Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - Squadron 42 Q&A

26 January 201801:00:301,532 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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greetings citizens and welcome to another edition of the brand-new reverse the verse life the only show on Twitch where I deliver a monologue life while my boss the founder and CEO of this company since it a chair only ten feet away and watches perhaps judging wondering if every decision involved in the hiring of me was a mistake I'm your host Jared Huckaby today on the show we sit down with the same founder and CEO and game director chris roberts to discuss all things squadron 42 and answer your questions live but first the Week in Review last Friday we had composer for squadron 42 Jeff Zanelli on the show it was a fun discussion of the variety of challenges and scope of work involved in scoring a video game especially one as ambitious as squadron 42 we also highlighted the community-created commercial for the P
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72 Archimedes by Alex s 189 checked in with tyler witkin at the pax south bar citizen in San Antonio and went behind the scenes of our behind the scenes interviews with Chris Smith and Josh Coons I suppose we'll never know if Mac ever retrieved his phone from up in the ceiling the lesson here choose your ringtones carefully people Monday saw the first completely backer sourced backer voted question-and-answer episode of calling all devs the questions backers most wanted answers to this week involved the trading of AE we see two other players the future of buying ships in the game with that very same au we see hot fixes between 3.0 and 3.1 are planned for freelancer variants and the way we spawn ships in the game you can find the most current answers to these questions on this week's show and don't forget to submit new questions for future episodes and vote in the thread up in the announcements section up on
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spectrum every Tuesday is Laura Day for star citizen and this week's post was a flashback story from the very first episode of jump point Whisperer in the dark now back when stories like this were first published they represented the earliest steps taken in uncovering and exploring the universe of star citizen and I couldn't get enough of them back then you can take your journey back in time and explore the future of star citizen right now on the Roberts space industries comm website and rounding out the week yesterday saw the dual releases of both the latest revision of the RSI website and the first squadron 42 centric episode of around the verse for 2018 the website update has been a project in collaboration with our partners at turbulent and features a streamlined approach for new backers to find the information most valuable and learning about star citizen in squadron 42 with a breakout of game features a variety of
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tutorial videos and the brand new public roadmap that is just our latest in our continuing efforts to help everyone follow the progress of star citizen's development as with everything we do we will continue to both iterate and refine on everything presented here throughout the year and welcome to the coil around the verse this week introduced us to perhaps the largest and most volumetric key laps character in the upcoming squadron 42 the coil which use first saw in December's vertical slice presentation the coil is an exciting example the kind of depth and detail the various teams working on squadron are putting into every aspect of the game and I expect to spend a number of hours myself just flying through the twists and turns looking for every tiny detail our artists and designers will embed there and why will I do this because they won't tell me what they're putting
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in there that's why hash tag spoilers for concierge members voting is still ongoing for star citizen's next t-shirt design with the Idris currently in a commanding lead with a little over half the vote between the three but it's not too late this swing the tied for that awesome sublimation print dragonfly shirt though come on help this go get his dragonfly shirt people voting is open until January 31st and with the reveal of the updated website last night concierge members also received their first look at the new concierge perks program with such rewards as a wearable top hat the gold RSI executive venture armor and a look at the upcoming f8c lightning now it's my understanding a couple of you might have some questions about that applying tight I'm certain we can get some information from the chairman of the Chairman's Club himself
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in just a few minutes finally we've made a permanent a new permanent addition to the RSI pledge store the earth so Rover originally introduced as part of a package with the constellation Aquila is now permanently available as a standalone item in the store and joining it in permanent availability is the dragonfly black which is now part of a Luton scoot to pack with game package for backers who just want one pledge with everything you'll need to play star citizen and explore the universe either in space or down below on the surface of any moon or planet and with that we wrap up this week's weekend review so we're going to take a short break and when we return we'll be sitting down with Game Director for squadron 42 chris Roberts to answer your questions following yesterday's episode stay tuned creating citizens i'm composer jeff Cinelli
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I wrote the music for squadron 42 and I want to talk to you about something very close to my heart this is the soundtrack album and I just want to go over a few highlights first piece I wrote from squadron 42 is called coil commander's actually my nickname in college that's where I got that and hope you like saxophones we have another one Admiral bishops tax return you're not gonna believe when you find this part in game what's what's actually going on in this in this story it's um there's a lot of money laundering subplots and lots of paperwork and stuff in the game so I wanted to make sure there's like a paperwork theme because I know a lot of people care deeply about taxes tax returns and Admiral bishops so you know we found a way of combining all those things we've got another one we've got
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um single-player at night it's about Jarrod's love life hope you like saxophones I do I hope you like saxophone oh here's a good one forty seconds of food transportation bagel carrier you're gonna want that I was thinking really really hard about what I should name this piece and I decided on intense space action those are the three words the three important words I hope you like saxophones the other thing Oh pimp your spaceship that's right that's that's you guys were asking me about space radio pimp your spaceship is the new hit Gillian Anderson is in this there I wrote a song about that oh I'm supposed
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to talk about the f8 lightning I think that right all right sorry no no no spoilers no spoilers okay I mean I already talked about the tax return okay no that's okay colonel Blair's funeral what else can we do and I hope you like saxophones some of you have heard my piece vertical slice wait till you hear horizontal slice so there it is the squadron 42 soundtrack you can buy it in any format you want as long as it's CD I'm Geoff Cinelli composer for star citizen squadron 42 and I approve this CD right we're back with chris Roberts hi Chris hey Jared
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hello everyone how you doing is this your first time on reverse numbers it is I think on the new river service definitely maneuvers I'm sure if I was on one of the old ones I don't remember all right so yesterday we had our very first squadron 42 centric around the verse of 2018 this time for each focused on the coil following it today is our very first squadron 42 centric episode of reverse the verse so we thought since the very first time we're taking live questions on squadron 42 we should probably get you to come in I know we are taking questions from a number of places guys you can submit your questions on twitch chat where we're broadcasting now please preface your question with the word questions surrounded by brackets we are also taking questions from spectrum which is our our bespoke communications platform available on Roberts space
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industries calm same deal there preface your question with the word question surrounding brackets it's just gonna help our our friends Tyler Tyler Nolan entirely Wiccan pull them out from all the other conversation and we had a thread up on spectrum all week collecting questions for folks who couldn't be here live and letting people vote on them so we do have a collection of questions that are the most voted on any questions and we saw a couple of a a couple of interesting threads pop up the same question coming up quite a bit and some people and a lot of votes on these things so I'm hoping we can get to some of these but right off the bat the one that jumped to the the head of the pack after the last 12 hours right is what's up with the f8 lightning well I don't think anyone's actually read the concierge booklet so you don't get the FAA lightning until squadron's out
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mm-hmm and our actual idea is there's a there's a few ships that we want to have you play squadron and if you get to the point and squadron that you get to fly them then you get the badge to be able to get that ship in the persistent universe so if you just if you're not concierge level you'll still be able to get the f8 c you just will have to have played squadron far enough along kind of near the end it's sort of a little bit like Wing Commander way you move up in flying different ships as you get a little further on and if you do that you'll earn the badge and I think this probably relates to a nother question that you have down here and it will enable you to be able to purchase that in the PU after you've completed
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squadron so the idea is essentially you have squadron has to come out and then it will be available and then you can either earn it by playing squadron all the way through or where as a thank you to you know some of the people that have really helped us make this game develop at a really supportive another incredibly enthusiastic levels you know we wanted to do a couple of nice things to say thank you because I mean you know we wouldn't be sitting here having this discussion we wouldn't be building the game that we're building long build squadron to the level that we're building it to without the incredibly enthusiastic support so you know that's kind of the idea of actually the cut though the concierge program is that the the people that sort of you know really I don't know whether whether I say all in a but yeah but but a more adieu see you know I mean everyone should you know
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like whether it's your getting basic ship or you're doing a lot more everything's appreciated and it's and and you know it's enabling Stu what we're doing and no one needs to do anything more than the very basic shape but for the people that sort of go above and beyond we want to have like a couple of fun things for them a couple of items that you know you definitely you know it's kind of like a bit more sort of cool and flurry yeah not necessarily something you can only get if you're that because like I said you'll be able to earn the fhc by completing squadron and getting to the point where you actually get to fly in f8a in the game exactly so that that brings that's a good file point there this is the f8 c that we're talking about similar to the hornet f7c the the f8 that that folks have been wondering about for the last several years is
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equivalent to the f7 a it's a military-grade ship that's yeah I mean it's you know it's not the the AVA like the new f7 a which if you play squadron you'll also get an opportunity to earn the badge for and then potentially you get one of those in the in the in the position universe but there's you know they're all they have military-grade equipment which is a notch above some of the civilian great equipment so that the sees whether it's the Hornet sea or the fhc they're still pretty awesome ships but they don't quite have the sort of higher grade more durable equipment that the military a version does that's not to say in the game that you couldn't
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potentially figure out a way to get one I'll get the equipment to upgrade your ship to get there but that's sort of you know they don't they don't sell the military-grade stuff you know on the show floor and the last question I saw about this the concierge perks the things that are being awarded for our Wing Commander and la goddess are those the opportunity to buy the ship like like completing squadron 42 or is that actually getting the ship right now they gather they get the they gather they get the that level thank you you can have it but ya know so all the items in the concierge set up starting with the top and going through the guns and the suits and stuff are all roared and in fact I think if you log in as a concierge remember you will be because the website went live you'll actually get your flower items on your
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account and I've even seen some screenshots already where people are in the suit or running around with one yes for one of the guns the monocle at this exact instant isn't supported but I believe in the patch that we're going to Dupre 3-1 well we just want to fix some quality of life issues the monocle will also be enabled but you can put a top on I believe right now so we'll see some pictures of that the current the current concierge uniform I've seen people wear adopting is the gold venture armor with the top hat poking out from the from the top of it right now so I've seen a number of yeah I think we probably have to fix some of those yeah the rules for what you want things you can input can't put on with the helmets I've noticed that people can put a baseball cap on put a helmet on but yeah there's a those are logged in a
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database and that's part of all the things that were busily working on fixing yes alright so the first question from the live chat also mirrors the top voted questions on the on the thread so we're gonna go right to this will squadron 42 let the player be a female character absolutely so 100% they go I mean both estas it's a squadron of female and male so it's a hundred percent part of development plan it's just that in the early stages the the concept is to not have to be revising assets that we do it with you know one skeleton which is the male skeleton amendment and then we decide we determine exactly what animations motion sets we want because they're still you know even though we've done all this performance capture there's still a lot of stuff where you're like you know
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working on the AI for instance to combat AI or you're saying oh I need you know I need an animation to slide in to cover a certain way oh I wonder some let's let's change it to work this way and so there's a lot of iteration especially on the sort of combat animations that you do for the players and also the AI so from our standpoint we don't want to have two skeletons that then we have to fix up to the animation so we so we work it on one skeleton till we like locked all the animation sets that we know we need for player and the AI and then we just make sure that we create the the other skeletons animation set so so 100 so definitely you'll be able to play as a female or as a male you'll be able to customize how your character looks in squadra and it will carry across into the PU so you'll be able to carry a character across from a squadron into
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the PU and so there you go yes okay that's a good lead-in to the to the next most loaded question what are our thoughts on the perks that can be transferred from completing squadron 42 in disguises and we've already talked about the opportunity for an EPS f7a or an errand F yes so there's definitely so yeah I'll give an example of a couple of things where you do things and you'll sort of earn the badge or the ability and the gay in the pu to get something that you would have done without doing that and that also you know there are some you know relationships or things that you can do during the story of squadron that if you do it will unlock some missions or content you know are people that will deal with you or sell you something in the pu so we kind of you know the idea is the pu sort of is
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you know the squadron is something that you know you did in the past and the pu is sort of in the present so yeah so it depends and you know we we track your relationships with various crew members or characters you meet and some of that will have an impact later on in the pu like I said unlocking certain things so we can I just want to make it fun and then you know potentially there's also you know we've discussed kind of like a Veterans Association or group that you know if you play squadron and you join that and then there's potentially opportunities emissions related to that and you wouldn't necessarily get if you hadn't played squadron basically if you hadn't served in the military then you don't get some opportunities for jobs a good it's kind of up to you I mean it's sort of like life right it's like you know the military guy may not want to
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join the merchants guild and trade and stuff I'm picturing the officer's club and like Lawrence of Arabia the kind of thing should only get when you serve in the world oh yeah yeah I know that's hunters don't we want to do so like we want you know there will be places for like you know Yui service people that they can go I mean we're longer-term I mean obviously there's we've got a lot of content to build but our longer-term plan even and like the landing locations is to have places focused on here like you know like the merchants guild and you go there you have to be member there the guild and it's you know the club for like the merchants a name there you can get specific missions as a member of the merchants guild and the same would be for you know X you know Yui you know military personnel you know potentially subscribers Quan Co you know like the
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Chairman's Club for concierge and I'm not sure we have a name for the subscribers yet but they will be kind of nice to build groups and there will allow organizations themselves to maybe you know own or rent a place that they can make as they're sort of org location of that that you know essentially only less than people of that org so that's that's kind of one of the the sort of overriding goals and so in the squadron process we play in the game we want you to be able to earn you know various achievements or badges that will have an impact on the pu gameplay here's a question from the live chat here in the recent monthly report we saw that the the vandal blade had a bit of a redesign from when its concept was it was introduced and in the text they
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mentioned the entire vandal fleet has kind of iterated this person wants to know if that a redesign will affect the current Glaber site that we have in the game now it's not quite a squadron related thing but the banner I you know I think the glaive on the site won't be affected that much I mean I think they you know we had we had some early concepts that they were really cool but they were also not necessarily the most optimal for performance reasons and one of the passes was to sort of make some of the ships come closer to the way that Nathan does the built the side which is also really and and so I would say that we're more bringing things closer to that
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style and we're still doing some development or work on things like the kingship and stuff like that so there's there's a lot but some of our very early concepts were sort of more kind of bony ribby spiky and so we still have some of those aspects but not quite as not quite as high frequency because that ends up being problematic and yeah you know the poly count you need for the ships and so we'd rather be using things that we can use a lot of custom normals and some of the kind of detail and pom mapping that we do that gives you this and you know really great detail I mean like the ship's look like they got millions of Polly's that yeah a lot of cases that's because it's really smart use of the detailed mapping palm mapping and custom
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normals the next question from the spectrum thread where folks voted on which ones they wanted to see us ask is another one about squadron 42 effect on star citizen if squadron 42 will have different endings and depending on how you end it this will affect your will this affect your character in the PU y I think it I think it will I think it potentially will affect your character as in you know why he's earned I mean the concept that we have is as you play squadron it sort of fills out your journal like if you imagine you have a journal from background yeah you're serving in there the military and as you go through it fills out your journal and then the things that you've managed to do will sort of unlock some stuff in the
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PU and you can always look back on it's like your achievement or scrapbook or whatever and see what is happening what you know what you did or what you achieved but we don't really have you know yes we have more than one ending but generally it's the you know you died with you you know who you sucked you got thrown in the brig whatever versus you got to the you got to the end of the story so you know in general we sort of assumed that you you will get to the end of the story but you know whatever you have in the PU is based on what you've done earn today so it's like your your journal hasn't been foot's because you could be playing a squadron while playing the PU at the same time and you know only be say you
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know a third of the way through squadron you haven't got to lay the things and then later things and so obviously you wouldn't have them in the PU until you got there in squadron there's a lot of things that appear but so in that way all effect kind of things you can get and unlock things but it's more about your progress through it so once you get all the way through it and you've done all the things you're unlock it and there are some things you can do that are optional so you may or may not unlock them or get them later on in the PU okay next question what art they're already asking about the next one what are your plans for future chapters of squadron four I'm working on this one but I changed it plans for future chapters of squadron 42 when they're tying with the persistent universe well I mean the hull I think the whole squadron you know is
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sort of a it's a trilogy is the three game is you know will be before the the events will be sort of a little bit before what where we're setting in the PU so it will have the same kind of impact that will be unlocking do you think so kind of what we would do is we would be doing episode two or episode three we'll also be adding some opportunity or have content that could be unlocked if you've done that in the PU something like that like the match of I mean we are actually starting right now the very early stages of we already have we have an outline of you know one two and three and now we're in the process of starting to flesh out two and three because our goal would be to get two and three written and then probably shoot all the performers cap back to
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back and then I once we have episode one hour and done with all the technology there two and three won't necessarily be you know as long a process right because we've had to build all this technology that we didn't exist before we really want to push it and so we've been focusing building tools but once the tools are in place you know two and three will I mean they're not going to happen in you know overnight but they will happen a lot quicker than than one did I mean it's very similar to the way say Wing Commander two was from Wing Commander one because it built on all the foundation of Wing Commander ones code and then we sort of saw our work to Wing Commander one and said okay well let's push much more of this story a bit more of a sort of constructed narrative more relationship stuff you know because in
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Wing Commander one you you basically talk to the various wing people that you could have and you sort of decided who you wanted to fly with and then pattern how you did it sort of in the missions it affected what the campaign path was but your relationships with the characters never really developed in the same way that say they did in wing two and there was a specific story there was a traitor though you know you have an opportunity for you know a relationship with Angel for instance and and so and that was mostly booze we saw what was really working on wing one and look back and say well well we could take these elements really push it and I and I kind of suspect though that will happen with episode 2 and episode 3 of squadron next most voted on question head tracking track ir toby toby iced of it will that be implemented when for
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squadron 42 when it launches i am pretty confident yes i mean we already i think have a version of toby and head tracking working i don't know whether it kind of like a lot of times when we go from release to release someone's got something working and they and then but everyone's focused on the new features so some old stuff kind of rats because it wasn't like you had maintained and you know there's so many things to fix that that was a lower priority but yes i mean our goal is to have sort of the head tracking the track AR the you know Toby I think we also have done some work and supported and they have and also you know also yeah the face we're set up that we have where you know the camera can you know not just attract your face but Trek you know where your head is positioned so you know and it's pretty I mean the game setup for that I mean you
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know I know people always ask about VR that's an expert you know on the VR front you know the game is very much built to be VR friendly because you know like almost all the UI is diegetic and the stuff that isn't we're putting more in to be done Jenica we want to prove the whole diegetic feel so you know our biggest whole back on the VR is really just we're still doing so much base level refactoring and the engine and the renderer will you know be starting on sort of the DX Volken dx12 kind of refactor as well and we're doing so much optimization that we sort of feel like we've got to get that done first and you know get the base level engine stuff more like finished yeah not constantly working refactoring
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and then we'll we'll put VR because you know we had actual VR support quite a while ago but of course again as we change stuff it breaks and then your engine team you go are they gonna go and fix the VR stuff or are they writing that knuth that you you know like the procedural planet system but everybody can experience and so that's always been that's kind of what's happened in those situations but once all that stabilizes of course yes we're gonna go and get that supported and when we're building things you know we're aware of like I said the day you know like putting everything in the world itself which is quite friendly for VR or yeah you know and moving your head around and tracking the same thing it's like we track your head look and you know actually we I don't think we've turned it on on three szura but it will be something where you can disconnect your look from your aim as a player we were you know they I can
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already do that because that's also something that's potentially useful where you're you know you're a certain way and you can look around you don't have to like maybe you're going to look at it here's a question to follow up to the episode yesterday will the coil be in the PU yeah now the coil will be in the PU imeem Odin will be in the PU I mean I it's not going to be in the PU like right away I mean we have to have the jump points to get there and the systems in between but it absolutely will be I mean that's kind of one of the advantages of you know we're building things like squadron and that's helping build out content that will also be part of the universe so it definitely will be in the PU but it will be set half their oscillator it'll be one years later so you may be an opportunity to see a little bit of
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the future the Odinson yeah well you'll definitely see some of the locations you visit you just may not you know come across some of the people that you come across in in squadron yeah okay well another question from the live chat just is also on the voting here will squadron 42 include a difficulty option where we can pick between easy or impossible gameplay yes I definitely will I mean it's it's it's it's kind of standard yeah it's not gonna be too easy though there you go let's see a lot of questions about character customization it's Gordon for you to I know with the roadmap out yesterday yesterday we saw the first sense of character customization for star citizen is coming
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in in 3.1 will it be the same system Wyatt for squadron ways it will be the same based on the line technology I mean the SIS that what will be in 3-1 is very basic is basically just switching between heads and hair and changing eye and skin color which is not the final destination for that I mean the final one will be full-on you know you can change both the face so we're still in progress on that side of the technology sort of ties into the kind of head rig that we talked about we have this like real-time head rig so it allows us to take any like performance and then map it on to any other hand I mean we you know we can have gary oldman driving the full the vandal though and we've done
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that to have fun and so and it's one of these allows us to do the face where technology and stuff but so there's still a fair amount of already but the final version that will absolutely be in squadron that's the plan and you also see it in star citizen and it's it's built in as part of the story so essentially what happened there's a you know it is it is part of your journey to end up in a place that you need to choose what your face looks like or even your gender so yeah next question is how will death affect the campaign well I think that's going to affect the campaign like death affects the campaign and the wing commander which is you die and you'll have to go back to your last save point which what which is not going to be quite as
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frequent as you would say experienced and you know a call of duty or something yeah you're not gonna fly you know the 100 kilometers and quick safe and fly another hundred kilometers a quicksave yeah saving your weight I mean I you know I so went between demon cells and you know a more normal experience but I want there needs to be some investment in achieving things I mean in the Wing Commanders setup it was always the missions you couldn't save during the save points were in the sort of interstitials between them you know back on the Bengal I'm not 100% sure we're going to go to that level because I'm pretty confident with not mostly because once we leave and we sell on a mission the way it's structured in squadron is it's it's not one thing it's sort of one thing that turns into another thing that turns into another thing you know what we showed on the
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December the Christmas livestream was only just a portion of what you would be experiencing at that point in the story so there's some other optional missions or places you could go check out that we didn't do and also once you get down there and you free treho there's a whole you know it goes on beyond that you fight your way yeah call it the advocacy it's so you know the actual you know amount of time that you would have vest in that you know even if you just went and did that one thing which is the only thing we did yeah it probably at least two plus hours and then you've got the other side missions a quest it would also add time so yeah I'm not sure we want to be like you know have an hour and 50 invested and then you get killed by the last you know slaver and then so so we'll have opportunities to sort of
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save it points but we won't have it every two steps or every second or because I I feel like you lose like people sort of lose the reason to play small if they do that like I certainly do when I play I mean I you know play through the Battlefront to play through the most recent Call of Duty World War 2 and you know yeah they look great but I don't really have I mean I just go and start shooting and I and I messed it up all right well you know I'll try shooting this other way and I just keep I mean I'm just brute forcing it I'm not not stealthy and I'm not being smart about my ammo counts and stuff like that so so I think we want to balance it a bit bit more old-school as far as that goes okay let's see we're getting a lot of precision or risk questions or you know we have a chance
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to talk about squadron 42 so squadron 42 here we also have a here's a big one is what part if any of squadron four you will be cooperative okay so yeah and I know this was a this is this was an issue from the being the because the squadron 42 story is as large it is and has so much performance and is so particularly crafted we can't do a like a cooperative story campaign where you know basically we let you know a friend of yours play the role of old ban which is played by Mark Hamill because there's definitely things that are happening the story that rely on other characters that to do their thing and you know if you have another player playing it they may
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just decide well I'm not going to do that alright and then all of a sudden everything is going to break down so our plan I mean you know you get if you have squadron first of all you all will have arena commander and star Murray and available to you to play with your friends but also as we go through the game we were going to take some of the missions themselves of the combat and then kind of have a kind of multiplayer version of it that you could play with some of your friends maybe playing some of the other wingmen to achieve the objective that would be unlocked once you've done that in the story so it would be for all of them because someone makes so much sense but it would be for sort of the big battle opportunity so there's some pretty big you know bigger battles or set pieces that you know there's a fair amount of AI
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that are fighting alongside you against a bunch of other AI and in those cases we could create so there's coming drop in drop in drop out and situations for that I just won't necessarily be tied to the overall you know playing it through the story because you know it's just at the level of storytelling where it would be hard tempting yeah yeah I mean I mean you know you just you know what happens if you you know you decide okay we've got this big you know attack and here's the good guys and his bad guys and there's you know 20 people on each side but you know you make those 20 players on each side and that battle may not end up the way that you want it to and need it to for the story whereas if we've got you playing it with a bunch of other AI we can we can sort of control the balance that better okay
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let's see we have a note here the majority this is not spying for D related but I'm told that I have to ask you this a majority of the website is new now what about sections that have been untouched like the store are there plans to revamp that throughout the rest of the year yeah yeah I mean I think we're where those newsletters gonna come out today that will basically say that we yeah so so what the website though that we just launched is is just stage one so and and really that was sort of focusing on separating out star citizen and squadron and then the community which is basically the RSI side the store just to you know because if yeah the old website if you went to it and you're like oh you heard about this started as only just it's like there's just an information overload how do I get in the game where do I go what's the
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game about it's not very obvious for the site so you know the site that we that we've rolled out we feel like does a better job of that I mean I did notice people commenting going oh it seems the same or this isn't but the that's mostly because the sites are so smart so if you're already got an account or you're already locked you already logged in it's taking you to the default places you know on the girl like the community section which of course haven't changed much right they've become a little less cluttered because we moved some of the elements of you know the starters and squadron starts to be moved to its own but it hasn't like changed or the store hasn't as it hasn't really changed either and those are things also so we wanted to get those sort of like hey I'm the stutters and things seems cool or I want to get into it so we sort of
00:37:23
focused on that the beginning not so much the latest or experience of oh well now I want to upgrade my ship or what is more just like hey I heard about stutters and can I give you $40 to become part of it and so that was what the focus was for the current site and also you know making squadron on star citizen so it wasn't so confusing that you you understood okay this is single-player game this is the massively multiplayer online game and explaining it and having some tutorials because although previously most of the stuff was fans you know I mean basically our fans do a great job of educating and showing and all the streamers do the same thing which is awesome so don't stop doing that please but you know we felt like we should do it better so that so it's the first step but we are absolutely going to be working on you know the SUBSCRIBE beside the concierge
00:38:13
side had a bit of a revamp which is kind of cool a subscriber side the store needs a lot of work and then just sort of the community development section again yeah we're going to work on that we just think it just takes time and you know we'd rather roll out bits as we go along otherwise it becomes overwhelming I asked them just kind of message all right back to squadron 42 we just released a public road map for star citizen will there be a road map for squadron 42 at some point in the future there will be at some point in the future so you know squadrons a little different because we're not so we're not doing our quarterly releases but I still want to but we are managing exactly the same way so the the rope the thing that's really cool about the roadmap and
00:39:00
I know I saw some discussion there where people were like hey well what about this and what about this and but don't worry there's a lot of studies it still needs to still working on the whole see guys but the you know the host he's definitely and probably the only reason why it actually wasn't put in as a test there was because there is a technical issue with the interior grids because the whole the contracts and expands the 100% it's the arts finished it's going to be in the game but the scare the bit where we were contracting strain the interior grid which isn't like we don't know how to do it or it's you know a year task or anything it's not at all it just doesn't have a resource currently assigned to do that and so they didn't want to expose that epoch on the roadmap until they had that and then it was done so that's kind of what's
00:39:48
happening right now is that we've sort of switched our development methodology to be much especially on star citizen to be sort of more day driven but we've also switched how we're running the teams internally to be much more sort of agile team based so before we were more pipeline base you know the programmers had a list of all the things they were working on the designers a list of things they're working on the artists and and we still have some pipeline aspects like the ships you know weapons characters pretty much a pipeline but in terms of future development we've changed it around so we're building agile teams where you know you have the engineer and the designer and the artists that would be helping and supporting that all sort of embedded together working on the feature and that is fair amount as fairly different than how we were doing it previously where a
00:40:36
lot of it was you know engineer was given you know we had a TDD his testimony from engineering they would go and work at his the things design needs to do wants to get the engineering is the thing we need for the autism they were you know there's there's communication and friction that happens in that so this is much more about having the sort of kind of small team agile style working so but that does mean that we have to you know we we change how we're utilizing JIRA which is our project management task tool that we use from sort of a most you know a bit set up more like a pipeline especially for the engineering design to more the sort of team tasks user story based which is where we're going to and we did a little bit of it last year towards the end but now we're doing it across it's
00:41:24
going to be exactly the same for every single studio across the company and you know we've everyone you know fully on board with that we have all our senior production right now over in the UK I think they'll be in Germany next week working working on finishing is out and the idea is that we we because with you know updating the the roadmap like we did for 3-0 every Friday was always just a big song and dance because we had things in JIRA but we were displaying them this other way and then there was the longer-term roadmap had so much stuff in it that the pro sure and we're so busy doing other so if they didn't really have a time to maintain it so it totally got out of date so they were updating the stuff that was four-30 but later and it just it just was a lot of extra work so we
00:42:15
decided we wanted to essentially expose our project management software the JIRA stuff to the website so turbulent built that whole roadmap tool it's it basically takes it via the JIRA roadmap and we have settings inside our epics that we can say this is a public epic and then we can put user facing descriptions and we can even add user pictures so production development can just when they set up the epic that they're working on they can set it up also for the public facing it scrubs automatically internet so the advantage of that is we don't have to manually update anything because there's lots of mistakes when you manually updating stuff so everything will just reflect the state of the tool that we're using to manage anyone across the company of course we're not showing every single task because there's thousands of tasks
00:43:03
the informations are overwhelming so we we sort of show the very high level you know what you would call an epic or in some cases sort of a saga which is overwhelming over quite a few epics I know they have all these sort of epic sagas yes the stories tasks but so it's of Campbell designed that here yeah so it's so we we expose those and we mark which ones are public facing we wanted to get the roadmap in people's hands which is why we went live with it here but the but they still have organization work to do because they've got to take the way JIRA was set up before some of it's been done not all of its being done so they have to change around because the they've got to organize it under the right air picks and everything so in the case where they don't feel comfortable that they don't have it organized
00:43:51
properly and there's duplicate tasks because you know sometimes there were tasks set up from before but now we're setting it up on this new one so in those cases they just choose not to show that epoch publicly until they have it in shape and so you'll see that roadmap we'll get more things added to it of course things also will move around a little bit as maybe a bit more information comes to light or how it's going but that's the beauty of it it's going to be a hundred percent live reflection of the tool that we use yes to manage all the tombs and we're using exactly the same process on squadron 42 which is going to get me to the end the to answer the original question which is are you going to get there right and yes and yes we we will we will if you look on the side there's a star citizen logo
00:44:39
that will be a squadron 42 mocha you get the roadmap so once we have the squadron 42 tasks and epics all cleaned up and ready to go then we will also turn that on a share it may not be done on a quarterly it may be done on monthly I'm not quite sure we're still discussing kind of the column format for it but it will again scrub live from all the the tasks that we have an epics and sagas that we have entered for finishing a score for you and let's trade get a couple more squadron for you two questions in before we have to let you go be careful when you answer so junctional doesn't kill me will we see any other big-name actors in squadron 42 that are not announced yet just say yes or no don't yes okay okay just Junction was right there I could I could feel it alright
00:45:32
next question from the live chat is squadron turning out how you expected it to in 2012 that I mean it's the totally there's so much bigger and cooler and better I mean I had some ideas about how to sort of up the emotional attachment and the story aspects of it and I wanted to put you sort of first and I felt like the you know technology moves off we can have better looking characters and so it didn't need to be sort of the old wing command you know like wing three our wing four we we filmed actors because we didn't feel like we could get performance into the rudimentary animation for the characters aboard the ship which is why we had a wing wanted to but it's yeah it's I mean it's way I mean in terms of scope scale
00:46:21
what we can do because there's a lot of technology that like the procedural planet stuffily sure we went down to Gainey which is this moon that we used to be a moving of Odin one which is Odin one is now really the coil and so the opportunity and yeah like when I was first conceiving it we were you know even when we were writing the script we were thinking we were gonna have to sort of hide basically level loads behind cinematics and stuff that you would stream when we do it and this is all you know gonna go plays live in the engine seamlessly and I think in terms of like emotional attachment and story that you're gonna have the game it's it's going to be I think it's going to I think it's going to have an effect on
00:47:09
people or they're not going to expect so right so i-i've we we spent so much time creating you know sort of arcs and stories for all the characters you come across so you see a little bit like so for instance you know one of the scenes in the holiday life sharealike is the moment where you talk to you know liam calling it coming yes you know captain why and he's actually how you doing and it gets to on his son and you can see the performance I mean yeah that's a great actor and he's there and you can sort of see you know there's there's there's some you know there's something on was not as something happened so yeah and it's like you know he there's there's a regret and there's a sadness and there's you know it makes him feel real he's not just the captain that gives you a mission and we have that across the board for the crew of the
00:47:58
Stanton and a lot of other characters that you'll meet through the course of the story and you don't necessarily have to engage in these so they're the concept is as a player you play the game and you sort of interact with people that you want to interact with you know there may be certain players will prefer to interact with certain characters than another player would want to interact with and and you know and that's actually kind of injured because that was the Wing Commander one thing I was always interested that like you know some people loved maniac and some people hated him right it was like it's very valorising but you know that was player agency and choice and they just because they made the choice they there was a there was this extra attachment to it and for in in squadron you know we've really you know everybody has you know
00:48:47
there's these personal stories and characters that aren't necessarily related to the actual story itself you're gonna go on but as you spend time and interact with these characters I really feel like you're you you they're not going to just feel like oh this is an AI character you're gonna you're gonna sort of see them as yeah as people and then of course you know the story of squadron you know it wouldn't it wouldn't be very interesting unless stuff happened so there's some pretty you know momentous or tragic stuff that would happen and it obviously will have effect on characters that you've met and hopefully builds an affinity for a relationship with and so I actually think your your emotional attachment as you go through the story you know is going to be of a level that maybe you know has not happened yet in games or has happens very rarely in games and
00:49:36
that will just mean that what you're doing or what the actual I mean that that much more so I mean I can feel a little bits of it now and I can see it and I know all our scenes and stories and I know when we finish off at the level that we're doing I'm I think it's going to be really cool and and it's sort of a subtle thing but I'm really interested to see how that ends up affecting people come at us at their video games come at us you mentioned going down to Gainey in the vertical sighs one of the one of the things that may have surprised a lot of people was was the FPS combat in squadron 42 because based on your previous game and we commander it's like that technology restricted us to only ever being inside the cockpit it can we expect a first-person combat throughout start squadron was
00:50:27
that the special one its throughout so I mean you know I've always wanted to have a game that is basically from your point of view whether you're on a ship you're flying ish you know you're flying your ship you know like you're on the bengal and this Wing Commander or you're flying your Hornet but I also wanted you to be able to be down on the ground and running around and first-person having a fight and so that's been a dream for a long time you know a few members of our team a long time ago I forget the name of it something bounty hunter they did it after they did starlancer was kinda that was the idea it wasn't it wasn't a squadron of Wing Commander style story but I saw I've always wanted to do that so even you know and if I did another Wing Commander I would do it this way
00:51:16
from 12 first-person point of view and so for me I just want it to be a fluid story and the experience I mean it's like you know you watch Star Wars Luke Skywalker isn't flying his x-wing all the time and he's doing plenty of other stuff running around on foot having adventures so the idea that we want is a completely fluid adventure that you know depends on the situation and what you have to achieve you could be doing it flying a ship you can be doing an old fort you could be doing it in zero g and e VA it's you know and you can be spending time you know in your off hours getting to know the crew and so there's definitely I would say there's you know plenty of ship combat and there is plenty of fps and you know whether you know there I would fifty-fifty maybe I
00:52:07
mean there's a lot so it's it's very fluid and there'll be plenty of cases where you'll be in a ship and then you'll have to get out and you'll you know be on fighting and then get back into your ship and do their stuff and so I think it's gonna be fun it's a first-person universe if any of us right we're almost at a time we do have a large worldwide yeah Packard community one of most voted on questions was will squadron 42 be available in other languages besides English yes now most definitely so we do I mean other bypass ring commanders we always translated so you know we're building infrastructure in for you know subtitles and full vocal you know full audio sort of travel you know translations so and it's gonna do I mean
00:52:58
well not I'm not a hundred percent sure and exactly all the languages we do I mean that literally yeah I mean in the past you know where there's the standard sort of what they call a figs which is I say either English French Italian German German Spanish Spanish ethics yeah that's this kind of industry he's like you like ei would say okay we're gonna be figs so I'm not sure of which one so they're probably all would be translated so you don't necessarily do all of them you know the full because the one that takes the most amount of time and is the most expensive is the one that is the full you know it's not just subtitles its sound and everything but that's that that would likely to be French German
00:53:46
Spanish and that I don't know about Italian on that one depends a lot more you and in Italy than perhaps you know but but yeah so so but we the infrastructure is there to do it so we're definitely gonna do it but again that's the sort of thing you do right at the end once everything is kind of locked because you don't want to be translating stuff that gets changed I talked a lot about the first person here in cut scenes can we see our characters speak or will in third person or will we be restricted only the first person for cutscenes we haven't decided yet is the simple answer so we captured Ian Duncan who played the player in all his scene so all his facial and body was
00:54:36
captured as he was as he was talking and you know in fact even for when we showed the IGN trailer we internally created a third person and the first person version of it you know I opted for the first person because it felt more immersive an immediate but you know we've long had the concept of potentially a sort of key that lets you pop out and get more third person set up I mean we're we're have been experimenting with even in the first person conversations having the option of sort of you know changing the camera angles a bit more cinematic so you know one of the things we had in the vertical slices we had these sort of cinematic cutaways but maybe what wasn't fully obvious to people was that that's all happening a in real time be your
00:55:24
characters there in real time so we didn't show you but you could like see the you could go to the cinematic cutaways and say the white talking to Wexler hmm in the briefing and you know you could have your character walk photobomb in the back walk back and sometimes you know QA had done that and but the concept is really that like you have the cinematic cutaways and you can basically hit a key to just go back to your point of view so it's sort of up to you you can sort of cancel you you just experience like even that scene like now there's you know there's a ben mendelsohn and liam Cunningham both great actors it was like yeah I want to see them up close I want to see them I want to see you know because if I'm looking at it from my point of view when I've entered the the briefing room I'm not going to see all the detail or the performance and so we so we want the opportunity so we're going to build this
00:56:13
is that we what we been playing with is building a system in that sort of has this sort of cinematic enhancement mode where like it all cut in there but if you don't want to deal with it you just hit key and you're at your point of view and you can see the scene playing out and you know and they're all real time running AI so if you move over there and break it up they'll react to you and do that sort of stuff you walk away from liam Cunningham is trying to give you your missionary fee well yeah I mean I think what we're going to do in the case of you know you're in the military so if you're a bit too disobedient you end up so we have you in the brig you know and various different situations which way you'll end up if you're basically trying to trial the characters and in squadron you're saying I'm never going to finish squadron for you - yeah you may be in the brig a lot all right well Chris that's it that's all we have time for
00:56:59
thank you so much oh you're welcome thank you for having me on your show Jared thank you thank you letting me have the show on that's good and hopefully everyone out there so my answers were informative and helpful and thank you guys very much for supporting you know I mean I'm having a great time making squadron and starters and you know I think we're doing something really special so thank you all very much all right we're gonna take a quick break and then we'll be back with the wrap-up see in a bit guys [Music] you
00:59:15
hey well that was that was one very persistent star affair with that this week's episode reverse the verse comes to a close a special thanks to my boss Chris Roberts for putting up with me for the last hour and some housekeeping before we let you go if you haven't checked it out yet take a look at the new public road map available on the RSI website it's got all kinds of neat information including which ships and tempo features are scheduled to be worked on throughout the remainder of 2018 there are also restock t-shirts available in the store including a brand new star citizen see you in the verse option that I myself just picked up last night and on Monday we've got another episode of calling all devs where we take your questions about group missions medical gameplay and the future of the Voyager direct store I know you're going to be very interested in this one so for reverse the verse I'm Jared Huckaby we'll see you next week
01:00:03
everybody thank you for watching so if you want to keep up with the latest and greatest in the star citizen of squadron 42 development please follow us on our social media channels see you soon

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