Star Citizen Live: IAE Free Fly All Ships Q&A

4 December 202001:04:421,933 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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hi everybody welcome to another episode of star citizen live this time our post iae free fly all ships q a i'm your host jared huckabee and if you've never seen star citizen live before it's where we take about an hour out of our day at the end of our week and we look into star citizen's development live uh sometimes we we explore the process of creating a thing with our developers sometimes we put our team members to the hot seat and make them answer questions directly from you the star citizens and that's what we are doing today so we're going to jump right into it our guest for our post iae free fly all ships q a are two uh two uh vehicle uh directors uh or two directors related to the vehicle ishness we'll start with john crew john crew
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tell us who you are and what you do for star citizen uh hi i'm john crew i'm the vehiclish director so i look after all the vehicle teams all right and uh ben uh this is you've been on starstone live once before uh back when you were the the the props art director but you're joining us here today who are you and what do you do for star citizen yeah so i'm the other vehicle director at the art one um ben curtis uh i am the oh yeah the vehicle art director i also run props and weapons um but vehicles are my my new thing yeah i always say new you've been in this role for a couple months now right yeah yeah so i mean i'm i've just passed my six years at crg so i've been here for a while um but it's about six months ago um that
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i took over vehicles yeah helping john out and then uh for those of you who watched long time we still have paul jones paul jones is still one of the star citizens art directors uh the division of labor there as far as ships go as as paul works on the concept side and then you work on the implementation and building yeah yeah yeah so so like a lot of the time you know like paul works with the concept kind of get that initial vision going um and then once that's kind of you know everyone's happy with that that then comes to um myself and john and to the art design teams and all the other teams to actually take that that concept and deliver it into game for people to play with okay so today we're we we're talking ships now we have a lot of starships starships star trek don't sue me a lot of
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spaceships in uh in star citizen well over 150 some odd at this point i should have counted beforehand uh for this for today's show we are we are focusing almost primarily on the flyable ships uh since we just had our iae uh free fly we will dive into some general uh general ship related questions we will dive a little bit into some ships that haven't quite made it flyable yet but as far as where our focus focuses are it's on the ships that are currently flyable and the stuff that is in development now um for those who have questions about the perseus which is the most recently revealed uh star citizen concept ship there is a specific q a being put together for that uh so we will be doing no perseus related questions today because there's already a whole other thing dedicated to that and we want to save
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our time for everything else here so uh our categories today we got we got questions for fight flight ready ships we got questions for general ship related aspects the things kind of apply to all ships we've got questions uh about the future of stuff and then general process stuff so we're gonna start in and jump right into our flight ready ship questions if you're watching live you can submit your questions with the word question in capital letters surrounded by brackets and we'll pull those out and we'll start adding those in again of course provided that they uh apply to the topic of the conversation and uh i do want to say right off the bat no one questions uh this this this is your first star citizen live broadcast or your 50th uh you know we don't address when questions we have an entire roadmap
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dedicated to that at robertsspaceindustries.comroadmap where all when related stuff is uh addressed there so right off the bat uh with two of the most recent flight fight ready ships uh if the mercury and nomads fuel consumption is intended as some folks have heard uh through spectrum what uh why are they so much higher than other ships in a similar class and if the if that's how it's supposed to be will other ships be rebalanced up to this uh seemingly new standard uh the short answer is that that was not intended that was uh more harsh on the field than we had anticipated so um that's been fixed for 312 so they're
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back to a what what should have been the norm for their release and it sort of spurred some further discussions for uh future star systems because at the moment all the fuel is balanced around what's in stanton to give the best gameplay there but when we go to other systems such as pyro there is significantly less opportunity to refuel so we're having discussions right now uh people like todd and tony to go over right what's what's the the range time that we're gonna support here and then we'll be balancing the ships around that so it works in a multi-system behavior rather than just content into the standard system so everything that we have at the moment is sort of
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designed for what's in the game right now but we want to move to a more future-proof system where ships can go for like the the nomads and star runner were particularly wrong but the the idea is not to be like you've only got 40 minutes of fuel so make your best we're talking like an hour two three four is your default range uh before you need to start considering fuel uh refueling okay um let's i think i don't have anything to add to that so we'll just move on there um what's we got the starfarer currently has no component housings and has long been i'm not sure that's right and has long been looked at as the ship needing some work by the community is it going to is it is it going to get a pass to add component housing or will there be some kind of additional
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interior overhaul at a later date uh there it does have some i'm pretty sure it has them in there they may not be like component housing like the the more modern ships but there are certainly spaces for them in uh i don't want to say the the star trek phrase but the the certain tubes along the edge there are there are hollowings there uh there's definitely space for the power plant in the engineering room so yeah there are spaces i know there is definitely space in the ship for it i think you know eventually all of our ships are going to need these component housings be accessible and be available um so we definitely will be kind of going back and giving it a revisit um you know and what we tend to do with a lot of the ship stuff anyway is um as new features come online we're going to
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need to retrofit that stuff to a lot of the existing ships um so i think um the the component layout is something that we take into consideration right the start of the concept of a ship and we make sure that there is space for it because again a lot of this is before my time but i know um we have had this kind of issues where especially with the smaller ships it becomes quite difficult to fit some of these um components into because new features are you know ever evolving and ever being developed but it's only when you know when you kind of have that feature working that you appreciate um what what needs to be done to kind of deliver that to the player um but yeah we'll be going back we've gone back and added dashboard buttons and you know cloud storage and everything else that is currently required and i expect lots of future new fun things as well yeah we don't
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want ships that came out a few years ago to be a disadvantage to the more modern ones when when the dust is set up they all need to perform the same gameplay functions yeah um it's what we have a question uh related to this later on so we'll get into more about the topic of you know keeping these up to date and you know making sure the old ones match up to the quality of the new ones continuing on with the flight ready stuff here um there is a significant amount of empty space on the starboard bow of the mercury star runner uh why is that and do we have plans for it in the future um i mean i think you know there's always a balance between kind of visually what you want the ship
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to look like and functionally what it needs to to work i think um there's when it comes to kind of making the exteriors and interiors work together you know if you've got um a big event or a big access hatch or something on the exterior of the ship and and on the inside there's a room that goes straight into it just that doesn't make sense and there's kind of a bit of a balance between um like making the player space and the functionality work and then the kind of implied functionality of what the exterior of the ship is kind of telling you and how those two things kind of work together um on the the star honor itself um i remember actually having a look at this when we were kind of playing with with the ship and kind of when it was in development
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and although there does look to be quite a large kind of dead space at the front of it by the time you take into account all of the player metrics and the size we need to actually um fit additional rooms in there it does start to get a little bit tight with a lot of intersection kind of in in the exterior um and also you know when you take into account things like uh the kind of like the the safe space we need between the interior and exterior for damage meshes and for office areas and all those sort of like more technical things that i'm rapidly learning about um there's you know it's not sometimes it's easier i could not just move this room back a few meters and get a bit more space um and i think there's also that kind of balance between having um having dead space in ships so ships that have got big
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open spaces in them and how that feels as a player when you're when you're in it because you know for me i like i like functionality i like that kind of that that feel that uh you know you can go through a room and know that there is functionality um in there and i think yeah we could we could fit some more you know crawl spaces in there but you'd have like a little rap maze going around and it's like where would they then lead you to and so yes there is some empty space in um could we have made it better we probably could have done but i'm very happy with what we did i think it's cool i think i think most people are very happy with the mercury star winner it's you know it's been a fan favorite ship since it was first introduced and um you know and i know there were a lot of uh we did the thing last week on isc where i tried to
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even mention everybody that worked on the ship and i still missed people uh you know it was it's definitely a uh what what what's the phrase i think john said it takes a village it takes a village to to to make these things and uh uh yeah in the unique challenges of star citizen having to make sure that the interiors fit the exteriors 1-1 it's not something anybody else has the interior to the million falcon does not fit in the exterior of the millennium falcon but they can fudge it and we can't uh continuing on with the mercury star runner questions uh is it possible that we may see a second exit added to the mercury star order in the future uh the ship's kind of a major fire hazard at the moment one way in or out yeah i'd i think that's a
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something that was probably a bit more of an oversight on our part than uh intentional um so i watched the first few videos come out and was like how how did we miss this i'm not sure uh i i don't know but um yeah yeah maybe that is a use case for some of the dead space but we'll see um i did enjoy the reddit trolling yes the person who added that the bottom hatch and people got excited and i was like no let's just read it um talking about uh changes to ship interiors the origin 600i uh there's been talk in the past about an update to its interior uh do we have anything to share at this point uh nothing super tangible but i have had
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a designer go through it and come up with proposal for how we wanna redo the interior the exterior less so the exterior is in a pretty good shape but the interior definitely suffers from some weird traversal roots stuff like ben mentioned about just huge spaces but they're huge spaces that don't really do anything um and then adding some functionality in that that should have been there from the start like a docking collar so design wise we're we're doing the pass on that and then it will need to go to concept because it's it's not as simple as oh just take take a look at the 890 and just copy paste that in job done there is some finessing that needs to go on there
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and yeah and i think that's it like um [Music] there's a space for big open ships like that's definitely a thing you know you take the 890 and you can you know that that's has it has its functionality or has its purpose in the verse so there is definitely a space for ships that that are roomy um but that is not you know one solution for every ship every manufacturer i think there's enough that there should be plenty of variation uh austerity has its limits suppose um i got a number of questions about the uh the the the carrick here so let's just take them one at a time um any update to the armored cockpit shutters
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uh they're still planned they're not cut um it's sort of tied in with some of the other other features of the character that aren't there uh it's a case of uh we wanted to hit the deadline of releasing the ship uh they they had no real function uh at release so we we made sure they would work so we didn't have to come back and do unnecessary work for them but until they have a a need that requires them that we're not going to spend the time putting them in okay uh the retractable antenna uh same same answer but that one can at least be quantified with jump points because therefore therefore mapping jump points so without jump points then you can just raise the antenna up and down yeah i was actually the max file recently and looking at like oh they're in they work
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but you know like john says until that features in and then with you know some of the things we've already talked about until that feature comes online it's kind of redundant putting the taking it all the way to the final when you you're not 100 sure how that feature is going to work and you don't want to just you know the most annoying thing is spending time getting something like looking just how you like it and then someone comes along and it's like oh actually yeah we need to change this now you know oh just just so i had that done then it's a time and resource thing as well like we could have a designer an artist spend time doing that or we could have them fixing issues like people falling out of ships things like that and i think i know which one most people would oh are you going to think one fixed sorry i said oh are you going to fix uh yeah all right and then i'm going to
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assume it's the same answer for like the underside pods yeah still still planned um they they are those ones are actually technically blocked um but that's the the same tech blocker as we have with the retaliator modules so uh when we have that uh retaliator modules will probably be the first thing that come online using it and then we can go back through the the catalog of ships that have that same modular room functionality and implement that all right um uh let's see what else do we got as far as the flight ready ships go uh uh the defender the defender had some uh what were they the tachyon weapons the the hit scan weapons for a while um do we intend those to come back um for the defender probably not uh they were a cool idea
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they worked better on paper than they did in reality uh they caused a lot more problems than they they solved um not so much the actual weapons themselves it's the fact that they were bolted onto a very maneuverable ship um so we're still going to have tachyon weapons in the game but they're almost certainly going to be more restricted to heavier heavier ships where having a hit scanner weapon is less uh balance problematic um let's see uh the constellation line geez we're just we're we're just hitting all the greatest hits here uh the constellation line has been in a pretty rough spot for a couple years now uh what can you tell us about any plans to uh
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bring them in line uh a few things so 312 it's had a fairly comprehensive uh rebalance pass in terms of its handling because it was absolutely not handling where we wanted it to to handle um i know it's got some uh much fabled uh shield holes on there that ultimately will get fixed by sdf shields and every ship that has these shield holes will get fixed by that as well so in the interim we we have been fixing them up as we find them it's a it's a very weird um it's it presents itself as a bug but it's act the code is actually doing exactly what it's being told to do you're you're hitting items attached to ships that aren't
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being registered by the shield because they're not the ship itself so it sort of bypasses things so we've been doing a few ways to sort of mitigate that um and then i guess the big elephant is the room is the the visuals of the thing and much like the comments we gave earlier that we we will be going back through these ships and bringing them up to date so the constellation does have component hatches in there but they're not they're not necessarily the right size or the ideal placement uh people will see some minor interior changes when uh constellation of merlin docking comes online um just because we've had to go do some work to the to the rear of the ship sorry the last thing on that is i did
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say that when when the taurus comes out we we want to look at the the view because it is a bit strutty yeah i mean i think i think like you say john you know um when when we go back and do that sort of work that we need to do to bring up all the chips up to that kind of same level um when we go into the ships and open up the files if there's glaring issues we always try and do that kind of like little bit of polish pass but again it comes down to what the um i guess what the big focus is for that release and if it's okay actually we need to go through you know a whole bunch of ships and get them all up to a similar standard functionality-wise and we have less time to go in and take one through to you know give it a full refill i don't know we haven't got anything scheduled for a refit as far as i know at the moment unless john's gonna tell me otherwise now cool yeah uh yeah so i think you know when we say
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when we go in we kind of do a polish pass and a fixed pass but um apart from that nothing planned my knowledge yeah i tried not to repeat it about the resource and time thing um i would much rather work on new ships or ships that we've not we've promised and not delivered yet then we work a ship four times that someone's already got especially if it if it functions and it does its role i would much rather put the team's effort into delivering some of the the community favorites but yeah we're going to have a question here in a little bit that's specifically about how we determine reworks and stuff like that so we'll just uh we'll we'll cover it there it's one of the most it's a it's a question whose answer
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applies to a lot of ships so uh let's hang tight on that for now uh the sabre raven is treated like a forgotten reject that's my word it's not down will it be fixed uh i i am not and i'm not gonna proclaim i know every single bug for every vehicle in the game but i'm not aware of it having any any major issues uh certainly has a 312 there there were some fixes that were done to the sabre that because the raven is essentially it doesn't come out the same source files it comes out with a completely separate one so you have to do the same fix twice to fix it that hadn't been carried over so we made sure those came over for for 312. so hopefully it's
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in a much better state but i'm not entirely sure what issues there are and if there are major issues then then please put it in the issue council the guys who monitor that for for the team we'll get that to it yeah i just want to reiterate that just to make sure it's clear there there had been several fixes and improvements made to the regular the baseline raven in previous patches that hadn't been carried over or in the to the regular raven to the regular saber jeez that weren't carried over to the raven because it's a different hull and those fixes are now in 312. yeah pretty much the only items that are the same between the two of the seats and the dashboard yeah jim like visually it's a it's a really pretty ship i really like it it's one of one of my favorites so um hopefully there's not a load of
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visual issues with it if there is again let us know uh why does one of the razer variants they don't specify which one why does one of the razer variants have more shield capability than a super hornet uh it's there's a ton of answers to this uh i'll start with the the bad answer and that uh the the super hornet is probably not where it needs to be or wants to be um it when we changed the shield uh i can't remember what year it was but we changed how uh the items were classified from one like size grading to another there were quite a few ships that didn't make the transition as cleanly as others um and the support was one of
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them so i think it's probably a little undershielded but just because the that razor is it the lx or the i can't remember i don't know which one specifically has more shields ex or the lx uh one of them is faster one of them is more shielded um but just because it has more shields doesn't mean it's like suddenly a super dog fighter which the the super horn is it doesn't have the armor it doesn't have the weaponry so it's it can be very easy to just look at the the paper stats and go this is this is better but you have to look at the the entire thing and put it together just because just because one thing has twice the amount of the other doesn't make it twice as good you're right you're not you're you're right in most cases
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all right so uh let's move into uh it's we're almost halfway this show so let's move into some general ship related aspects and that question that we've i've been talking about that we'll get to here uh today's ships are made far better than those of just a few years ago that's nice for you know new ships and new stuff but what incentive do players have to acquire and operate many of those older ships some of which are the signature video vehicles of star citizen like the hornet the super hornet and the consolation i think we touched on that in the previous questions that we are i know i kept telling you to wait for this one we are going to make sure they all have equality in terms of gameplay functionality and
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um yeah there's they do have some issues at the moment but those ships are definitely not underplayed uh we we look at the the stats regularly both from a an ownership and a play time and the combat ones and the mission um completion ones and that again that would tie into one of the future questions about what triggers rework um but for for their issues they they are certainly not being ignored both internally by us and by players yeah i mean like visually with with the ships as well i think you know um we've got quite a diverse range of manufacturers and you know that
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um that can mean that not not every manufacturer necessarily has to have the same um aesthetics but they should all match the same visual quality and there's definitely ships that haven't been touched in a while and there's no getting away from that you know as as a team progresses technology progresses as our pipeline progresses yeah we always try and learn from the last ship if we didn't we'd be stupid um so yeah we're always learning we're always trying to like push you know to get things done more efficiently and to look prettier you know there's no other way of doing it we want to make one make stuff pretty that's kind of what what we do um or at least what we try and do um and to kind of probably butcher a phrase somewhere that there's the you know it's easy to be taller when you're sitting on the the shoulders of giants or whatever the
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phrase is that you know every time you're learning every time you're pushing and yes yeah that does mean that some of them don't quite match the visual quality we want and um you know it's something we we do want to kind of unify but it's part and parcel of making there there are kind of two things at play here one is that most games don't operate a live environment in the middle of their development yeah so so this process of of building ships you know in each successive one learning from the lessons of the other one and getting better as you go along is a normal uh aspect of game development that's that's not not just normal it's how it's supposed to work you're supposed to get better at this as you go along um it's just that you know for most normal games that period where you go back and
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you bring everything else up to you know up to quality happens behind closed doors when the game releases they just hopefully if everything works the way it's supposed to you see everything at the same quality at the same time we don't have that with the model that we use things things have to go out as we learn things and then the second thing is uh um so i think one of the things i'm quoted as saying quite often is like for everybody that's in the chat right now like you know give us the better merchant man give us this i'm like i'm like no you don't want it now you want it later you wanna you know after all the lessons have been learned after after all the the kinks have been worked out it's like the longer it takes to make some of these ships the better they ultimately end up being so it's it's a it's a it's an interesting situation that we're in with star citizen because
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we operate this live environment or you know during the course of our our development so but uh but yeah as we've seen we've remade the freelancer four times i think you've read the constellation a couple times it's i think our commitment to bringing keeping these things updated and bringing them along with everything else has been shown it's just a question of when is the right time to do it if we do it now and there's still lessons to learn we got to do it again so let's let's learn our lessons let's let's let's refine our process as much as possible and then every ship will have its time and that is like one of the i guess the luxuries of working on the project and using the model that we do is that we can be like super reactive to new techniques and if if if we work out something that is easier and better and and and looks
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better then you know we would jump on it and i you know i have worked on projects before where um you could be you know coming right up to kind of gm in your game and it's like oh but if we did it this way it looks ten times better and we can do it twice as fast it's like yeah but too too too late for that you can't can't do that now and you gotta just write it up and use it for the next project yeah it's uh again to echo that like where it's such a unique position that other games where you get it on uh launch day and you're you're super hyped for some reason you don't like this thing and you you're like petitioning for developers to to change stuff like they're already nine months down the road on the next thing they're like nothing's going to change whereas we actually have the ability to to react to things here yeah yeah so i i
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think it'll happen it's just like everything it's a question of priorities and and resources and all that good stuff but i don't think anybody doubts it'll happen um what is the status of ship armor one of the most perennial questions we get with related relating to ship stuff we talked about it recently on uh calling all devs a couple months ago uh any update you can give to us uh it's currently has a 312 a just a damage modifier um it that will all go away with uh physically based damage which is actively being worked on right now and then then it is truly going to be properly physically modeled or physically accurate um and it will be taking into account everything so
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thickness uh slope velocity and weight of the projector coming in um so yeah it will to say it would be different it would be an injustice to how different it will will be like it'll just completely change how the game works in terms of combat do i need to start worrying about the weapons backlog sure do is that what you're telling me all right a while back uh cig stated that ships would be limited to limited not just to what size components they can equip but also what type of components back in those shipyard articles i think we we wrote john the civilian the military the industrial type components are these restrictions still intended um so it's again it's something we're
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we're discussing at the moment the experience team are looking at it um that was quite an old design so the categories themselves will absolutely stay around but the actual restriction of this ship can only take military and civilian is something that the the way the discussions are going internally at the moment is probably not going to stick around um for a few reasons uh it's an artificial restriction that doesn't really make any sense when all the components are all identical anyway it didn't in theory uh and practice really stopped the the people min maxing loadouts because there was just so much variety in the the categories anyway uh and it sort of restricted upgradability of ships by going out here's ben's team has made
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five million components but you you only get access to 50. it's sort of shooting yourself in the foot with a long term gameplay there and from the balance side just made things just harder to deal with so we'll probably be getting rid of those restrictions not gonna say absolutely yes or no right now and when we do make a decision we'll we'll probably update those those shipyard articles to to have the latest and greatest info um but the categories themselves will definitely stay the same and each category will have upsides and downsides for it and i think that you know drummond started the ship partners themselves they they yeah they're long overdue a bit of a bit of tlc i think um i think we we i think it was 2.6 maybe
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it was a while ago it was when i was fairly new to the company i remember having taken on those ship items and yeah we did a whole whole load of work getting them ready and they've kind of not really been greatly touched since um and you know now we're getting to the point where we are adding them into ships and you know having the panels open and stuff i'd really like to see that stuff sort of like that game loop closed out and really kind of getting that stuff i mean we went through made loads of you know sub items that go inside the ship items that go inside your ships and we've got a whole slew of them and you know kind of getting all that stuff in working feature ready uh liberty in the chat says is this show pre-recorded yes um what else do we got uh as it stands uh the carrick is the only non-capital ship with a med bay
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and the kraken is a capital ship without a med bay uh why don't more multi-crew ships have med bays of any tier whatsoever uh i'm pretty sure the kraken will end up with one when we actually put into production that was almost certainly just an oversight at the the concept uh stage uh i don't think the carrick is the only non-capture ship in the meadow because we have the we have the apollo and the cutlass red i guess it's a bit vague what you call a medved versus what you call a med bed the different tiers of med beds um but it's it's certainly not intentional that there's just those three ships in the game only only ever going to have them but it is a supremely powerful feature to have in your ship so we don't want every
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ship in its sun having a med med bed in there that you have as your mobile respawn point so we do want to restrict the the availability of those to ships that make sense so the kraken would make sense because it is sort of like a mobile space station the carrick is a supremely long distance exploration ship where you're going to be out in the deep expansive space a long time but having it in the back of your cutlass like your bog standard cutlass that you just chucked in there maybe not but the red again designed as an ambulance um so yeah it didn't there will be a difference between and i think we've we've shown uh sneak previews of things like the the med gun as well there will be other ways to heal yourself
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beyond a med bed going forward so you won't need a med bed in the back of your if you break your legs on a planet you'll be able to use other mechanics to to heal yourself but med beds will be primarily for the whole respawning aspect does the 890 jump have 890 yeah has one but i guess the the question was uh is it sub sub capital ships having them capitals tend to because again by their nature and size they're they're often long distance long duration and then the ephemeral definition of what a capital ship is we're not going to get into that here um any update whatsoever on player facing ship modularity uh several ships
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uh are supposed to have a variety of player swappable modules uh some including entire rooms you touched on the retaliator earlier yeah uh the the tech for doing uh i'll concentrate on the room aspect of it because it's the the probably the most important and and the easiest one to answer the tech for having swappable rooms is being put it is on the schedule for early next year um it's to not give a super long winded tech answer it it was blocked by moving some of our data from uh loose xml into uh our own data forge format um so it could tie in with other systems because those rooms especially the retaliated ones have items inside them so they needed to when attached and
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detached from the ship needed to be able to dynamically connect and from it so the items inside would continue to work so that was the reason why it's taken so long to do it but that that work is now scheduled and when it's online like i said earlier the retaliators will be the the first ones to have it proved out because we have all the assets all they're waiting and ready and then once that's done been in the game for a cycle and we found any issues with it we'll we can start going and look at the other the other ships with that that sort of stuff i'm going to do my thing where i roll back the idea that the retaliators are we are what we intend to be the first implementation just with the realities of see happen to john not me uh it's just that
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with the realities of game development we know these priorities can change but right now yes our intention retaliator uh will be the first um at some point at some point um let's see uh kind of a similar question i guess uh what tech is blocking our ability for ships uh to save the current setups such as mfds and settings like firing groups and overclocking so that when we respond with a ship and get them back from our factory our preferred setup comes back and we don't have to reconfigure every aspect of our ship again from scratch yeah um that's not particularly for the vehicle team to answer that's more of like the general persistence back ends guys uh but from the the vehicle facing side of it um we want to
00:38:42
and we've talked about this before having the the mfd rework moving them away from their current system to building blocks and as part of that you're going to be getting a setting like ship settings screen that you can you can set all these things in and then there's a single place that we can send off like here's here's this ship's settings and it's just one place that gets sent and retrieved and then works across the ship rather than having to pull all this all these various locations on the ship and package it off and get it back so i yeah i can't really comment on half of it but from the vehicle side we need to have those new mfds done first um this may this answer may go into the same area then uh for the past year and a half or so ground vehicles cannot be loaded into
00:39:30
vehicle bays that use lifts instead of ramps because they clip through and fall out can you tell us about the issue and is if there's any fix on the horizon it's definitely something the physics guys are looking at uh be really good if you could ever nail down one of those guys to get on because i know they're incredibly camera shy um because they they can explain it really well but from my designer understanding of it uh it is what it's doing is it's teleporting or interpolating the the lift as it goes up and if you have a dip in frame rate or the server has a different frame rate or anything gets out of sync slightly that that that one frame or two frames or three frames where it's out of sync
00:40:17
it's now the wheels are through the bottom of it and it has a choice of which way am i going to push this out to get out of this collision and sometimes it goes up the right way and sometimes it goes down the wrong way and then as soon as one wheel's in it's starting to drag all the rest in and then it tends to go wrong but it is something we know about something we we do intend to fix that they have put numerous fixes in almost every patch that yeah that makes it better but there are still some some edge cases we don't want ramps on all ships but we definitely want this you know like ramps i like my ramps i just think this look cool like pressing the button be like yeah i mean i guess you would end up with
00:41:08
ships looking very similar you'd have like the the freelancer shape where it loads in the back or the carrot shape where it loads in the front or the star lifter where it does both i think it definitely works on some ships but there is that sort of a ramp takes up quite a considerable amount of space and has a big impact on the exterior because you know it has to arc down and be a certain like otherwise just get problems trying to get in the ramp if it's too you know too steep then there's other problems that come alongside with it so have have you considered side ramps side ramps we did have a concept ship where it has side ramps as part of the brief i think it may be in the corsair but it never survived right no at one point in the course there yeah at one point of the course it had side ramps
00:41:54
um but a good point on the ram stuff is that we do have metrics for the angles and we can't go over a certain amount which means if you have a ship that has loads of stuff on the bottom of it it's going to be 10 15 meters up in the air and you have a 10 15 20 degree ramp coming off the back it could be 50 meters long by the time it gets to the ground and then you've got somewhere to put a 50 meter ramp in the ship yeah the the terrapin i guess has a side ramp too yeah yeah it's just not big enough to load i was just okay i was gonna say not big i didn't even get through it and i was like no i've seen people do it take both the wings off and put something um yeah and i mean yeah it's something that i've been talking about today with the
00:42:42
lifter and you know making sure that ramp's kind of fit fit purpose and you know it is long enough in the correct angle and everything because you know you don't want to drive yourself in the back of it and just get wedged you need to do is eventually just need to do something like a chinook where it doesn't have a lift or a ramp or anything it just grabs it and carries it around we can just go and pick up other things and slide them in uh we we we discussed uh we discussed the chinook style ship way back on the gosh two or three years ago now um in one of the shows i can't remember what this is where ben gets to pitch his favorite ship concept idea oh what's your favorite thing to say i'm not saying it here it's fine i got roasted enough for saying it in the mean i did say um is there an update on the
00:43:30
customization options that the 300 series received uh we we said then that we'd be using it for other ships uh there hasn't been another ship using the same customization system as the 300 since then uh is there more coming what are our intentions what can you tell us if anything i definitely plan to do more of them it's a it's a time time reward saying it the the 300 took a lot of development time because it was the first we learned a lot of it from the dev side we learned a bit from what players liked on the other side of it what they didn't like and it's really just finding another ship to to do it on and release it on um because it does add time onto the schedule so it's a case of we we could release the ship at this
00:44:18
date or we could do it with customization and it's one two quarters later and like do we want to do that or do we just want to have the ship out so uh the those discussion on it is definitely gonna happen in the future and absolutely gonna happen for things like cockpit decorations yeah i think the the kind of like the decoration side of it um when we when we first started talking about that a while ago on the prop side we did a whole bunch of you know like ones we could use to prototype with and play with and everyone really enjoyed it um and yeah we definitely want to get the point where you can go and you know find these really unique um assets that you can kind of you know show off in your ship and and decorate your ship with and things that you know not yeah you can't just knit down to the local landing zone and buy but but things are a little bit more unique and every
00:45:04
single nick that kind of topic of conversation comes up it's like yeah everyone's excited about doing it everyone's talking about making the assets and having fun doing it um so i think once once once that comes online we should start seeing a lot of that stuff were you surprised by how many how popular the coffee maker was uh i'm not gonna lie that coffmak has given me a few headaches like like oh yen's who's on the program side of things he's uh he's like are we gonna cough makeup is working isn't it it is working so i keep seeing images of it not not working on reddit and it's like yeah it better be working um but yeah everyone loves coffee um i think we touched on this one earlier john uh will there be a fix coming out for shield holes in the
00:45:52
upcoming patches like those of the constellation lineup uh you if you just want to reiterate yeah so sdf shields will ultimately fix it completely in the interim we're just patching them up as best as we can there's some less than ideal design changes that we can do to do it but it involves having to actually find how they're being done in the first place so i think i think we have probably got about eighty percent of them maybe nine percent of them temporarily worked around it causes other issues but those issues are less problematic than the shield holes themselves a lot a lot of things coming with those sdf shields folks are excited about um what are some of the current challenges
00:46:39
or technical hurdles to spawning ships and vehicles inside of other ships and vehicles uh which is a bit of that i guess um so it's technical wise we're actually having to solve a lot of these right now whilst we're working on the merlin and constellation docking because that really brings the problem to a head a really good example for the merlin and connie and the guys have fixed it now but it took an incredibly long time to do it uh when you spawned in arena commander with constellation uh actually put you inside the merlin because the merlin was the the last pilot seat in the order of the vehicle uh so it just put you in there instead
00:47:29
and you it put you in there but it thought you were in the constellation pilot seat so you were flying the constellation from the merlin's seat and all sorts of weird stuff like the the constellation had access to all the merlin's items so it would start trying to fire the merlin's guns um you could turn off you could turn off the other ship's items from within the other one just all these edge cases that we we have to work through and then you go into the weird i say weird but it's it's stuff that players will do where you go to your ace up terminal and you've got a constellation ana merlin in your account but technically that merlin is attached to your constellation so we need to hide it from the aesop terminal uh until you've gone in the vma and removed that merlin from the constellation at which point should turn
00:48:17
it back up in the aesop and then you get into weird scenarios like i've spawned my merlin from the asup terminal and i've crashed it and i've claimed it does it now go back as a separate loose item to the a sub terminal or is it going back to the constellation and all the combinations of that like i spawned to merlin my friend has got in it i've got in my consolation i've gone somewhere else i've logged out i've respawned by default that merlin should have been attached to me but he's still flying it around somewhere lots and lots and lots of edge cases that like the technical side of docking and undocking the ships was relatively easy and it's the time to spend on all these educations that we have to solve first uh in game development weird is a global
00:49:05
term for anything that a player will do yeah um let's see what we got from the chat um how come the canopy bug that was once known for the hornets series only has now infected virtually all single seated singers single cedar ships we'll just go from there uh it's weird that it only affected the few ships because it should have and did affect every single ship so why it was like such a slow like this patch it was this ship but this patch it was the ship and this ship it should have been all of the ships at the same time and uh the the 312 build that went to yuvacarti the other day had a fix for it but we had to roll that back because it caused some
00:49:52
other impacts um but we're we're definitely working on it and it absolutely should have been ship specific uh it should have been any ship that you had any ship that required a part of the ship to move before you got in it so any ship with a moving canopy like the vandal ships where the the sticks do something first and then the the massage bed uh drops out for you to get on um would have been affected no now i just want to clap when you say it should have affected all ships that you're not speaking about like an intention like the the bug was intended to affect everything it just it just it was a systemic issue with the way the animations that attach to the cockpit where it's like we were surprised that it only ever affected a small yeah it absolutely was not intended to
00:50:40
whilst flying around your canopy should constantly open and close like a hooptie yeah or in the case of the vandal ships just dropping you outside the ship every now and then um uh but you said we had we had a fix in 312 we had to roll it back uh because it had other knock-ons that were unintended yeah uh it had a strong chance of not actually letting you get out the ship again so the canopy didn't open and close but you could never get out of the ship yeah no it was particularly vicious with the vandal ships because it was just it just yeted you right out of the ship just like thanks um all right uh we've got a little less than 10 minutes left let's jump into some some general process stuff um how are ships prioritized one of the most common questions that we get
00:51:27
through all of these streams is how do we determine which ship gets made first next what this after this uh our history is replete with many instances of we're going to do this and then we want to do this and then we want to do that team will move from this ship to this ship and we always have our intentions and then three months goes by six months goes by those intentions change those priorities change uh how does this work uh there is no singular uh criteria for for organizing it uh it's a combination of what stuff we have free to work on things like obviously if we only had one person free to work on a ship they're not we're not going to put them on working on a capital ship for multiple years
00:52:15
uh at least about two months ago so q3 of every year uh i sit down with the exec so chris uh aaron tony and some of the the other directors like todd and anyone that has like a vested interest in a vehicle coming out into the game and we sit down and we look at the backlog of ships and go right what what what ships do we want to release next year what is going to add to the game and we give our like these are our top five and then we go and see whether there's any consistencies there and that usually pulls out a few and then i go away and work with the production go right you can't you can only have one of these because this is a big ship that's going to take all of the net like you can have this
00:53:03
ship but that's the only ship you're going to get next year and they go well i don't don't want that so then we go backwards and forwards and we spend a few weeks going like we want this one and we'll have these two these will fit we have this event at this date that needs this ship for it because of x reason so that has to go in and if we have any time left over then then it's sort of internal like team choice of we have a four month period so are there any small little ships that we want to squeeze in there or do we want to look at doing a rework of a ship and that's how it goes in a lot of ways it's important to keep everybody busy to keep everybody working to keep everybody engaged and i think there's this there's this misconception that
00:53:50
anybody can work on anything i mean we saw it just a couple weeks ago when iae started and the website went down i'm doing a show with i ai guys and they're like why are you here why are you not fixing the website and i'm like these are artificial intelligence programmers people what do you want them to do about the website it's it's there's this idea that everybody can work on everything and even within ship artists even with within the people that work on showers artists have different styles artists have different aptitudes there are people that you would put on drake like okay these are the people that we should work on drake but you wouldn't put them on origin because it's outside of their uh aptitude i think like you know every member of the team is is you know capabilities but definitely people have things that they feel more comfortable with and just
00:54:36
sometimes people just click better with certain things and then we have like um within the team you know you always want someone that's a bit more technical and has a bit of a better understanding of what the whys and hows as opposed to necessarily the ones that can you know make stuff that's like just just super pretty and and so that you know otherwise you end up with a ship that looks great and but everything's broken yeah and and yeah then it comes real frustration of having to backwards and forwards with design and tech people to try and get that stuff working so you do need to sort of i mean i guess that goes with any any kind of walk of life you always want to get make sure that the right people are focusing on the right things that's something you do is sort of like a a lead and a manager and everything else is you know kind of um trying to make sure you're playing to people's strengths um and and there is that you know when we
00:55:24
get on to kind of doing some of our kind um more alien ships and then things that are kind of a little bit um less you know hard surface and things like that that we may or may not tackle in the future um see jared loose um but uh you know that there will certainly be like a learning curve for a lot of a lot of members of the team with with that stuff and it might be that you know certain aspects of the ship um may require more specialist skill sets so you have to make sure those artists free and ready to jump on it and then yeah i think it is just i guess it's just about managing time sorry i'm rambling no the the manufacturing point is a really good point um we have it was never intentional but the
00:56:12
different studios have sort of ended up being the the go-to teams for different manufacturers like the the us guys are really good with rsi and drake ships so if if we decided one year we wanted to only do rsi and drake ships those would primarily go to the u.s team but there's only so many of them and if the uk guys were given them they'd be able to do it but it would take them that bit longer versus if it was an origin or an aegis ship so then that's that's where you see things start moving around um or we we have a an event where there was a request for one thing and it turned into two things and that's a non-negotiable request that we suddenly need to adjust course and go
00:57:00
well actually we're gonna we're gonna pause this ship for a bit and then we'll do this and then we'll come back to it and then that's where the often uh where i do read the comments quite often where it said john cruz said this team is going to be doing this ship and move on to this ship and that absolutely was the intention at the time just something happened in the middle that caused that to be paused and then they'll get back to it i cannot stress this enough that when we do these shows and i'm on i'm on year six of of of doing these things for star citizen here when we do these shows when we give these answers these are always always our best understanding and intention of uh regarding things at this time uh it's game development not game construction we're all learning as we go along we're all discovering the best way
00:57:49
to make the best damn space sim ever you know as we go along we're we're always finding new ways new people come on they join they join the team and they show us new ways they go oh okay you know so like this uh it's so it's it's it's all it's we you see a lot of you know cig lied or cig said this or whatever but it's just it's never enough times to remind folks that when john comes on this show or ben comes the show or anybody else todd uh richard tyra or sean tracy any other and they we are sharing our intentions and our understandings of the process at any given time so uh and as with all things subject to change so we are just about out of time so i had all these questions about the banu merchant in here that i was saving for
00:58:37
the end i have to skip them should be a beast no okay so all of these questions are gonna have pretty much the same answer guys but we're gonna we're gonna do them so that you so that you hear them and so that you know them and so that you don't say that we didn't answer them uh from the uh from the thread here uh any status updates on the redeemer uh it's in whitebox right now okay uh yeah it's solid concept looking cool had a bit of a review with the guys today uh excited about it and we heard a bit of a tight space yeah it it it may or may not still be a five-man crew it may be less okay and we showed some of that on calling all devs a month or two ago so check that out for this uh consolation taurus why is it taking
00:59:25
so long uh i sort of alluded to earlier it's it's one of those ships that is very easy to to pause on when we need to pivot to do something else that's come up like a patch is on fire and we need the vehicle team to fix a load of things uh it's it's just there's nothing secret or special going on with it it's just a very easy one to go right we can stop here we can come back to in a bit okay um anything you can tell us about the polaris uh it's had a reconcept pass it's got fractionally larger but it's not humong isn't it it's still in the 100s in terms of meters okay when you say re-concept you mean mostly the flashlights like the interior yeah the interior has a full pass done on it um the the only other big thing of note i guess
01:00:12
it's got a docking collar nicely on it now and the hanger is to metric and uh some of the images in uh isc yesterday uh may have been related to the some of that polaris reconcepting um anything you tell us about the javelin we're just getting progressively bigger bigger uh yeah it's big that's is this big yeah 500 meters a big um i think people saw it at fleet week it's it's had some changes since then okay um uh halsey uh be real careful here uh no no active production on the content side
01:00:59
uh we have done some work on the the halle concept which may roll over into the the visual of the whole sea so the ie hollow viewers you saw the actual reconcepted helle um but tech wise i've spoken about the blockers for it many times and they they are slowly slowly going away so docking is a big one that is on the horizon um animating vis areas now works animating grids now works so we're sort of down to docking and cargo and a few minor other things yeah cargo a minor thing related to the call c and that's a classic case of you know um that the holidays like john cena just had a new concept that's really cool um and then finally the banyan merchantman canceled oh really uh it's it's
01:01:49
in concept again uh anyone that's a bmm fan knows that the concepts were quite different depending on which which version you saw so it's bringing them all in line making everything fit in it uh it has got bigger but it is um not gone up a landing pad size so it's still in the same size category uh it still has the same amount of cargo as it was concepted with so we've not cut the cargo and we're working on the interior to bring all the stuff we learned from the defender inside concepts for the interior conceptually uh concept and folks as far as when you can expect to see that when i would say when the banning richmond actually begins like active development when when things actually start being
01:02:37
built is probably the next time you can expect to see some of that stuff so yeah that's going to be a big one it's going to be yeah it's not going not going to be soon just put that way um and then um uh the genesis starliner which comes from somebody who's not me i don't believe you i'm the one genesis starliner fan in the world it needs a concept uh pass on it um just because it's it's one of those older ships that was done doesn't have the modern metrics to it so i can't really say a lot about it i know it was done in yay old days i just sure will have the mix master to keep everyone happy with it i love that we do some pre gaming here
01:03:26
and ben's answer was i don't understand this question but the tennessee starlinger it's the best all you need to know is mcmaster i think all right guys we are over time thank you uh thank you so much uh uh we don't have a host uh this week so we're just gonna leave it here everybody uh thank you for joining us for our post iae free fly uh q a remember uh there is still a perseus q a uh scheduled to go out sometime soon that's with the community team i don't know when it's going out but you can check the thread up on spectrum there and uh yeah and we'll be back here next week for our last episode of the year uh we're gonna have todd pappy and richard tyron to talk about all things alpha 3.12 so for john and for ben i'm jared thank you so much for joining us
01:04:13
and uh we'll see you next week take care cheers

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