Star Citizen Live: IAE 2951 All Ships Q&A

3 December 202101:06:031,840 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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hi everybody welcome to star citizen live our weekly show on fridays where we sit here we talk about uh a star citizen with our developers uh usually over zoom on the show this week we have an esteemed panel of vehicle experts from our experience content feature and just overall vehicle teams let's meet them now we've got a vehicle art director this way ben curtis hello what's up uh we we've got vehicle a systems designer uh mark gibson hello did i get that wrong probably no that's right yep uh first timer for a a a noob to the friday show we've got
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chris mccoy uh also a vehicle designer a senior vehicle designer i think worked on the spartan we've got uh uh yogi klatt from the vehicle experience team how you doing yogi i'm pretty good thank you and uh we got a receiver of incoherent tyler wicked emails mr john crew how you doing hello i i wondered where you were going with that it's it's it's it's one of those mornings already all right on the show this week we are talking about all things spaceships uh iae is winding down we're at the end of our iae festivities now and so as we are want to do every year we bring a panel of our vehicle people on the show and we open the floor
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to almost any and all vehicle related questions now i'm going to i say almost any and all vehicle related questions because i want to start this off with a brief discussion of what the vehicle teams work on and what they don't work on so this this is a big point of uh continuing uh consternation and confusing uh confusion because the the the easy answer would be that a vehicle team works on everything that ever goes in a vehicle that's not the case though many gameplay systems or shopping systems if you're talking about the crack and privateer and stuff like that are not actually handled by the vehicle team those are handled by economy teams and you know in u.s gameplay teams and stuff like that
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so uh john real quick or actually everybody let's open this up real quick uh what kind of things do the vehicle teams work on versus what kind of things do you often get asked about that you don't actually work on um i think the number one thing we get asked about a lot is uh npc crews and like duty cycles and uh things like that because whilst it is quite related to vehicles like we obviously want to have npcs in our ships doing things we and specifically the vehicle coders are not the people doing that we simply go like um we will let someone in this seat have this role but we don't control hiring an npc or
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making them get in the seat and stuff like that that's other teams um we make it work for a player doing that um and then other teams leverage that to make npc schedules work around those sort of things i think that's that's the biggest one for me at least okay well what what about you mark what what do you always get asked about that you like that's not actually my team uh the most common one by far is do you make the art um for vehicle system designers we don't do anything with art we we assemble everything and get it functional we we follow the ships from the beginning of their the life cycle where we come up with the original brief and follow all the way through to the actual release but we work with every team to assemble everyone's work together to get the ship to actually work function and out there to the backers as a whole so
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for me it's definitely we we don't do the art but someone else may have a uh very different answer about the art in the chat ben curtis i guess i'm the the opposite of mark right i'm i get asked a lot why doesn't this work and i'm like i don't know we just make it pretty um so that's probably you know yeah a lot of time is is when we get things in like they come through um and we do a bit of a triaging session between us and work out who's responsible for what because uh even though it's a game that we're making it can be quite complicated um so and even even ourselves you know we sometimes get uh bugs and things come in that they need more expertise than i have to work out where they should belong yeah and also i get asked a lot about
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props still like me personally like why is this prop not working look after ships now now uh chris and yogi uh let's flip the script here and talk about what you do work on but the difference is uh chris you are a via you are a vehicle systems designer and yogi you work on the vehicle experience team uh how uh what do you do versus what the other person does uh what um well anything we do really in vt has more to do with how we um how the ships feel how combat plays out and to some extent a little bit of input stuff anything that relates to what happens inside of the
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ships like you know lighting and where sounds go and all that that's all not related to our work so we we still just focus on you know anything that can shoot um but only from the in well from the outside basically i'm not sure if that's a good reply but it's the one you get what's your answer it's pretty clear yogi's is pretty close i mean essentially we'd do with every any seat that's in the ship we've probably put it there anything that you can walk around and open up and get a drink out of that's we've put it there because i'd have put it in the reference and then we've got that looks pretty it needs to actually function so i'm going to take a seat and i'm going to put that seat there and hopefully someone will sit down on it and not break it and then when it breaks it
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we fix it they bring their magic basically we make it we we make it pretty and then they like sprinkle some here make it actually work and yeah i do said the term ship was a ship was it yeah this is my this is my very short way of saying that not everybody works on all things in the vehicles so it's it's it's there will there will be questions that our folks here today are are capable or knowledgeable to answer and there will be some questions that are still yet for other teams questions like we got a lot of questions about the cargo refactor we won't be talking about the cargo refactor because that's actually on one of the pu feature teams and not on the vehicle teams as john said npc crew is actually is actually a function of
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our ai teams and stuff like that and not on the vehicle teams and stuff like that so when you as you go through and you watch uh this highly anticipated show if you see that certain questions are like why aren't they talking about that or whatever uh it's because as we've attempted to demonstrate here in the last couple minutes uh not everybody works on all things and not every thing that seems related to the life and experience in a spaceship is actually on the spaceship team so that said most questions overwhelmingly have to do with where is this can you give me an update on this ship we had folks asking about the polaris the corsair the uh perseus the pegasus the apollo uh the merchant which we uh just revealed this
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finally entered white box phase on yesterday's isc the ranger the link so a whole bunch a lot of the questions came they wanted updates on this ship or that ship for all of those questions those cleverly designed when questions we're going to point you back to the public roadmap basically all the information we have about how far along a ship is in the pipeline is there on the public roadmap generally speaking if you do not see a ship on the public roadmap it is not currently in what we refer to as active development now let's say let's talk a little bit about how we schedule these things out and why the schedule ships uh we've covered this before but it's always like a year or two between times we covered this john so how do we
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schedule these ships and why do the schedules change as much as they do yeah so it's a surprisingly complicated thing to schedule and manage mostly because of the time frames involved so if we take like a very simplistic ground vehicle that is probably still three to four months of development time uh and you go to the other end of like a big capital ship that could be two plus years of development time so we sort of have to work back from uh a known point which could be um a gameplay team says we're going to work on this feature which is happens to
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be a key feature of a ship or a feature that a ship helps um further in the game and they go we're going to release this in q2 next year can you give us the [ __ ] for us like nope you should have asked us last year because it's going to take too long to do that so if we know in advance when those dates are going to be then we can sort of work backwards and look at our schedule and go right this ship will fit in the time but we don't have the people we don't have like it would take everyone on the team to do it which means we just released one ship that year which is not what we want to do so it's a constant juggling act between wanting to deliver a ship with a specific feature and specific dates and the people we
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have available so i think we'd all love to just all work on the big huge capital ships but it's finding that balance between getting through some of these larger ships and having a sort of a fairly regular release cycle of putting ships into each each of like the six big patches that we have each year um because you have the four quarterlies and then i.e invictus and in terms of prioritizing what ones go that's that's generally done at sort of a very high level uh i think like i said we we talk about this every every year or so but every every show is someone's first show once or maybe twice a year i sit down with
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chris uh aaron todd tony and we we look at the like the next 12 to 24 months schedule and go ah this this feature is coming so let's try and push for the ship there or we can't guarantee a ship is this feature is going to get done in this time frame so let's put some ships in that don't have any pre-existing gameplay requirements or even do new uh like straight to release ships that can help maintain that regular release cycle without taking away from other things and that's also the reason why things move um like we mentioned at the start we don't do everything related to ships so if another team for whatever reason can't deliver the feature on time we're sort of left going do we just stop working on the ship some
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ships we can it's easy enough to just pause them at some point come back to it connie taurus was a a great example of what happened to a ship that got paused so many times because the people were needed for other things um at the time you get to the ending yeah the whole series uh other times it's like no we the ship is done and we're just waiting for the game play can we release it without this gameplay the raft being a good example we wanted it to be with the cargo refactor so you could be dropping those crates on unfortunately that the planets didn't align for that but it could still be used as a cargo ship so we we made the choice to release it with the existing cargo gameplay rather than hold it for the cargo refactor and it you know it's not just the um they're like the feature teams as well
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is even within this group you know we've got five different people working on five different things we still have like the concept teams the vfx the animation the audio the tech art so so it's there's enough we represent a rather large section of the company already within us but that's you know just kind of half of the picture as well when you take into account like all the other kind of departments that work towards getting a ship out and it only takes kind of you know one or two things that that changes priorities there that can then impact what what we're trying to do we're going to get into some well worth wrong one wrong button there all right so we're gonna get into some questions here uh there were a lot of questions about uh reworks and updates i should have muted my phone a lot of questions about reworks and updates so we're gonna kind of group them all into one section
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here uh right off the bat uh a lot of folks have been talking about are asking about a 600i rework and they've seen because of the public roadmap that it's currently underway uh what can you tell us about the 600 i rework what what scope of work should folks be expecting so the the 600 eyewear works actually one of the things i've been working on and um when john asked me to to go through it we were happy with the exterior the exterior looks great but we the interior just didn't line up with what we wanted to deliver from the gameplay side so we the interiors had now on a complete internal rework with huge amounts of features added to the ship so it's still currently going through its interior iterations rework but to give an example because obviously there's not been much
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information out there about about what's been added removed etc um it's now got a medical bed um so it's it's got a similarity a medical bed to the carrick it's got individual crew quarters so for example before i had that giant urban area where there's just four little beds so it's now got private crew quarters for each person um and the touring and the exploration version both have very different features inside them so with the exploration you've got the medical bed you've got a full-on armory now with places to put your suits your weapons and everything else as well as a little bit more gameplay towards the exploration side as well as a proper vehicle cargo hold to put much more vehicle like much bigger vehicles and a lot more cargo in as well as a much better floor through the ship and then the touring
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has been completely flipped on its head to lean completely into luxury gas transport a big change to it was where we did the modularity as well so currently the modularity was the middle section and that's been moved to the rear section to allow a lot more changes between the different versions but it's not quite ready to show yet which is why there hasn't been much talking about it like we know people really want to know more about it and obviously the stuff that i've just listed off means people like i have even more questions but we're not quite there yet ready to show people but the it has docking colors as the external lifts it has escape pods it does have a lot of new additions although the captain's quarters with the exception the bathroom moving what one
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side to the other hasn't changed because that was fine i'm sorry what would you say and i don't think doesn't say i think he's uh on on the note that and going back like your original point about the road map is um although this rework is on the roadmap the the part that reworks on the roadmap is what mark's talking about is doing the investigations to getting a plan together it's not that ship is in production and we're about to drop it it's we're doing the initial part of the the investigation of what we want to do um is it's you know we haven't got artists that are actively working on this yeah for folks who saw that merchantman uh yesterday that you know mark as a designer is working on layout is working on layout and where everything's going
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but there's not a whole lot to it visually it's like that when it goes into visual production that's when it moves from mark over to ben's team and that's where you'll begin to see the fruits of all this effort uh almost certainly in an inside star citizen because that's what that shows for oh without a doubt it looks you barely see anything when we've been working on it but as soon as i get involved that's when you actually see differences what can you tell us about the mole and the prospector saddlebags this question comes up a lot uh yep they're they're still planned to be as as they were pitched so detachable um detachable compressible bags um that
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is actually another good example of something that the vehicle team isn't actually working on that that's actually going to be um eupu because they they own mining they own refining so it's uh it's on them to deal with they're essentially items that will be detached from the ship moved to another ship um or a station or cargo or whatever to to do the refining and then pass back we we from a vehicle content side just simply make the assets in a way that they can detach and be compressed okay um let's talk about the starfarer uh starfarers going through a bit of a a run a small renaissance at the moment uh the we interviewed uh dan treffin for the first
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inside star citizen he mentioned that the starfarer which is long supposed to have had you know some refining capabilities is also getting additional refining capabilities so that it can take fuel from other or take refined goods from other ships and uh and refine that too uh and those those uh that requires some moderate rework of the starfarer uh talk to us about what's happening to the starfarer and maybe a little bit about what we hope to do for the starfarer in the future uh yeah i think there's two things really to talk about there's there's the work for supporting refining and refueling which is what we're doing at the moment and that doesn't really have any impacts on the interior like the the layout is it's all pretty much contained to either the
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bridge consoles at the rear of the bridge the gantry at the back and the sort of fuel pods and then there's what we want to do with it to fix all the the issues we have uh within the interior the layout and the flow or the lack of flow in it so we're actively working at the moment on the refining and refueling side of it so you probably won't see it in 316 um but you'll obviously see it alongside when refueling comes out um there's lots of changes there and then we are going to start the process of much like the 600i looking at what we want to do with the interior of the staff era to sort that out yeah the the the starfarer was for folks who have followed the project for a
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while the starfarer was famously you know developed and pushed forward as early as it was because it's used in squadron 42. uh but as you build these ships each and every year you guys learn and learn and learn more about what it takes to develop an a full one one interior exterior ship uh the lessons that your team has learned about flow good flow proper player flow and everything cannot be understated you see the the ships that come out today are quite honest if i'm if i'm allowed to have an opinion uh have a much better flow and better player experience inside them than the earlier ones so i i think i i can say to folks that our desire to go back and redo the starfarer interior is just as strong as those of the
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players it's just a matter of finding finding the the time and the resources on the schedule because like you said before having to balance you want a certain number of ships out every single quarter every single year and so if you work went on certain number of ships that would be the only thing you'd work on for some time then you have to balance that with the reworks and stuff so it's a it's not an enviable task uh but i think folks can count on it getting done let's talk about gold standards uh there's a there there's a lot of questions a lot of questions about gold standards we've seen uh talk of the cutlass black gold standard uh we've seen a little bit of the retaliator gold standard work we've covered the gladius gold standard in recent months what ships are currently
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uh underway are have gold standard passes underway and what should we expect from them uh so yeah um i mean the gold standard work is any of our you know release ships that we're working on will kind of get that incorporated in them um and a lot of it comes down to um supporting features that have come online since that ship was released and that's probably the best way of kind of describing what gold standard is really um it's you know it's going back in and adding and making sure that you know the the items are interactive that should be interactive it's going sure making uh sorry going back and making sure that um things adhere to metrics correctly if we take the kind of retaliator as an example um unfortunately something like the
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corridor spaces were just a little bit too small to allow our ai to navigate comfortably through it um so we had to just go in and massage things around a little bit we we try and be kind of quite delicate with our approach so that we're not like not changing the ships too much where possible so things like making corridors a little bit wider or you know moving items around to make them more accessible for players and ai that's kind of like relatively straightforward things that are a little bit more invasive i guess um is things like adding big airlocks to the side of ships that didn't necessarily have airlocks in the right position um and that's something that we we've kind of started doing on the retaliator as well um we've taken it as far as doing like all the interior changes um we just haven't got around to doing the exterior changes
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that yet and that's why it's kind of we haven't really seen much from it um but yeah the the main part is just making sure the interactions work bringing it all up to kind of uh the the experience level that we want so dashboards and and things like that work and yeah the the item i don't have i've forgotten anything one of the designers will jump in and tell me that i've probably forgotten something components is the big thing it's also an opportunity for us to go back and change anything that we've decided needs to change as a result as as the game's evolved and progressed and new features and things have come online the gold standard is the perfect opportunity for us to go in and correct things or improve things or just get things more where we want them to be
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something like the disabled one for example that there wasn't much needed to be changed for the interior point of view but the um 600 eyes on the opposite end of the spectrum and its opportunity to completely change what we have learned from this experience and the the starfire will be very much a similar sort of situation where we can take everything we've learned and move it forward and it's it's it's kind of ever evolving as well um because you're as new features come online so you know uh a gold standard two years ago might not have had the refueling ports in it or you know can't think of anything else but yeah as features come online um we they get added to like the gold standard list of things to do well the the like the screens you know the the door screens that have all the lighting controls and you know they're
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they're all additional features that as they come online we're like oh yeah cool let's add that to the gold standard list and so yeah we always joke about oh we've done gold standard do we go into platinum standard like how far do we go but it's it's just like that kind of like uh i guess that ever moving line of what we want to where we want the game to be right yeah it's it's probably also worth been touching it briefly that gold standard doesn't necessarily mean like full rework um some some ships will need that like the 600i is going to be its gold standard will be pretty close to full rework i mean the exterior shape isn't really going to change and the exterior visuals beyond like supporting donkey colors and maybe any knock-ons from interior
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changes but it's not like put it all in the bin start again fresh and then you have the the other end of the scale like mark measured with the saber where pretty much the exterior work was just putting in the component hatches and doing a bit of material optimization and and it's everything in between that there is no we have a list of everything we want to do for god standard but that is not like a time-boxed amount of time per ship to do it it varies per ship yeah i i think all in all it's important that uh folks remember that a gold standard is not a it's not a guaranteed rework it is it is a it is it's essentially a review process of the ship to bring it up to whatever today's mod whatever today's current star citizen standard is as more as you said as more features as stuff
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come online adding fuel ports is a great one going back to the ships and going oh they all these need fuel parts that we didn't know where to add or how because we didn't know how we were feeling was going to work when we were building those ships but now it's going back and adding those and stuff um so with that so when people see something like the cutlass black gold standard that's not another full rework of the colors they shouldn't expect massive changes to the hall of the ship or anything like that correct um it's the cutlass one off the top of my head will be again making sure the components have space adjusting the cockpit uh so it's less wall of screens and you're actually sat in it properly um while we're before we move on from we
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work reworks and updates here uh one of the questions from the thread was about how we saw the updated van dual ships uh for squadron 42 a couple years ago on uh atv uh why don't we have those versions of the ships in the persistent universe because we're saving them for squadron first is the the very short answer um when squadron ships they will almost certainly find their way into the pu uh let's talk about some uh uh combat and flight stuff yogi yogi's been sitting patiently it's your time man it's your time uh i enjoy watching the show right off the bat uh will weapon ranges ever increase again based on weapon size yes um so anything we have in the weapon stats for now is just temporary and
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normalized to aid us with the general combat framework so to speak um but we will add a lot of differences actually the size five and plus so size five plus weapons they actually have a longer range already but there will be more difference between the weapons also between uh energy weapons and ballistic weapons um so yeah that's all ongoing uh just not ready to be submitted yet i know we talked about how the cargo refactor is another team but uh will the upcoming cargo refactor affect uh ship's mass and internship handling uh there were a couple questions in the thread about you know because we simulate that mass and stuff is this refactor going to massively change the way that ships handle long term it's supposed to to affect
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that so for example if you transport a let's say if you have a cargo hold full of weight equipment or something like that then your ship will is supposed to be planned uh is supposed to handle more uh well less less agile but um i'm not sure whether to check for that so the cargo work as such i'm not sure if it has an effect on the physical properties yet um somebody else would need to check that i'd i don't know it would be for the the team doing cargo to confirm that but i know from the ifcs side obviously if you put more mass on the ship it will behave correctly with the extra uh weight it's just the current cargo system just doesn't do that at all if it did then you'd have that behavior already yeah so so currently the mass is just not propagated to the outside of the strip it's just this the layer doesn't
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communicate with it yet all right are you planning to increase ammunition or add extra magazines for ballistics okay so yes so there's there's two two things here so we want to have some ammo ballistics ammo management and supporting things like that bigger ships can just use bigger ammo boxes right now we can't do that because of that we had to restrict the weapon loadouts in the uh or the ammo capacities and a lot of the gatling guns and the cannons that is and this was more for balanced reasons and this is not the way how it's supposed to be what we actually want to do is to tie the ballistics gameplay closer to the physical armor
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gameplay and once that physically physicalized armor gameplay is done then we can reevaluate the ballistic counts again that said at the moment the ballistic counts is related to what kind of purpose the weapon has and if the purpose of the weapon is to attack larger ships it has more ammo so for example the bearing gatling series has a lot more ammo than the other get links but also that that's all work in progress that will change over time uh have you found your different role for auto gimbal yet uh this is referring to our ic7 we did a couple weeks yeah i think so um we haven't tried it out yet um so um so we sketched out what we want to do um but we didn't have time for prototyping and testing it internally uh yet but uh let's hope we'll we'll approach that
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early next year hopefully we got a raft question here uh why why does the argo raft only have three containers when it looks like it could fit uh several more when the raf was actually going through its uh early concept and design stages we went through a load of different iterations for what we want to do with the cargo ranging from it being one huge giant pod there you put cargo inside like the thunderbirds style where you could put a vehicle in drive out or whatever um putting loads of different ones on but in the end we ended up settling on the three cargo pods and there's a couple different reasons the first one being that it's nice quick and easy to pick up a pod room move away without any risk of accidentally um
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hitting your other cargo containers another one is it is an early starter long-haul vessel um and when we tried to jam more in there it just started looking cramped and crammed and crammed and the mechanism started looking more flimsy and flimsy and flimsy and when you're actually going to be escaping from pirates at some point you want to quickly be able to drop your pod and run because you're out is the pirate wants your goods not you so if you leave your pod behind and then fly off probably just gonna let you get away which considering you don't have a lot of weapons sounds like a good deal to me john let's let's jump into some let's jump into some uh higher level stuff so some broader features there are a number of things
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that we've talked about over the years a big sweeping apocalyptic changes to uh uh just features that should absolutely kill every carrick let's go ahead and ask them about how i was going to get marked with that one uh where is player facing modularity we've been hearing about this thing for quite some time uh and what can you tell us if anything about this system so it is it is still planned uh though i say this every time that people ask me uh it's still planned it's not something that we want to get rid of or just not doing it and hoping people forget it exists which is what i i see a lot on spectrum um
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it's the big thing is it's quite a there's a core tech blocker on it which uh item port system uh needs to work within object containers which it does at the moment like ships have or stations have item ports inside them uh the problem it has at the moment is object containers assume some sort of level of they are static they're not dynamic they can't object containers themselves can't move and they really don't like being deleted and undeleted at run time and the item port system within those would have to dynamically attach and detach so we use the retaliator as the really good example for this and when we have this in it will be the first ship that gets the modularity in
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game the retaliator bomber modules need the item ports for the torpedoes to be placed within the object containers which the object container itself will be in an item attached to the ship and we need the game to be able to read those detachable and detach events and link all the power and missile controllers to the items within those object containers because at the moment those torpedo items are actually part of the exterior ship cga to make them work whilst we could do the modularity right now you would never be able to get rid of those torpedoes in the ship um so you would swap out the room and have the like the
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the uh drop seat room be able to swap in could do that right you just have these four size nine torpedoes shoved in the room at the same time as well so what we're waiting on is the the vehicle tech team to work on that dynamic detection retouching of item ports in object containers in items attached to ships it's just a horrible nesting problem and when we have that in the world's our oyster we can it's that's the only thing stopping us from rolling it out another yeah that's going to sorry as i said that's going to bring us lots of options to um yeah rather than every new feature requiring an entire new ship it's going to allow us to kind of you know give
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support the features but still be able to spend the time making the ships that everyone wants us to make and not just kind of being kind of bottlenecked by okay well you know we need to do this particular feature support so it has to be a new ship um it just opens up loads and loads of new options which is super cool because you at the end of the day our ships are well some of our ships quite large and they could definitely benefit from from having some kind of you know more variation to them in their functionality i mean personally i'm really looking forward to being able to actually go back and do the module containers for the carrick to actually go a bit further with them but like like john's saying at the moment if if we were to do them the problem would be you'd still have whatever module was in the place of the cargo holds yet the cargo hall would be there and then the eight and ports inside them would be then it would just
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layer on top of each other again and again and again is this the same stuff that would allow us to do um all the animations on like the uh items within the ships as well uh to some extent yeah so the the avenger is uh although the avengers i could never remember if they were officially true variants or modules um variants and some were modules yeah it would allow us to have that be done properly rather than all being like hard baked variants so basically it sounds like you know it's it's something we know we know what's necessary we know what's involved in making it happen it's just it it requires a pretty sight it requires a pretty sizable chunk of time and
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resources in order yeah it's a lot of low-level engineering uh people and the people that are best suited to doing it uh unfortunately the people that are looking at server meshing because they're they're ironically the people that made the object containers and a lot of the original pipe system code uh all right let's let's go to another easy one physicalized damage where uh it's it's being worked on by the physics team at the moment i saw a cool little video the last few weeks so they are prototyping all the different aspects of it um so they've got a little like soft body deformation tests on vehicles which
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equal parts looking really cool and terrifying to me from the the content side this week in fact we were looking at um replacing the hit point based part detachment material based and tensile strength detachments so rather than you just depleting the parts of the wing down to zero health and they fall off it's you hitting it and the tensile strength of the joint reduced to the point that it would break off naturally so it's it's been worked on it's there's there's a lot of things there and we're at the we're at the point where we've got all these prototypes it's merging them together and then looking at that versus our current pipeline and going right
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what's what's the the best way to merge these two things together because obviously we build ships in a certain way at the moment and not all of that is going to be 100 uh usable out the box with physical damage making me scared yeah it's it's it's it's a it's a big change but it's uh it's absolutely central to uh so much of of what star citizen wants and it wants to be so um there's there's some of it actually in the engine already but just disabled so there there's a c bar that we can flip correctly generates the mass based off the material applied to the ship which is sort of a lot of physical base damage is going
00:40:14
to be based off the material types and surface types attached to the ships so at the moment design just go this ship weighs 87 tons and the the physics engine goes right i'm going to work out the volume of each part here's the overall volume this overall volume weighs 87 tons i'm going to split it equally between it um but it has no knowledge of what the part is like if if you have a ship with like a what looks like a carbon fiber wing versus a solid iron wing the the engine at the moment goes they weigh the same unless a designer goes in and specifically says like this one only weighs 100 kilograms this one weighs a ton which obviously we don't want to do per part on every single ship in the game uh that's that's not fun for a designer the new system looks at the material
00:41:03
type so when art are making the ship they go this wing is basically when you shoot it shifting it off of design down that chain on to art he's realized that that sounds like a fantastic idea to me john let's everything's going to be made of metal dense it's fine all bugs to the art team yeah um but yeah right there is a cvr in the game that we can flip and then the ships look at the volume of the parts the material plateau and then works out the correct mass yeah yeah i i was wondering if you were going to go all the way with that john i was like he's going to put this on the art team with the materials pass on the record on the record sorry ben you want to go back to props don't we have you normally do some sort
00:41:51
of like caveatting at the beginning jared that's like yo everything stuff that's changed like no this one's going to land on the on their team i will actually say that the two ships we tried it on there was actually very little uh change in the mass because they were good all i can do for you ben is i can keep hitting john with the hard ones john talk to me about ai blades we we already put npc crews off on off on uh ai team but what about the the blade components uh unfortunately i can't quite shift that one off um so ai blades is uh tied in with ship computers or avionics as they were called um
00:42:41
people still call them avionics and i think we only changed the name to be computers because ground vehicles don't really have avionics but they have computers but that is on vehicle experience in their their long-term long-term road map someone just rung the doorbell in the middle of this that is making the computer item itself which hosts the blades and makes the the cpu resourceful blades to use and then blades will still be as we planned they they add in or modify uh functionality to vehicle systems tactical muting tactical muting um all right let's
00:43:30
do one more big let's do one more big uh several years ago several years ago uh and i think it was one of our anniversary videos it was 2016 if i remember correctly uh we showed up a video with nate diersley demonstrating a hex code paint editor a tool that was originally designed internally for artists on the ship team in order to help you know color and cr and paint stuff uh but it was said during the thing that you know this would be a great tool to give to org leaders and stuff they could give out their hex codes to their players and all have a unified paint scheme and stuff like this we have not talked about this for a while and in the interim we have now introduced uh uh paints uh uh paints that are for sale on the website we have
00:44:17
talked about the uh the auto body shops that we're adding into the game where you'll be able to take your ship and have it you know custom painted there uh let's take this opportunity to talk about what our goals for ship paints are at present whether they've changed in the last five years the floor is yours where are we moving towards here because it seems like we're going in a couple different directions at once if i'm inheriting physical damage and materials john can answer this question time to delegate back to ben it's it's still planned we still want to let players paint uh paint their ships in game there will be physical locations in the in the universe where you have to fly to
00:45:06
and get your your um ships or vehicles painted uh we do want to let players pick their colors um but we're still working out how far we go we still want there to be some exclusivity and benefits to um having these pre-made paints uh whether that is uh we don't really want to lock off specific colors that gets very messy very quickly but maybe specific finishes or stencil patterns um they're exclusive to paints that you get rather than create yourself so so so the idea itself is not dead we're we're never dead okay yeah it's absolutely something we still want to be able to
00:45:53
support and give players the freedom to make their ships more their ships um i think at the moment um yeah we do you know we do produce a fair number of tints each each year and each quarter um the system is still very much in its infancy as to where we'd like it to be um or personally where i'd like it to be um there's still a lot we can do to um just just add more variation we're making an entire universe so not all ships should be like gray and black i mean i'm a big fan of black i love black but i'll get in trouble for making every tint black so uh yeah i think we like say we don't want to be like oh we've made a we've made a blue and gold thin um let's let's reserve that so that only people that have bought it can make blue and
00:46:39
gold tints um there's there's got to be more to it than that we just haven't kind of uh invested the time into producing that system that's going to be really accessible for the players to to be able to do what they need to do um but it's not off cards we were quizzing you know quiz and chris about it this week uh i was on holiday last week and saw it blew up on reddit and i'm like oh my god i don't even what is this video oh okay and yeah yeah like like ben says uh it's it's something we we definitely want to do the the tools we have internally aren't really where we want them to be that they they're not quite given us what we want so the the last thing we want to do is work on a in-game player-facing version of a tool we're not happy with
00:47:28
and just let people suffer that and then have to change it all down the line we want to be happy with what we've got first and then we'll work on the player-facing side of it so um the flow will be like i said you'll go to somewhere like cousin crows and you'll go to a terminal and you you'll purchase your your respray job for however many uec and then uh whether it will be hex codes or rgb values or sliders or picking swatches we we don't know yet um but you'll be doing that and going like primary this secondary that tertiary and yeah one of the the things is you can look at a lot of a lot of competitive uh other games that allow kind of uh this little customization to their their vehicles um the thing that i
00:48:16
struggle to get my head around sometimes is just the sheer scale of what we're doing and by that i mean you know it's very easy to develop a system that works on much smaller ships but then when you've got ships that you know they range from you know tens of meters up to kilometers you need a system that's going to be flexible enough or we need to make rules and put rules in place that actually okay yeah you know these smaller ships will allow a certain level of customization versus these massive great big ones that might not um i had a classic guy on the front of red dwarf right painting the letters on the side of his ship at the start of every episode yeah another good point related to that as well is not all the ships are set up to take paints at the moment we want to make sure that all [ __ ] all ships are equal in terms of painting because the last thing you want
00:49:04
is i've got uh i'll go mp uv and i've flown all this way to a paint shop to find out i can't paint my ship or if i paint my ship what i picked red on here is sort of a weird pinky color because there was something wrong with the base material we need to make sure all the ships can do it all at the same time and they all it all applies equally because as we've been doing these paints and tints for various events we found like this looks really cool on these three ships but the fourth one for some reason looks terrible and then we've had to go back in and reassign materials and do lots of fun things just to get it to behave how we want um so we we need that in place across the board for them all before we can even consider the player side of it i didn't see the name but someone just puts like in the
00:49:51
chat about um the orig the orangifying the interior of their raft and that's something that again like we need to spend time investigating that sort of stuff like from my point of view i would absolutely love to be able to kind of have control over the interior of my ship and you know just like i say make it all dark grays moody um but is this something we're not able to do right now um i know john you need to get some magic tech people to sprinkle the magic dust on on interior acs and brushes and everything else like s that's another thing we want to do is like customizing interiors we we tried it in a very obvious way with the 300 series letting you customize the uh customize the interior when in fact that is actually you're just customizing the dashboard and it changes trims in the back because they're part of the
00:50:37
dashboard so we can do it it's not a great way to do it and it absolutely doesn't scale yeah and larger shapes and we've tried it like internally with um using our system within our editor but all it does is it just gives us another version of everything like the entire ship and it's not able to kind of do that in in the client and in game so yeah we can we can prototype this stuff but we we don't have an ability to actually put that in the live product um which is a shame because you know i think it was the star lifter we were playing with and and you know we started making the different variants and it was like oh this looks really cool in dark gray on the inside uh but it it just doubles up the entire everything we need for the ship gets doubled and that does not scale when we're trying to do you know hundreds and
00:51:25
thousands of ships it's just never going to happen unfortunately the dark green give us like give us like yeah yeah give us like happy to talk about jared making me upset development it's where you try things and not everything works let's just put it that way uh something happy okay uh is racing dead better not be want some more racing uh no pretty much everything we did for the um for the flight model and also the upcoming stuff with the high speed changes and so on this will this will have an effect on racing [Music] so yeah no it's not that it's i mean specifically for for rich who he was not
00:52:13
here today but he loves racing it's really really important for him so uh he'll make sure it won't die right yeah so no it's not that for us uh let's see what else do i got what else have i got here for the for the group here uh looking through the chat uh can you give us a list of the various operator modes uh that you intend to add we've added a couple operator modes recently um so operators in general are very useful for us because they allow us to focus on a on a new or on a specific feature and also for controllers or input purposes it kind of cuts down the amount of keys we need
00:53:01
so we will expand the lists when we see the need for it i mean we we split out basically the let's say the guns operator notes from the missile opportunities and the things we have planned for the future is at least emp and qed so you get different separate operators for for that um in my list also salvage appears but we're not doing that like or at least not in vt but basically any kind of other operator mode um yeah so so for new features it's just really good to use operator modes because it makes a lot of things easier for us uh let's see we don't have a whole lot of time left we might be able to go a couple minutes over but let's see if we can do like a like a like a like like a speed round here get get a bunch more of these questions
00:53:48
in uh any update on the armored cockpit for the carrick uh we're actually talking about that this week ironically yeah it's it's something uh that we we're fairly confident we can do now um we didn't do a release because we just didn't have the tech to do it but because of the work needed for the whole sea and it's like animated states controlled from the ship and controlling animated items on ships it's doable in theory we just need to grab out the asset and actually have a go at it okay but like everything else it's time by doing that it's a designer not doing something else in this it looks really cool mark it it
00:54:36
does look i'm not gonna lie just start watching cowboy bebop and those shots come on all right uh windshield wipers that's all that questions windshield wipers question mark right next what not sure windshield right does did the space shuttle have windscreen i suppose it went belly in didn't it so it didn't go face first through atmospheres um i think 900 years in the future we perhaps would have evolved past it and had space rain x remember those really posh beamers from the 80s they used to have like little um squirters that used to pop out the front and squirt water up onto your headlights and then little winch wipers we're gonna we're gonna get wintering wipers you need one of the lights as well there is definitely uh bugs with the current canopy effects
00:55:24
at the moment that we we are looking at something changed and it has wildly inconsistent results across all the ships that used to work so some of them the the water and slush is the wrong size or it's going the wrong way or it's um not appearing at all um so if if you're offended at the moment by the amount of water and slush going across your canopy it's probably not intended to be like that yeah and for once it's not just artists ramping up the wear to to make it feel more real it's uh scratching yeah yeah i don't think it is anyway if there is we'll find them uh any love for the saber raven the saber raven's actually my favorite trip in the game for its visual
00:56:11
appearance i love that thing whenever we're doing the play tests i that that's what i do if i'm flying solo if i'm not taking passengers with me that's the ship i go to and use i i know it didn't get the same love as the best server with the gold standard rework and like a lot of people they didn't understand why the saber got the the fix like all the new stuff and all the new shiny stuff but the the river didn't it it's just because it it was a separate model to work on it it wouldn't just be as you do one work the other one gets done like some variants it's straight up an entirely separate model so it would have been double the time to do the gold standard so it was just it didn't get done in time at all um it's not forgotten that i say i i love the way that ship looks um yeah
00:57:00
right uh can we please separate the ship's wing animations from the landing mode john can we please separate that please uh same answers what we talked about the carrick that is theoretically possible now we just need to actually go and go and do it um i'm not going to say what ship it is but there's one a production where it's going to get trialled on uh shipping ships spawning not really us um all i can say is it's definitely gonna be a thing and then to start with you'll be doing it from the ace up terminal so you go pick your constellation and then pick whether if you have a melon or archimedes pick which one you want in there yeah just probably on usp then i would yeah all right um
00:57:48
in a previous q a it was mentioned that the fact mentioned that the mercury star runner is missing a second entrance in egress uh it was overlooked has there been any progress in adding that in no still on the first first straight note it's first straight now okay uh and then let's see what are we wrong buttons here all right let's see any updates on escape pods or ejection seats with parachutes anything at all uh i keep bugging rich tyra about parachutes or jetpack um full arrest systems because yeah it's it's really annoying that if if you have to eject you might as well just stayed in your
00:58:35
ship and died anyway because you're probably going to die from hitting the floor um so i mean we can settle for ejecting and then little engine in it rings oh sorry um that'll be like good enough for now right yeah many spaceships all right and then uh we'll get time for two more questions so uh for this our second last one i'd like to just talk about go back at the beginning of the show we talked about uh ships that were currently in active development easily our number one most asked yet like if you take all the questions about where is this shipper where is that ship where is that ship it was easily our most ass stuff so i just want to kind of touch upon a couple of things uh before uh uh but before i do that saying er folks check out the public wrote about the public roadmap is always
00:59:23
your best resource for determining which ships are currently in active development and if you don't see it anywhere on the public roadmap it's probably not in active development uh anything you can tell us about the polaris these polaris the the polaris had its um full interior concept work done like we we figured out the full layout it's all that already we figured out the metrics for everything what needs to go in um there's been some changes to the actual uh polarises um loadout but i'm not gonna say more because once again we're not ready to show right now but there's been some updates to bring it up to scratch with everything else similar to when the merchant had it um revisit when we brought it up to the
01:00:10
standards there is now but i don't think now is the time to actually go into detail about it but it's had some significant changes to bring it up to where it needs to be i mean as far as the concept goes i if i remember correctly it's ready for development when we can find a slot if i remember right pretty much yeah i think one one big-ish thing to talk about on it was the original concept for it the hangar was sort of not quite to any of the hangar metrics and now it is so much like the odyssey it has a proper two metric hanger so it can fit a much larger range of ships in there rather than as much fun as it was watching everyone on reddit spectrum um
01:00:58
getting photoshop out and deciding what ships can fit in there um it is a proper size now so there's it should remove that and that naturally got a little bigger and we always make things bigger but it's um not gigantic sorry come on uh when it comes to things getting bigger i mean i suppose i could say that it does have it um a capital shield generating it now because i mean it what it is it did get some component increases as well because that's what people are probably very curious about with it um so it has had its uh power plant coolant shield generator bumped up to capital level um yeah and when it does go into active development which is which is we assign you know 3d artists to actually start building it that's when we'll begin to showcase it on
01:01:46
inside star citizen you'll start to see some of this reconcepting work and all that stuff like that so so again it's had some recent work reconcepting but it is still not in active development so there are no it won't be any new updates to give you until that time comes uh so it crosses that line that the banner merchant just crossed uh the corsair what can you tell us about the corsair remember we're out of time so we're looking at it there's we've white boxing pre-production we've got some people digging into it this week and next week started yeah unless john shouts me saying that but yeah yeah basically literally this week yeah we just started rolling onto it so it will you i mean i'm not sure when we'll first start showing it it's like
01:02:33
very days but yeah we're on it uh and then of course the merchantman recently just began its uh began its white box uh we showcased the first images of that off of last week other shows other ships that folks are asking about the perseus the apollo the kraken the ranger the endeavor the genesis that was probably me asking uh those are ships that are not in active development yet so there are no updates to give finally just one last question before we let you go john crew uh why do you why does john crew look like he wants to die anytime someone mentions the endeavor i know exactly who asked this because i saw her in the thread um i don't know it's just something about that ship maybe it's the space farming
01:03:20
ship that it gets to me or the the absolute headache i know is gonna hit us for um because it was before my time at the company the absolute headache we're going to have with the modularity on it this is a good chance to remind folks especially in uh lieu of carrick keller and everything that at star citizen we do things a little differently in our stuff if you haven't if you haven't noticed watching my stuff for the last seven years now uh our our fine and wonderful devs are not trained marketing professionals they get to speak their mind here they get they get to share their personal opinions about things i get to say that i don't like the carrick i've never liked the
01:04:07
carrick a lot of people do you know john can not be super excited about the you know endeavor paul can think that the the the odyssey is a carrot killer these are personal opinions by the people who are working on these ships and we are very grateful that we get the opportunity to share the personal opinions of our developers we want you to know who we are we want you to know what we honestly think about this stuff and sometimes that can get mixed up when people are used to seeing uh bland and sanitized marketing crap from everybody else out there in the industry so just i would just encourage folks to remember that that's not who we are we tell you what we think personally about our own thoughts our own feelings our own views on things and we think that's important
01:04:57
because that is that's frankly it's who we've been since this project started back in 2012 going all the way back to the wing man's hangar days that was started before john it was started before me and i'm proud to carry that torch today so just always rem just always remember that you know when we're talking we're talking for ourselves that's one of the things that sets us apart so for ben for mark for yogi for chris excellent job today chris you held you you held it down man yeah no worries i can be silent for an hour and john crew uh i'm jared huckaby uh i'll see you next week everybody take care bye you

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