Star Citizen: Behind the Scenes - Variants

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:01

   so we've got four new variants for four of our most popular ships we've got the Avenger Titan Gladius saber and hornet f7c they're each getting a sort of special edition variant that promotes a different style of gameplay so we're doing this for a few reasons one it really pushes us to get at the new painted material system working so we can quickly iterate on these wild paint schemes that gets us closer to you know to give you guys the ability to customize your own ship paint and two it means we get a better spread of weapons out in the in the world so everyone's got the same sort of same level of ships and quite a few people don't actually customize them that much so by giving these extra options means we've got so we'll very combat off the back just with these things being around

2. 00:00:49

   so for these variants we've picked some sort of quite different loadouts to really promote different types of gameplay the the default low deaths that come with every ship are sort of average loadout so they're good at everything equally but for these we've really pushed some of the gameplay styles like we have the ballistics versus energy and ship weapons and a few of these go all one way or all the other and we're also with the new missiles into six giving some of those on these loadouts to really put them right in the missile racks and the quantities of missiles on them so these variants we watch they change how you you would play the game with these ships they're not massive whole changes they don't change the handling of the ship it's still the same Gladius saver hornet avenger that you know from before so if you get one

3. 00:01:39

   of these is the exact same - to fly is the normal ones they don't have any super-secret advanced items inside that make them way better it it's purely a visual change with the paint system and a loadout change geared towards a specific play style so essentially the process kind of begins with we want to get these pre-configured schemes done so you could for example go off and go oh you know what I want I want a NASA themed kind of skin or I want you know a district 9 themed skin or I want to work you know a pink Hello Kitty themed skin and then essentially you know we we as artists create what basically their material files their tiny memory they're like they're so small that we can have like hundreds of them if we want to

4. 00:02:28

   because they're all calling the same textures that'sthat's what's done under the hood ok once those material files are created and obviously named accordingly and sanity check that the emblem is called emblem and the sub material ID is called summit of ID one two and three they have to be the same names that's then handed to tech design to then kind of set that up with the loadout that they're they're putting together for that further forward we want these lower these these kind of paint configurations to become hex codes so if you in if you in like a you know a guild of you know twenty players and and you know the the clan leader said all right this is our paint scheme there's gonna be no like guessing work like you get the hex code you put it in there and it automatically will say oh you know what you know our we've got matte black against yellow

5. 00:03:17

   against pink something crazy and and every ship in your fleet you can put a hex coat on and it will automatically go into that color configuration so there's there's a lot of kind of cool things and you know as artists we do this stuff all day every day and we were just like you know why wouldn't we give the end-user this functionality so that's that's the that's that's the overall plan there is a lot of there is a lot of kind of very things you have to be careful with when you're authoring shaders for this stuff so it can accommodate these options but we're on top of that and that's that's kind of yeah it's good that's what we're doing on the initial kind of burster ships right now I think it's really cool and it's really amazing to see like today I just kind of caught up with the guys and look to what we're working on for that stuff and there's like a fleet of 50 ships all with different skins all

6. 00:04:05

   the different loadouts and it injects color into the game you can have your kind of personal things going on which is kind of cool if I was going to pick one to Flying customized myself I've always got a sweet spot for the Avenger if it was me with I'd probably go for a dirty chrome kind of finish the shape is just kind of so kind of primitive to get some kind of highly reflective material on it I think we just look super cool in space so that's that's that's that's what I would go for