Star Citizen: Around the Verse - The Labours of Hercules

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:14

   hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse i'm sandi gardiner and i'm eric kieron davis this week jared huckaby brings us another installment of shipshape with looks at the anvil hurricane and something new from a manufacturer we haven't heard from in a while you're definitely gonna want to stick around for that but first let's drop in again on Ricky Jetley for your weekly dose of roadmap goodness and another star citizen project update show us what's new for the PU Ricky thanks guys let's get things started and take a look at the road map the PMA VMA has been integrated into the item kiosks working on a boot sequence planned for the kiosk monitors the intention is to animate the character shown on the kiosk to specifically show off weapons and clothing as the player is browsing through options wireframe for the

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   shopping flow continues to be worked on speaking of the PMA and VMA no big ass improvements continue with game play teams adjusting the arm position to better match the target adding fade in and out to the loading screens and integrating tooltip on the app burns to reveal what each app is when you hover over it as a resolve these adjustments the button press is misaligned at the moment and the animation team will be helping to get that back in line with the app projection graphics a quantum travel bug causing ships to spin out of control upon coming out of QT was recently fixed turns out the game was storing mass moves made during the quantum travel process and executing them all in short order upon exit and the gameplay teams have been working on streamlining the quantum travel process for better functionality and ease within

3. 00:01:51

   the developing group system with UI mock-ups for quantum linking almost complete and calibration based implementation for the feature in progress looking forwards future releases the effects has been doing scanning R&D for visuals and the way that the scanning grid is implemented in a cockpit this is very early prototypical work and the team is take feedback from chris roberts and others into account as they continue to research and tweak the mechanic VFX has also been doing R&D on a very experimental particle spline emitter that could potentially be used to create various space anomalies like aurora borealis energy pulsing through the coil and more elaborate and diverse explosions the ship team have been looking at the interiors of the Aegis hammerhead performing color palette

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   tests to determine which color and lighting combinations work best with early work continuing on the bridge cargo room and captain's quarters on the origin 600 I the exploration module is complete and work on the ship's escape pods and interior corridors is almost complete as we finish designing the escape pods the ship team is putting their heads together with design and animation in order to nail down how the functionality and animation will work with game mechanics meanwhile the rework of the consolidated Outland Mustang line is ongoing with the ship now in the final art stages the props team have continued their work on the hangar props adding more heavy machinery to the set to bring movement and life to the

5. 00:03:26

   utilitarian hangars the utilitarian material has gone through a polish improving the wear to give a harsher transition between the layers of paint and surfaces that have accumulated over the years of use and maintenance and here we see their work on a modular cable set which has been white boxed and handed over to the environment art team for validation before taking them further through the art pipeline the tech our team has been prototyping procedural prop placement work is being done on different layouts to add variety to its rooms the systems can be used for decals on walls exteriors and usable items as well when using the tool a designer can place a volume in the environment which can be named or tagged to indicate a prop or a collection of props to be spawned the tool will

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   specify the category type of prop dimensions branding and theme the props are set up to allow a layered approach to these volumes where a certain volume placed by design could suggest an object with smaller objects on top of it which in turn specifies smaller volumes for instance a designer could spawn a table which has a volume allowing for something to spawn on top of it the volume could be tagged to spawn one a variety of plates which would also have a volume to spawn food the food could also spawn something like a fork or knife stuck into it the tech can be applied to many different prop sets and designers can increase the variation through creating more elaborate setups via prefab libraries the environment art team is focused on visual development for hearse to known

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   as moons set to be released in alpha 33 here we see recent work done on components of la ville Hurston's main landing zone that's all for this week we'll see you next time with more PU progress back to you in the studio that's cool stuff Ricky it's gonna be really fun watching progression of alpha 3.2 features over the next couple of months as they really start coming together remember you can always follow along with development yourself via our public road map on the website that's right and for an overview of the work done on the PU as well as squadron 42 over the last month check out comlinks for our latest monthly report yeah we'll have another project update next week now who's ready for a shipload of new info Andy yeah alright let's go to jared for our double dose of shipshape

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   greetings citizens and welcome to another brand-new edition of shipshape where we take a look at what's on the ship pipeline who's working on what provide interviews with developers and sometimes just you know sometimes I let people pick my new favorite ship in the comments below the video and that in turn forces me to do something I don't want to do I'm your host Content Manager Jared Huckaby now behind me you see the ship pipeline that's the ever-evolving continuously refined network of phases milestones and review points necessary to ensure you the best possible spaceship or vehicle for your star citizen experience like the 300 series rework which is still in design review it's scheduled to resume its journey later this year we've also got the origin 100 I which we introduced in last

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   month's show which is of course concept complete the Orion massive mining vessel that it is it's currently on hold pending additional resources that means there's no ETA available for that at this time also absolutely nothing in grey box nothing to talk about there at all all told there are 64 different ships and vehicles that have already made their journey through the pipeline and are now available in the star citizen universe with another 52 on their way actually you know what we're gonna have to make that 55 after today's show that's because it's my honor to introduce to you three brand new additions to star citizen's pantheon of spaceships now you're probably saying to yourself I hope it's Aegis let me tell you a fine citizen at this point there

10. 00:07:35

    are no more plans for Aegis ships for the remainder of 2018 I know it I couldn't believe it either so what is it then Drake RSI both worthy manufacturers for new additions but instead we're going all the way back to where my work with the ships of star citizen began yes it's time to reintroduce the world to Crusader industries and their brand new line of military-grade transport ships the Hercules starlet now whether it's the m2 milspec ready to transport ground vehicles like the cyclone or Nova tank into the thickest war zones the c2 civilian cargo variant meant to carry large-scale cargo as safely and securely as possible or the devastating a2 Hercules gunship that's meant to bring the pain down upon anyone and anything in its path Crusader

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    Industries is back and ready to make its presence felt in the star citizen universe let's check in with the team members in our Manchester studio who are working to bring the new Hercules star lifter to life the Crusader of stylish though this is a new shape you roll and for me and the team you a new manufacturer this is the transporter you know sort of military transporter ship basic you know it's got quite a large cargo capacity so it can hold up to two temple tanks so that's some hefty firepower that you can store inside it and then we've got the three variants depending on which you know what role you want to play and once you know what piece of the game you want to take on so the base variant this is more like you sort of commercial commercial haul you

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    know it comes in the the white red and black livery looks pretty cool you know has full cargo capacity it's essentially like a roll-on/roll-off type of situation so has ramp at the front ramp at the back so we can just like said you can roll tanks up and then roll them off comes with four four turrets essentially unmanned turrets sort of two on the neck and then two on the back and so it has you know decent matter firepower basically obviously comes with the V tolls standard interior so that's sort of split into two so you've got the main cargo section and there's a lift of the side that takes you up and that's or takes you into the main sort of a habitation sort of guts of the ship so basically can get from there into small

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    hub zone and in the bridge if it would be in our world it could be used by the UN for example to reach certain areas endangered supply to people or to helped people after that we got military variant which is cm2 achilles it has a navy armor on one size 3 or imitates at the font which is basically just under the nose so it's even more firepower has a font it's basically is mostly the same ship we just do I want the regular variant with more cargo capabilities all the way want the military variant which is a bit more heavily protected on a bit more guns it comes in different livery so it comes in the greys and then we've got full-on gunship version which is you

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    know this is does exactly as it says on the tin I mean this is basically the full hopped up full firepower it comes with four additional unmanned turrets and also you lose half of the cargo space so you still have a fair amount of space just to bring stuff with you but in that space well basically you'll have an option of using either some the equivalent of no abs you know mother of all bombs so you'll have four of those that can be stacked like a stereo to either side and they sort of an angle and they sort of just drop down then through the floor or sort of a modular unit for sort of bomblets so we've all worked out sort of again a small modular

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    unit they can then we can slot in so you'll have four of these so you and your buddies can run it in up the lift run - run to where your command station is getting your chair screen comes down and then you know you're assessing looking through the eyes of the gun and then you're all you're all shooting away so yeah I think if that's going to be that's going to be a pretty hefty one for sure though the gunship has the guns more focused on the on the button of the hull naturally it's about it's almost hundred meters along 70 metres wide so it's not a dockside ship here additional seats were so just can control the guns that's that's got nice then T redesigned between the country and the basic

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    version for example it's quite different when you in the COG a cargo area because you have all the new equipment for the pump systems there's also an additional seat in the cockpit area the additional guns on the country they changed the shape quite a bit because you have it's up to wait at the basic rationing of s feuless for guns and that the country profession you have so well as five guns so it's always interesting to work on new new manufacturers basically new to us you know obviously Chris had words only you know earlier in the project and they'd worked on that and Genesis Starliner which is more of a airliner you know just for you knows for carrying

17. 00:13:26

    people passenger airliner basically there's already some existing art language design language for that and star citizen now we're generally sort of trying to get things into quite different categories so you you know okay that's Crusader that's aegis that's own bill in the past we've had some crossover and you know we're trying to keep things quite separate where possible and so on this you know there were just summit summers like some key shapes that we've taken it's literally just you know there's a certain profile of that Starliner there's very similar that we've sort of taken but with this you know with the star lift it's a

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    different role of ship isn't it so we didn't want it just to be a standard military carrier so Mike's done a good job of taking taking the functionality and take it no sort of initial styling cues that we wanted and then advancing it and you know that's always that's always the best part for a concept artist it's new it's fresh you know there's they've got a lot more freedom to define things as usual and I'd like to start with just simple something sketches just black and white and doing different versions of them selecting best solutions of the sketches and then let's say two or three and continue

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    continue with those so it took two sketches into 3d made a rough concept block out of them and then there was a final decision between those two and then after you have the rough final idea of the overall shape and interior you you go ahead with a bit more into detail not too much but yeah you start defining the shapes and how it fits with interior continuous interior and it just exterior and till you can focus on buttons in the corporate we we had some concerns at some points like isn't that too many guns isn't that like too much firepower

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    but we we've tried to balance it as much as possible so that's why the guns that are on the gunship are not facing forward so like for example a single-player if it was just alone in his gun ship it wouldn't really makes a big difference with a military ship if you want to phrase a gunship you need to have friends our AI with it so they can fire the guns towards a corner or to one society it's more an air to ground combat design the guns are angled on the side but they are more angle a bit downwards as well so obviously it's not like real planes where we're life gunships will try to circle around the position because those are spaceships you don't really have to circle around but she seen you have to

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    hunger a bit to be sure that you can eat this way or bus way at the same time I mean probably Mike probably did like uh now 30 30 or so initial sketches and then from now is probably developed another 10 and and just building up building up building up and my job is really to sort of work with Mike to basically get us to a point where we've got a couple three solutions for Chris to choose from on this occasion he was dialed down to two and was when I was saying one definitely was more sci-fi both really good like strong strong silhouettes strong form language and then it just comes down to Chris Watts you know what is what did you want the

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    version that people are saying now is there is a version that Chris Chris went with and you know initially I don't think we'd really sort of fact it in the vetoes and they can't became a big feature of the ship and we you know as as the design developed you know would still sort of a you know reference back to the Starliner and we still got the key things here that we want to keep star line is basically like a double wing we haven't kept the fan but I wanted to keep that sort of double wing with the negative space so you so you see that very much like in there in the front shot of the vehicle and again it was just sort of keeping the hump of the head and the sort of slender neck and then a little bit of a hump at the back a little bit of a spoiler and then that

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    you know after that sort of tails off into its own thing and with all these things it's you know it's you're you're in constant development you know the next you know the next one will do well you know will advance a little more will be like okay currently we've got these three things that we hang our hat on you know that we always use for our design and we've got these other two things now that we that makes you know that becomes part of the style guide it's always got to have these things I think the biggest challenge for me was the poorest size of it when you compare it to the hog which was my ship I did before it was like this size the hog and now you have the star lifters like this so yeah and then designing this in the same amount of

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    time which much more content it's it's it's quite challenging so obviously well it's it it's not going to fly before a while but this is we we have the dimensions we are sure that we can't hit two tanks inside we can't read the specific amount of cargo units we can check all the components inside we can we'll see ejection seats work will the player be able to walk inside without any issues will there be any issues in terms of atmosphere which shall be an issues in terms of metrics so obviously all of this we already checked I'm really looking forward to see the behavior when it's flying atmosphere how it changes from flight mode to landing

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    mode with the VTOL on the side because they're some separate kind of separated wings which can rotate and when it's landing in a traditional sort of strict sense of what this vehicle would be imagined to be used for yeah it would be it would be that would be softening up the enemy you take out their defenses then you can come in land you know with that with having that with those large vetoes you can learn pretty much anywhere unload your ground forces so you know yeah we're looking at so you know you know it can hold two tumbrils but the Korean see who knows I'll probably load up 200 people do you know what I mean it'll be like we don't know we don't know what will happen but yeah

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    you could have an Army's mini army just roll off and then and yeah you'll have clans who will have not just one they'll have multiple so yeah and just like in the in the promo shots we've done you could have essentially your task force coming in and just completely taking over somewhere I'm just blitzing it ramps in the front and back cargo capacity enough to hold two immense Nova takes sights for guns man turrets remote turrets and a gunship variant all combined to make this Hercules capable of completing any labor set before it that's a classical lit joke now you'll be able to get your hands on a brand new Hercules star letter from Crusader industries when its

27. 00:21:32

    concept or motion opens to everyone on May 11th but before we get to our next feature let's get a quick update on a few more ships making their way through the ship pipeline in grey box phase the constellation Phoenix has made it all the way to the gray box final approval stage and as you may have already seen from Sandy's social media accounts tech designers have already begun the process of hooking up things like the doors and the seats while ships like the Mustang the blade the Eclipse and the hurricane are all continuing their journeys through the final art phase now ships like the hurricane are scheduled to come online with alpha 3.2 at the end of this quarter so let's check in now with some of the team working on that ship that introduced the phrase glass hammer the star citizen universe the anvil hurricane is a hard-hitting

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    anti capital ship typed wrath it's sown the same kind of shape and styling of a dog fighter like you'd see with the sabre the super hornet but strength really comes from being able to leverage the four size three guns on its man turret against a larger target what was interesting about the hurricane specifically it's got some some shapes on it that aren't really common on many anvil ships so what you'll notice is that you've got sweeping lines that go from the nose all the way to the wing and some lines that go all the way from the nose over the back all the way to the tail so you have the circle turret on the back and you've got a lot of sort of flat shapes and vertical stabilizers so the first thing I had to do was sort of approach the ship slightly differently

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    than we do other anvil ships so you'll notice that the wing flows directly into the side of the body which flows directly into the nose it was also really cool to work on it because I was able to incorporate almost directly elements from other Ambulance like the gladiator what's cool about this ship in particular is that we physically have separated the position of the gunner and the pilot so there's no conflict between the enter and exits between those two but I was able to do a pretty refined sort of mechanism for pulling the seat up and then also ejecting out of the pilot seat so it's got a it's got a rail that's separate from the seed and everything sort of mounted together in a really cool way the idea with this is you've got a pilot and gunner team working in concert with each other where the pilot is finding and setting the

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    best lines to give the turret gunner the longest on target field of fire to whatever they're attacking but on the flip side it's got a sort of poor armor poor poor shielding so on its own you know it's kind of you know it's a bit of a gamble how you'll do in a fight you know if it's the classic you're coming out of the Sun and you know take somebody buy some prop you know by surprise chanceless blow the mouth water no problem but if you're you know if you're spotted then you're probably gonna have some issues so the Hurricanes turret is a bespoke setup that we've made just for this ship normally a turret is only gonna have a pair of guns total on it with this one we decide to make it a quad laser type

31. 00:24:49

    setup so it's got two guns on either side of the turret just more throughput to it and giving the ship the ample power and cooling throughput to actually handle all of those guns firing at full force as long as possible so we're adding the hurricane because we want something where you can and get that swarm of fighters approaching but that swarm is going to tear apart a large target thinking about almost like you know a swarm of army ants or fire ants coming at you know a piece of carrion on the ground they're gonna pass over that and there's not going to be anything left but bones and its wake and that's sort of the idea where you you get a wing of hurricanes working together maybe you put a vanguard in serve as a spearhead for

32. 00:25:39

    that wing to take some of the damage from whatever target you're fighting and you're going to put a tremendous amount of damage on whatever target you want to they're not going to they're not going to hold up that well on their own against sustained fire but you you put a pack of them together they're going to just shred things apart it's difficult because you know then it's going to be part of the family and and you know for players and for the community you want something that's slightly different but you know it's where to push and pull where to where to go wild or not and so we sort of we there was a lot of sort of hopping around on this one especially in the early stages and then remember there was one key stage we hit well you know

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    looks really good really stole it was hitting all the sort of key beats and then and then yeah we kind of I ideally we should have just got it you know it would have been nice nice straight road from he to the A to Z but you know we sort of meandered and so when you sort of looking in that initial sketch in the final sketch then not really that far apart but we did do a bit of a crazy loop to get to there but it's kind of for me it's as part of the process you know I personally want I want to make sure that we've investigated the options and not just plumbed for the obvious thing you know I want to make sure that you know let's look at something that gives it more of a fragile nature it's you know let's look at adding fins or taking off fins you know adding a bit of

34. 00:27:16

    more gladiator influence or more Horner influence and just see where that takes it so there's always that process so the cockpit on this particular ship is a little bit more minimalist than other anvil ships so we still have a bunch of buttons all over the place which corresponds to every system in the game but for the most part the dashboard is is very clean we're not adding a tons of detail in areas just for the sake of adding them on this one we're keeping the player view we're trying to keep the complaint view as clean as possible and any details that we have are meant to mostly be functional so the cockpit in this particular ship is a little bit more minimalist and your average anvil ship but the cockpit in the turret I

35. 00:28:05

    think is extremely cool because that thing you basically are sitting in a bubble surrounded by weapons and when you start firing you can see the muzzle flash of each gun around you just going off so it feels like you are the gun and firing and that thing is super cool you know I've got the style guide we know you know here's are the key things here the key beats that need to be hint we can and we can do variety within those beats in terms of proportion and placing but those are the things that are important to this brand and so the ship has followed that you know into and in terms of its line work you know split lines I mean the ship comes across as a little more not complex but slightly higher manufacturing kind of ability so

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    it's a little it's a little sleeker in places but generally you know they'll be familiarities in in terms of what you see in the gladiator and we see in the hurricane I think I think him you know the sort of increase in skill needed for the ship could could well be a selling point I think it'll be you know I think it's going to probably divide the community you have people who like I don't want to touch this shape with a bargepole because I'm just gonna get shot to pieces and that'd probably be me and then you're gonna have players who are just like you have I'm going to take this on let's see what we can do with it and you know with that firepower you know and you know there were there are other games was what you can't mention but you know they have those sort of similar mechanics where you have just got massive firepower and you know you just

37. 00:29:45

    see you take a chance see if you can get away with it dare I say would you be the griefer I'm not quite sure but I think it'll be fun yeah the the benefit of the hurricane over say a bomber like a gladiator and eclipse against a larger target is going to be just sustained throughput ordinance so missiles torpedoes rockets anything like that it's a finite supply on any ship that carries it laser blasts aren't as finite as long as you've got a functional power plant and functional coolers you can keep shooting and so it's that sustained throughput that's going to give the hurricane its advantage in fighting these larger targets because you know a retaliatory drops all of its torpedoes in a big salvo will say you know anti-missile systems take out a couple of those

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    torpedoes or one of the torpedoes manages to hit you know a fully shielded face that retaliate err isn't going to wait twenty second thirty Seconds for its systems to sort of cool down a bit and fire another volley they're gonna be out of ammo whereas the hurricane okay I messed up on one pass well the the pilot can find a new line we do another pass zip down the ship zip down the target and keep just pushing out that that steady throughput of damage on target the hurricane definitely feels like it's the kind of ship that's gonna appeal the most to teams of players wanting to pick on bigger targets it can punch above its weight class and then it gets hit once in the wrong spot and it's gonna go spiraling a bit it's a fun ship but it's

39. 00:31:21

    not the kind of thing that you want to try and go picking fights with more purebred dog fighters in it just take a look at the nose then I think it has an incredibly aggressive nose there's a lot of detail in there it looks like a really angry face and I think that sort of reflects what what it's supposed to feel like when this thing's bearing down on you just get out of the way man let's just call this thing the pew-pew edition of shipshape huh I mean seriously you can admire that from any angle but not the front do not get in front of that thing now before we bring this edition of shipshape to a close I promise to do a thing last episode I said I didn't know how to pick my favorite from amongst our citizens now 119 different ships and vehicles and that instead I'd let the comments below the video decide a new favorite for me

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    well in what some might have called predictable fashion you find citizens overwhelmingly suggested that my new favorite ship should be the carrot now I was gonna do this silly thing here but I figured you'd rather some real information about this very popular exploration ship so I don't have much but what I can tell you right now is that because the reclaimer has been implemented in alpha 3.1 a very small team of artists that worked on that ship after finishing some other minor tasks we need them to you know do first those guys will move on to the carrot now this small team is scheduled to do a couple months of what we call R&D where they flesh out things like the anvil style guide as it applies to ships that are

41. 00:32:57

    much larger than something like the hurricane as well as adjust the interior design in line with everything we've learned since the concept was first introduced in 2014 which let me tell you that's a lot now when they're done with those sprints the team will expand and work will begin proper on bringing this fabled ship to life so what does that mean you know timeline wise well while everything is still subject to shifting priorities and schedules work by this small R&D team is currently scheduled to begin next month so does that mean that we're gonna see the character in 2018 it does not at this moment it's a 2019 ship and it's not on the public road map that's already available for first quarter 2019 so you should adjust your expectations accordingly it's gonna be a long road to bring in

42. 00:33:45

    the character life but since we get better at this with each and every ship we make I think you can I think we can all agree that the wait will almost certainly be worth it for shipshape I'm the guy that tracks all ship stuff Jared Huckaby back to you Eric and sandy Thank You Jared as mentioned haven't seen a ship from Crusader industries in some time and the Hercules looks like a worthy follow-up to the Genesis yes another big useful ship from Crusader keep an eye out for more information on the Hercules and the upcoming concept promotion our Intel screenshot contest continues and we've had a lot of really impressive entries so far with has gotta taking home the prize in round one for his dramatic capture check it out check out spectrum for a closer look at these awesome shots and find out how to enter

43. 00:34:34

    for the chance to win your own Intel obtain 900p solid-state drive and tickets are available for citizencon and we welcome you to join us on October 10th at the Long Center in Austin Texas check the official comm link for details and while you're on the website don't forget to enlist to receive our squadron 42 newsletter for project updates and development highlights from the game that's all for this week make sure to tune in to this week's new lore makers guide to the galaxy for a tour of the Oso system and calling all devs for answers to questions about the planets Crusader Hurston and more and don't miss this week's reverse the verse live at 9:00 a.m. PDT 4qa on the Hercules following its reveal and today shipshape thanks and as always to our subscribers for sponsoring all of these shows yes and of course thank you

44. 00:35:21

    to all of the backers your support makes it possible for us to deliver truly remarkable gaming experiences so until next time we will see you around the verse [Music] thanks for watching for the latest and

45. 00:36:12

    greatest in star citizen squadron 42 you can subscribe to our Channel or you can check out some of the other shows and you can also head to our website at www.uvu.edu/library