cutless and jumping a Target uh those Buccaneers would basically be the ones trying to suppress the target keep them from getting into Quantum try and keep their Shields down where the cutless and that crew they'll probably be the ones trying to be like all right cool they've they've got them pinned you two guys get out the airlock get over to that ship take it over let's start getting whatever cargo or whatever valuables we can from them into into our ship and then just get out Goa so I defin like the way that this all seems to be working together you know you You' you've got your Herald for for for your surveillance and your information gathering you've got your your Buccaneer to disable the targets you've got your your cutlasses to bring in you know your boarding parties and like that and then you've got your caterpillar to haul away
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your your booty oh yeah it seems very cool yeah I mean it's just it it's giving it's making sure a manufacturer feels like a a true family of ships cool well um Matt uh thanks so much for your time um that's been a brief look at the design phase for the buccaneer the buccaneer goes on sale tomorrow the uh 20th 27th and we're still going to have a few other uh you know surprises we didn't go over all the exact specs on it today so there will still be some other cool stuff for you guys to look forward to check out that post on Friday Matt thanks a lot man yeah thanks for having me all right uh to Ben and uh Jim hello everyone so this is the uh
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inaugural uh 10 for the chairman uh segment that we're going to do in the Los Angeles show and this is where we take 10 questions from subscribers who um uh their generous backing allows us to do all this uh Community um uh communication Work video uh and this show here as well as the stuff that we do in Austin like wingman's hanger and the behind the scenes stuff so thank you all to subscribers um and we take 10 questions uh every week uh and uh funnily enough the very first question is from 10 um and he asks I'm curious uh to know about the hardware setup required to run uh Star Citizen on full HD on Max detail hey everybody Welcome to ship shape we
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have a very special edition for you um I'm sitting down with Jim Martin the uh The Man Behind the buccaneer Concepts that you're going to be seeing uh this week hi Jim welcome to uh around the verse Ben thanks for having me yeah we really appreciate you coming out um you have been with star szen since the the very very start you uh you did the vul Scythe for the the initial pitch demo the Drake Cullis you are uh you're our Drake man essentially I am Jimmy Drake Martin so we are here today to talk about our newest Drake ship the buccaneer um this is our chance to kind of have our Drake and eat it too we we did the cutless at the very very start of the campaign and people you know it went back and forth and it ended up
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having larger cargo and less maneuverability than some Pirates wanted so we we've gone back and we've said okay we're going to do a ship in the same sort of price class same similar role but you know focus on maneuverability and weaponry and uh of course we brought you in because you're you're the be all and all in Drake designs okay yeah I I you guys reached out to me and said hey do you want to do a small um maneuverable Fighter for the Drake uh interplanetary and I said of of course I do that would be great we kind of went over what um what are the key components to Drake design which is utility you know um which is uh definitely uh an industrial kind of very practical feel
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yeah they've got that very like lived in feel especially like a caterpillar and yeah it's it's not elegant it's more uh functional it's a working mhip yeah yeah sturdy reliable so let's talk about the process of how you how you concept a ship um what do you get from us you know I know we all sit around and we come up with specifications and we we dream up crazy things and what what do you what do we send to you to get this process started the first thing that you guys send are kind of the uh specs of what you you know your expectations for the ship and then um also because we've done other Dres we kind of have a we have we have a design language that we've been uh that's kind of been growing each time you do a ship you you kind of add on to to uh you know what what the design
00:39:08
thought is for the greater Drake uh design and um and so I got a packet of kind of highlighting things that we like about the earlier Drake ships and um like things to keep in mind and you know then we talked about what we like that are that is real world technology that has that same utility feel you know whether it be uh you know A10 warthog or a an an Russian helicopter you know things that we feel you know might have a a relation to the Drake aesthetic I can definitely see some Russian helicopter in this one with a bit yeah yeah and then um then so in my process I would take all of that I would
00:39:58
start with reference and of earlier ships and um and kind of photo design reference maybe um helicopter thing things that we feel look utility and um and you know fitting within that aesthetic and then uh go to a sketch pass do you what does a sketch pass mean exactly I know some people start in 3D some people do 2D first what what's your process for that initial look I kind of feel like if you start in 3D too early then um then you or maybe just me I I fumble and waste a little bit of energy um kind of being too spread out so I for me the sketch pass and then a tighter drawing pass is my way of setting myself up to
00:40:49
be more efficient in the 3D uh part of the design so I'll do I'll just do a random um sheet of loose ideas you know maybe 10 maybe 12 sketched out try this maybe big small long four engines you know just working out volumes and um and seeing what you know what hits and then um I like to pick maybe my best three and say okay I like this one this one and this one and um let me take those to more of a finish and then I'm also fine with if um you know here at the office of Chris and uh you know Mark Skelton and and the um the art directors want to take a look at that early pass and say you know we like this and this one and
00:41:37
this one then that helps me too yeah we use a tool called shotgun here where artists from outside will upload their uh what they're working on and they get immediate feedback from Chris he loves he loves making his morning shotgun pass I think um you did the uh the bis freelancer early on didn't you the did yeah cuz I I was thinking back to the sketches of that we got and I remember seeing the the very first sketches and realizing that you were also the Jim Martin who worked on these face 9 because it was such it was the same style as sketches the defiant I this is so cool how did I get here so uh so what what's next did do a tight drawing you know do a tight 2d3 2D view of uh of and set yourself up to um to kind of have the foundation for a 3D
00:42:25
model and um you do if I do three drawings then I like to have um you know the the art Direction minds and uh and Chris take a look and say you know maybe pick elements of those that that um they favor and taking that you go into 3D and um and you're going to kind of make this jump because there are so many things that are that are more apparent when you start tumbling your model than when you were designing off of a of a one view two-dimensional drawing so things that might have worked in in the sketch or the drawing may not work in 3D or the a version of that might not work and then you have to you have to start thinking
00:43:13
of it as a 3D model and um and what's going to work from all angles so you you just start moving it looking at it tumbling it adding volume and you flesh out kind kind of a base scratch model or study model and um and that's kind of a core starting point now when you you you have a sheet from us with kind of the early specifications we've imagined you know engines and thrusters and guns how much of that do you think about at this point are you saying oh it has to have five guns right now or does that come later you know what that that kind of for me um some of that comes Midway in the process like when I'm starting I'm trying to make sure that I'm within your size parameters and uh
00:44:01
letting the design kind of grow within that specific um bounding box and then from there then you you hit that point where you better start figuring out where the guns are going to go or you're going to be in trouble like you're going to you're going to have to start undoing things that were working once you add these other things to it so even with the with um the buccaneer we we tried some different gun configurations that were not working for the specs and we abandoned them and went to some things that were were lining up with what you need the ship to do so you know the important thing is is having it do what you need it to do for game play yeah absolutely so um what's next is it is you know so you kind of go back and
00:44:50
forth with the team you get feedback from uh Chris the art directors I give terrible feedback myself because every time I see his patient that's cool that's even cooler that's even cooler and it's totally useless to the process but you know it it's going to get blown up you know halfway through it you know things that were near and dear to you about the design are going to are going to fall like they're going to go you know what the cockpit it's looking too uh bulky you know and then and you just need to um roll with the notes and uh and keep finessing the design based on what the feedback is I know that for the for the buccaneer um it went about halfway with really kind of big engines that um that eventually we had to slim down because it just was
00:45:38
keeping it from uh from having that Sleek feel that we needed it to yeah it had that very like military gunship feel to it but it didn't quite say it's cheap an industrial as the rest of DRS line up yeah it it was more like um you know it yes it was keying off of like um like gun helicopter gunship design but um but it was a little too much so we did a we did a design uh redirection and got it to feel better yeah so then you'll take the model and you'll then you get your notes based on a maybe an initial um design pass where you send in some renders with some paintover saying like this is kind of where it's headed and then um and then you get the notes back and then you address in the 3D model and
00:46:27
then um you know send in a corrected pass with uh with a new Direction yeah so we we go back and forth a couple times and then we have what we think is the ideal this is what we want it to look like what's what's your part of the process after that then um the you uh need to go to finish and try try to get the the model to a really good place where you have the detail in it that you want and light and the light on the model is doing everything you want it to do you you go for um some nice paintovers to to try to imagine what it would look like in the the final version in the game and then you need to have it landed and the landing gear is always
00:47:15
the that last tricky thing at the end you know because you really do need to um to have that resolved well you know how do how do the landing gear tuck away you know how does it extend for the landing you know how do you get in the ship MH how do you exit yeah yeah these are all the you know when we we first started building ships very very early and we didn't necessarily think about all this stuff and we oh you can't actually fit in the cockpit here or oh so or you can't get to the seat you know yep so it's it's been a learning process for for our team you know now I think we have it down by the numbers for what we send out but uh it's been really interesting learning how you actually build 3D spaceships uh that work in a game so you you've done all sorts of incredible movie work there's going to be a separate interview where you talk
00:48:02
about sort of your history and other stuff you done for Star Citizen but how does how does building a ship for a game compare to similar task for a movie one of the things that I really like about working in games is that um when you get a design assignment it really does focus on you know this specific design and how it works for the game and gameplay and um that means that you really can uh have the chance to to go for Pure game design that that is uh that is thought out from start to finish you know sometimes in in film um you know it doesn't need to be taken that far because it may be a background thing it may be it may be something that's um not
00:48:49
necessarily uh you know not getting a a story focus with games everything needs to be uh just taken from start to finish and and um and it needs that attention to detail and I really like I really respond to that yeah cuz players are going to study every single yeah you've probably already seen they've studied every single millimeters of your ship design so far can you talk about doing the like marketing paintovers you do for the sale itself because I think of of our concept artists you're kind of unique and you you were really good at these like scenes with people in the ship and just it makes them feel like they're real well you know like I think that comes from working in um in film where you know that if you're if you're trying to present something for uh for a
00:49:39
production meeting you can show a prop but a prop is more interesting when someone is holding it and interacting with it and you can show a set but a set is going to be more interesting when people are standing in the set and it it feels more alive like if you're going to do a a coffee shop you want to have people sitting around a coffee shop drinking coffee and um I I kind of apply that to to this as well like I want to show you know the interaction with the thing that I've designed you know and try to make it feel like it's happening in a in a specific time and it's a moment if you capture the moment you kind of you kind of capture the charm maybe of that illustration do that make sense absolutely abolutely
00:50:28
okay all right so can you tell everybody why they should take a look at the buccaneer what what makes this ship really cool you know what this ship is a is a utility fighter that's meant to take a beating and uh and it it is rugged and um tough and it's not pretending to be pretty it's it's going to get your pirate job done it's a Drake come on you know Drake rugged rugged and tough sounds fantastic and we can't wait to share the Finish ship with everybody um in fact it'll be available on the RSI site tomorrow we'll have a whole post about it so please come and check that out um thank you very much for coming in um
00:51:18
awesome my pleasure we it's it's just always such an honor to work with you so you guys are making the magic I love it thank you very much very happy to have you all right hey there Tyler Witkin Community manager in the Austin Texas Studio here to bring you this week's MVP a huge congratulations to tralian for his video we are star citizens many don't realize just how much time and effort goes into working with the cry engine and bringing a project like this to life so absolutely fantastic work sir congrats again you're this week's MVP back to you guys congrats Teran it is clear that a lot of time and energy and love went into making that I think that defines
00:52:05
the star syson community in general it most certainly does we have a very passionate community and uh we might be in Manchester this week but we have not forgotten about ATV's fast forward check it out 2 1 2 be sure to tune in to reverse the verse
00:53:18
tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. Pacific on Twitch and do you like round the verse and want to show us hit like And subscribe below it helps love it it does help with that thank you as always to all of our subscribers for making the show possible we will see you around the verse did you know that many of star Citizen's
00:54:08
developers are on social media if you would like to follow Star Citizen on Facebook you can find us here or on Twitter here and even Instagram here and for a full list of developers personal accounts they're willing to share with the community check out this link you can find out uh what I bought on Amazon this week Star Wars stuff it yeah it was probably Star Wars stuff [Applause]

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