Around the Verse: Episode 1.38 (2015.04.02)

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] coming up on the Empire report jump point for ransom has a new Jump point to solve been discovered yes according to one explorer who is demanding an exorbitant price for the information is it real will the uee pay and a new study States children raised entirely in space may have an advantage however some are claiming the practice to be cruel find out what both sides of the debate are saying plus is a fan favorite show planning a return to the Spectrum we talk to entertainment correspondent ton vasara to find out why the answer may be yes yes and yes all that and more on the latest Empire report at 2200 sat hey everybody Welcome to episode 38 of

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   around the verse I'm Sandy Gardner and I'm Ben Lesnik we hope that you enjoyed our April Fool's jokes yes I I hope I I don't like when a company puts out something that tricks people that seems mean like an abuse of authority but when it's a joke it's it's pretty cool yeah I enjoyed my fish so long and thanks for all the fish our biggest news is that the Vanguard concept has been released and uh this one's really cool you know about a year ago we had this vision for doing like a World War II style twin engine fighter in Star Citi it's something we Commander never did it's something I think that gets overlooked as we do space games so this is kind of a first time we've seen a ship like this and uh the art team here turned out something really incredible we're very proud of it and relatedly we hit $77 million in crowdfunding thank you uh Vanguard thank

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   you Vanguard and thank you to all our backers uh we actually have quite a few new backers joining every day yes um I think after uh all the buzz South by Southwest uh PAX East yeah PAX East people are trying star sism for the first time and it's pretty cool the team is hard at work on 1.1a uh 1.1 is going to be a very interesting patch uh I know the little lowercase a makes it sound like it's a minor Edition but we're going to have a new flyable ship the Gladiator and uh we are also working on the tutorial mode although I believe that may be uh 1.1b there's going to be some balance fixes and uh work on the server back end to support the fact that star CI is a lot more popular now it is a lot more popular we have a lot of new backers this month I think it's actually one of our record months um and we are

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   downloading petabytes petabytes yeah I I don't understand a lot of what devop says but it's it's all good news uh people are playing Star Citizen in droves it is cool new players more people to take me down more people to uh try and explain what around the verse is yes there you go if you're just joining us we're sorry the team yes we're very awkward you may have noticed that we're changing the weekly meet the dev Series so let us know what you think we want to have kind of a more intimate conversation with the devs instead of just the standard five questions we're kicking it off with the uh man behind the Vanguard uh gmach yep favorite section of the office for me is germick and elwin and oh the ship pip yes it's really cool up there cuz you can see the ship go from an idea to end the game kind of just as it goes around the office yeah and they have this really

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   big screen where they put all the concept ships and ships in the hanger and everything it's very cool and now it's time for news from around the verse let's go to the Spectrum hi I'm Daren borick production coordinator from cloud Imperium games in the Santa Monica office and today we have with us our new production coordinator hey my name is Lisa ohen nice to meet you guys so we're here to give some updates regarding what's going on in the LA office uh the first one we've got two updates regarding the Gladiator uh the first one is that it's being made flight ready by our Tech designer Kirk tomang who's also

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   currently actually doing a lot of test animations with it um on top of that we are also working on on the Torpedoes for the Gladiator um the torpedo is a new class of projectile being designed by our artist Patrick CNO so the torpedo is gon to be pretty exciting stuff uh finally we've got something going on Something Brewing that we're calling pirat swarm uh that's being designed by one of our current new designers uh Randy Vasquez it's basically a new game mode where you get to fly like vandu swarm you fly against vandel but in this you're flying against Pirates Who are using actual UE ships like the Hornet the Mustang you get to test your metal against that so that's pretty some pretty exciting stuff and that's that's pretty much all we got from the LA today so again Daren borck lisan have a good one guys

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   thanks hey everyone my name is catrick Gonzalez creative director idal phonic I'm Travis D and uh we got a bunch of updates for you guys this week Travis since you're here now yeah yeah so uh uh basically this week we've had Todd papy out here he's our new design director uh formerly of krych formerly of God of War ascension so a very talented individual and he's been kind of out here overseeing the design of the FPS looking at it checking it out playing through it and coming up with a fair amount of tweaks there's a lot that you know obviously as you guys know we're building not just the FPS module not just the arena Commander module but also this persistent universe and Squadron 42 and so there are a lot of considerations for the design of FPS that holistically needs to Encompass everything that needs to happen for uh the use of Squadron 42 first person shooter and also the use of

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   the persistent Universe for first person shooter so we've been looking at different things like the way that the gun animations worked for The Recoil the spread the bullets rate of fire so I mean every little kind of nuance detail and it's been really nice to have him out here going through everything and and getting really I mean the important part right is in making this game is to have everything flow together really well and so that's that's his role and that's what he's been helping with out here absolutely really interesting a lot of little tiny VAR tweet other than that what we've been also been working on is playing around with this new mode as some of you guys saw at p e was the Astro Arena level and how really showcase uh Eva type environments and floating around and stuff like that and uh we're playing with this new Mode called sat ball which is kind of like a uh it's like a like a Eva anti-gravity almost like a like I

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   would say soccer footall European players I guess but except more violent with shooting each other so imagine 3D soccer football exactly yeah so it's uh it's a really cool mode where you're you're going around you're trying to move this ball around and travel and really focus on utilizing Eva and and like uh moving off objects and floating in space and making sure you toss the ball at the right angles and everything like that to um make goals and you know that's kind an ongoing thing we're trying to make sure that it feels right and plays great and it's fun and um that's that's definitely something we're going to be focusing on hopefully we got some more information on that soon so yeah I think it's cool too because with all like the R&D that's been going into the Zerg movement and you know even the network issues of network prediction zg movement and using the different animation blend

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    spaces I just it's very it's very cool that we're using this as an opportunity to showcase something kind of going back to what we're saying earlier where in the persistent Universe this is how the Zerg movement will work this is how you can navigate without thrusters and so it's a that was a fun opportunity to tackle all these challenges up front and get it feeling right yep absolutely and contain environment and when it's a fun kind of sport event it's going to make you use the uh mechanics and then so hopefully in the Pu whenever you're you encounter Eva situations it just kind of comes natural to you because you're just used to using it in this non-hostile environment so you're not really feeling you know like oh my goodness this is something new to me so it's going to be cool yeah all right well thank you guys for joining us uh for yet another week of around the verse news from around the verse and uh look forward to sharing

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    more with you guys next week see you guys hey guys Jake Ross here associate producer of the pr Universe here in Austin here with me this week I have Andrew WN physics and the gameplay programmer all right thanks for being here with us today Andrew we got a brief uh update for you for for Austin studio um so we're uh well actually Austin Studio plus uh working relationship with behavior so uh we going to talk a little bit about what the guys up in Montreal are doing so uh they're currently right now working uh hard on the Nyx uh Lei Landing zone so we we talked a little bit about that in the past but it's making good progress we're in gray box

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    phase now with that so we're kind of uh we nailed down the design of what it's going to look like and then now we're kind of going in and um flushing out the details and making it all nice and pretty so uh really cool environment I think you guys are going to love it lots of uh pirate activity going on there um so it's a little different than what we've seen in the past so I wanted to pass it off to Andrew to talk a little bit about the the stuff he's working on Andrew go ahead uh So lately I've been working on the uh the mining occupation prototype and getting that all uh like mocked up so I can get into the hands of the designers quicker uh like some of the core tech for for the occupation is being developed simultaneously so I'm trying to get as much of it um from the design perspective for them to be able

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    to use sooner rather than later and uh and yeah to get that prototyped out and get a good feel for it what specifically what kind of gameplay do you have working right now uh so right now we I have the uh the cargo operator working I have like a uh I guess a mockup of the like the exploding like mining um asteroid fragments blowing on off and you can play as the cargo operator uh like trying to slow down and pull them into into your cargo hole and um and like scan operator like manually firing those guided missiles and uh yes manual control with like a a point of view camera on the missile itself and yeah I just attached that to the asteroid and

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    start relaying data back cool awesome sounds like it's coming together MH all right guys that's all we got for you this week so thank see you around hi guys I'm Pete here I'm a junior environment artist here at Foundry 42 hi I'm Dan I'm also a junior environment artist here at Foundry 42 uh today we're going to be talking about the shuin interior and some of the art assets we've been working on um we've we're both asset Builders at the minute so we've been working a lot on building the asset for the interior and so we're going to go through a bit of that pipeline now yeah um it starts off with design doing a broad pass on a specific area and then what we done is we tried to take that and try to do the same layout but in modular pieces and um it turned out that we needed like large

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    rooms like a large room set a small room set walkways pipes there there's many components to this set and um we Tred to be like really rigid with like the door placements every door is in the exact same place no matter how large the footprint is for per modular component so that everything can snap and connect together so that when World builders get get out of it or even designers when they're blocking out specific areas it's really easy for them to use yeah I mean once we're happy with the uh white box we then move on to the gray box where we can start working up some of the mesh detail at this point we don't really have any sort of textures or shaders set up yet so we're mainly just working on getting the mesh to the point where we're sort of sort of happy with how it looks um after that we go on to the final Arts this is where we can start using some textur some shaders and you know really bring the the level of

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    detail up to somewhere where we're we're pretty happy with yeah it's it's worth noting as well that we're using the same pipeline that they use on the ships the Retaliator the Gladiator everything you guys have seen out of this studio so far so we're taking that approach so it's really really high resolution textures with um with small details that we can cut out so that it stays really high resolution for you guys hopefully you'll really enjoy it yeah yeah yeah it's cool um I mean currently we're working on a large room and a small room uh I'm working on the large room set which is a lot a lot less detailed but it's meant for really you know big areas such as hangers and such like stuff like that you know uh whereas Pete's working on a much smaller set where we have a lot more high frequency detail because it's mainly aimed at sort of corridors small

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    rooms and stuff like that where you're going to have to play in really sort of tight places yeah it's worth noting as well that the small room set has like an exterior shell to all these pieces so from from an outside point of view you can see it almost makes like a cabin field to it which can be placed in these really large rooms to help and almost make their own little separate rooms within a room it's really it's really quite cool and everything snaps and works together yeah I mean it's the same with all the other uh modular pieces we have such as the pipes and the walk waves they all sort of fit together within the space and so we can really create some really cool environments there's a lot of Versatility the pieces it's quite surprising what um the world Builders are starting to achieve now each even though they're using the same assets um the diversity in the and the the way that they can make each room it's start it's really I'm surprised

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    actually I'm like oh is that is that our set quite it's quite yeah it's really cool I mean our team is sort of split up at the minute into sort of asset Builders such as ourselves and you know World Builders who are the guys that are going to be working on you know building the levels sort of adding the Assets in doing some of the lighting and stuff like that so yeah that's all it's all really cool stuff yeah yeah um I think that's pretty much all we've got time for today isn't it yeah so uh yeah that's it I think yeah I'll see you guys see you thank you to all the studios around the world for your hard work we wouldn't be here without you now let's go over to Alexis for a new segment subscribers Corner hey everyone I'm Alexis subscription manager here at cig welcome to subscribers Corner this segment is intended to give subscribers a special voice on ATV the show that they're

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    helping us create if you've been a subscriber for a while you might notice that a lot of wreck was added to your account today this is to cover the test pilot and advanced test pilot back badges that we promised last year additionally we've made sure that imperators have access to rent the ship variants they were promised like the Super Hornet the Vandal test pilot badges will be added once the Scythe is flyable we're also putting out the year three subscriber perks later today we've brought back some old rewards and we have some cool new additions the subscribers corner is your section I've started a thread in the den where you can let us know what you'd like to see going forward if you've got a question you want answered or want to talk about perks you'd like to see in the future let me know on the Forum thanks for joining me back to you guys guys hey Alexis thank you Ally uh our subscribers make shows like this uh meet The devs Temper the choss and uh we are

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    looking for new ways to involve them in the process honor them uh celebrate their contributions now let's go over to Ryan Archer who interviewed senior engine programmer James Wright hi guys I'm Ryan Archer here at cloud and prium Games Austin and I'm with James Wright um James hi guys what is it you do here at Cloud so um I'm a senior game engine programmer and so that's game engine in the traditional sense of like the core technology of our game so that's what I work on okay so you work a lot with the back end of cry engine and yeah kind of down in the guts of cry engine um I've I've been involved in heading up our our what do we call our large World effort which is you know taking a firstperson shooter Engine with you know it supports

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    maps that are like 16 km on an edge and supporting maps that are millions of kilometers so yeah so that's been a big ongoing effort for us yeah what's been some of the challenges with that particular effort so some of the challenges are you know it's it's different taking an established engine that does a lot of things really well and and kind of adapting it to solve a new problem like these just these huge huge Maps that's different than you know if you were starting from scratch you might take a different you know basically you're you're working with you're you're trying to decide the best solution based on the technology that's already there right right yeah and uh in a lot of ways that's a it's a more challenging problem you know oh yeah yeah because you're working on top of something that someone else already built so you have to learn what they've

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    already done it kind of shapes the direction of which decisions you make you know right right so yeah so have you enjoyed working with cry engine I know that it's it's both has a lot of strong points in the fact that we can get a lot of detail but I know it can be frustrating sometimes because it it crashes a lot L it's been an enjoyable and interesting experience I think anytime you you wander into a huge code base that's been you know a lot of really you know great games have been made with an engine and you can tell you know it's it's changed over time and there's been different projects and different features and yeah I mean I think that's part of what about my job and what I do is being able to take you know an existing engine and add features and make it do things nobody ever thought they would need it to do when it was first created yeah absolutely so are you excited I know

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    we've uh We've added a lot of guys from Frankfurt uh who worked on cry engine um with for kch um have you had a chance to work with them much yet actually we've been starting to work together a lot in fact the large World effort is now actually being run out of Frankfurt so okay um it was primarily me and another engineer for a lot of the work I mean we had other people helping us but it was two of us full-time and now we have a whole group of guys kind of jumping in here at the end we're getting close to done so um but it's especially good to have the the the Hands-On rendering expertise the cry engine to help with that effort because there's some changes that need to happen with the renderer okay and also with physics so they're kind of having to reprogram cry engine to to it not reprogram but but shift things like let's say you know you're

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    shipping on a previous generation of consoles and you make an optimization decision about how transforms propagate through the rendering pipeline MH let's just say that for our title that decision basically won't work because of the way we're doing things so now you need to change you know how transforms are handled and when you move to more like a more camera relative space for rendering for example okay someone having like that like carsten uh who has you know an intimate knowledge of how the render it works having somebody like that on board who's kind of been through the renderer and and you know knows some of the the the pitfalls and is familiar with it's it's it's huge having those folks with us right yeah I know it's it's amazing the amount of people that uh amount of

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    talented people we've grabbed from different companies as they've kind of moved on in their careers like I was talking to Jason Hutchins from you know blizzard and stuff and so it's kind of neat Do You Feel Like We we've gotten a lot of talented people that have kind of joined the company because they're proud of this project and yeah I think it's we've pulled a a lot of really good talent in the sense you know it's it's an interesting problem MH I mean there's it's not another turn-based MMO or it's you know where the technical challenges might exist in scaling like on the backend server but as far as like real-time simulation it's just not that hard right um you know we're doing a high fidelity massive online game so oh yeah and I know we just did South by Southwest and a lot of people that had

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    never seen the game before were uh that I talked to were really impressed at amount of detail our Graphics get to like it's I I haven't seen anything quite like it uh in the game world yet so I know a lot of people seem to be yeah yeah it's and it's fun being a part of pushing the limits you know um and that's definitely part of part of our goal is to really push those Fidelity limits and to look good on a 4k monitor that's just not you know if you talk to someone like if you know if you rewound yourself 3 years and you said that to somebody working on you know a console title they would look at you like you were crazy so it's it's cool getting to have that kind of you know targets back and then kind the fun part of being a you know a PC title is the challenge of scaling across a range of Hardware uhuh we're really just trying to scratch the service on the kind of work we need to

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    do to really scale well and it's it's Tech we have to build to really do what we said we're going to do with like you know Capital ships fighting with each other yeah while a marine boarding part is getting on board and you have like local physics Sim on the capital ship but local gravity and two Capital ships slugging it out with a bunch of Fighters going around like you can't do that unless you build Tech to support that kind of scaling so as an engine programmer it's it's pretty exciting very cool so what is the one thing that you feel like you're most excited about for the future of the persistent Universe it kind of goes back to what I was just saying like that well you know in any had games where like sandbox type games where you have these kind of simple rules kind of create these really interesting kind of emerging experiences I'm really excited about like having a

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    true persistent universe that you can go out in and you know end up in a fight with pirates or you know have a new buddy who's you know make a friend who's going to help you complete some Mission or kind of the the you know the idea of the the simple rule set and our economic simulation that's going to kind of set things up for kind of this living breathing thing like I think I'm really excited about that very cool yeah I it sounds really exciting and I as you explained I kind of realized how every little piece of that uh making something like that happen is very important and like you said you have to build Tech to make it work and so that's really cool is that is that something you feel like you're very proud of so far the work that you put into that yeah and a lot of that you know so the the design groundwork is being laid and um a lot of that effort I think will be run out of

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    out of Frankfurt okay um but I'm excited to help chip in on those efforts and a big part of getting us to I guess where we are now as far as really proud of like where we've gone with a large World effort um it's it's it's just a it was a huge problem to solve of how do we take this engine and make it do this thing it was you know never intentionally intended to do which is support these gigantic Maps right and um you know from like to just to nerd out on you for a little bit like we didn't just do the naive like okay now everything's 64 bit cuz there's you know there's performance consequences like it it was it was a very directed and targeted change like this it was very Surgical and I I can say that we have no performance

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    difference versus running the game in full 32 pit positions and the other thing is setting up our our gameplay programmers for success I feel like we've created uh an API for them a change that basically if they make a mistake that would cause problems it won't compile you know there it's bulletproof of course but but it it's it's a nice type safe solution for them and I think it's nice and clean right cuz you know you want to create as an engine programmer you want to create like kind of like a a grammar that other programmers can kind of Express themselves in like you know when they're building things wow so you're kind of like building the canvas for the uh programmers who are the artists so speak am I am I mixing paint am I building the palette that they paint with that might be yeah that might hold a little better or maybe I'm

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    making pigment I think large world is more like making pigment about now after I've been at it for a while but yeah very cool so well it's it's nice to see this side of things because I know we we spend a lot more time on designers and artists but it's nice to see what the what the engineers are doing and it's you guys are a big part of uh what some building star is into the pris universe especially um so I appreciate you spending time with us and uh being able to explain kind of what you do with uh the engine and helping star system become a reality and I know that the fans would love it if I tell you you know how much your hard work means to them uh they're they're all excited about the game just as we are and uh so you're helping make it possible and thank you very much uh yeah and and thank you guys backers um I mean without your support

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    like you just we couldn't afford Specialists like myself basically you know you kind of have to have a bigger scope project before you hire guys like engine system programmers and you know um so it's it's great being able to be a part of something that's this ambitious and we really couldn't have done it without the extra support yeah absolutely so thank you guys and we'll see you out there Jared yeah I need you to help me my match with Ben is coming up well there's one place we can go but it's dangerous dangerous what is it I'm not supposed to talk about it but Flight Club come on now before we go in there are three

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    things we have to remember rule number one we don't talk about Flight Club rule number two do not talk about Flight Club and rule number three if this is your first night at Flight Club you have to flight let's do this all right I am coming after you Ben now today you're flying on a special account designed just to beat Ben yay your account name better than

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    Ben nice here we go all right all right all right oh here we go they come and this is Vandal swarm MH three waves yep you're at Full Throttle we're poaching our targets y wingman coming in from the left uhhuh I see them all right yes all right there you go oh oh lead your target lead your target oh keep on him keep on him oh hold on good job keep them in your sights oh no I'm blacking out it's okay we got him better than Ben has killed B scavenger

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    oh my gosh yes these lessons are paid off hold on hold on right all right whoa W next Target hold on hold on keep on him keep on him oh oh okay you damaged him you're hurt he's Hur okay recover good recovery keep on them all right throttle up uhhuh good job Leed the Target and yes toast yes not you toast the other toast all right okay another vendal scavenger stressful come on okay oh and guns are overheating okay all right so let them cool down keep on them all who all right Shields are critical don't

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    worry stay on target hey guns are cooling off and you got it that 2 minutes in oh my gosh that's amazing you've got two kills I don't think i' ever you must be my lucky charm cuz I've never no hey all right your misses are still misses your misses stay on them stay on them stay on them die ah my guns are overheating man seriously it's okay die you can't go anywhere you're on them like glue and you got it yay persever 2 and a half minutes you've got three kills already now I'm now I'm getting dizzy okay hold on W wave two you cleared the wave

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    okay relax a little bit oh my gosh how many are there now now there's five of them great you still got your wingman okay okay hold on let's throttle up throttling up yeah doing it here we go you got your target hold on hold on here we go coming in range okay hold on stay on T MH surprised much concentration okay uh uh he's running from okay Miss here go here we go here we go fire missile it's all right no a panic missile away missiles

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    away oh see look at that that was just whoa did he hit me H one of his buddies hit you I think it's all right they're afraid of you yes and they saw they should be come on die there oh ah did he die no kill number four kill number four kill number four come on oh oh yes I keep going to take my hand off the joystick level out want to black out oh yes no wait what not dead yet just damaged it's okay just need you get to kill him now ready ready ready ready

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    ready light this guy up oh man come guns are overheating okay no man it's all right it's always a delicate Balancing Act between using your guns and overheating your guns and keeping them cool but yes look at that yes ra my I can only raise my left hand perseverance okay where it's all right ah no that's I'm going to die no no no hold on okay you were running out there because you were accting downward turn but you're coming out of it you're coming out of it you're right on this guy come on oh man your guns are overheating all right come on just stay on them until your guns come back you stay on them

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    until your guns come back come on die Collision alert die yay right all right okay is that it I did it I think I think that does it right a impressive huh all right you think you're ready to take on Ben I am I think this is a tremendous improvement from where you started I don't think Ben has a chance I don't think he does right now with now what do you think Ben you have a chance that would have been funny so uh can you talk about Flight Club no no we don't talk talk about Club tomorrow is the last day of

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    gladiate free flight which ship would you like to fly next let us know in the forums I hoping for the Super Hornet Super Hornet I'm getting so good in Aurora imagine what I'd be like in a Super Hornet monthly report is due tomorrow as long as all of our uh Studios get their reports in it should be pretty good and watch the C link for updates on 1.1a as always we uh we're going to put it out when it's ready uh we do not have a call whether or not it'll be this week or next week but uh looking good so far and we'll keep you updated we want you to submit your dog fighting footage we'll share the best ones on the show we've created a form thread to collect them uh please keep it to 30 seconds and we'll we'll use them as bumpers along with your handle and uh talk about your achievements so let's get some more

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    Arena Commander up in here and ATV is moving starting next week episodes will Air three hours later at noon Pacific uh if you want to go behind the screens on this one uh that's going to give our production folks a little bit more uh backup time in case we get in Thursday morning and find there's a licensed song or a editing error or something in the show right sneak peek what is it Ben uh well check it out thanks everybody for watching and for

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    subscribers for making this show possible we will see you next week on around the verse on