Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Vanduul Blade & Shops 'n Trade

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:15

   hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse I'm sandy Gardner and I'm Chris Wallace this week Jarrod's back with an installment of ship-shape on the Vandal blade yes and we'll see what's in store for the immediate future of shopping chaos I know you all want to know but first let's go once again and Rikki gently for this week's tar sands and projects update yes let's take a look at where we are on the roadmap and what the doves have been up to thanks guys let's get things tired and take a look at the roadmap more progress has been made on the mining mechanic Laser arc highlights are in and working but the VFX are just placeholders and will be replaced once new tech is complete right now we have three levels of breakage for rocks with a fourth still to be added and we're still tinkering with the

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   physics to get just right Rock destruction VFX work is also ongoing with work being done on specific States like in progress mining safe mining and incorrect dangerous mining again the visuals here will be replaced with new tech once it's available so that beam you're seeing isn't the finished article implementing feedback from chris Roberts we've been adjusting the way the tractor beam looks and acts as well as making further tweaks to the scanning and mining UIs which will be finalized once the prospectors boom arm is complete it has been determined that your weapons will be offline while in mining mode due to the power allocation and we're still working on the button interaction and key bindings that will switch and control the modes test cases are being implemented to help various

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   teams get FPS AI working in the pu in this example you see the AI running on a server with an outpost being used as the test level as you can see the AI don't behave as expected due to many factors which do not become apparent until they are placed in real-world scenarios such as running over a network or being within the zone of a rotating planet these levels highlight issues like this and provide teams a testbed to work more rapidly on fixes early VFX work has been done on the death masks for several ships here you see first damaged pass effects for the aegis avenger rework and damage effects are being worked on for several other ships including the anvil hurricane that's some pretty cool explosions this team

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   has also been working on ballistic weapon VFX improvements including a more natural muzzle flash and less intrusive tracers as seen here with submachine guns and sound design is being worked on for some of the FPS guns planned for alpha 3.2 like gemini 55 and the scalpel sniper rifle environmental where continues on the hangers that you'll be seeing in Denarius space stations with more areas in the gray box design phase such as the drone base scene here we've also been adding thematic panels to add visual interest and open up opportunities for

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   interesting AI interactions and narrative choices in these locations finally door animations have been blocked in which also adds some nice dramatic touches work continues on the planet Hairston with its multiple biomes being visually developed and tested and its landing zone lovel really starting to come together here we see visual work on an acidic biome the asset tinting applied here as

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   seen in last week's update really helps this biome allowing less assets to do more and the distribution of rocks continues to be improved also some visual tweaks are being made to the sulfur pools that dominate this environment and here are some work-in-progress renderings of a savanna biome with trees and lighting getting some attention this area is also being used as a testing ground for wind and detail bending you can see the visual and geographic diversity that's being developed for Hurston and its moons beginning to take shape finally we get more glimpses of the Hurston trash biome if any of the sets really represent the environmentally compromised planet it's definitely the trash biome as low levels visual development continues the

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   environment our team is putting together these prototypes for artistic direction mood and to show what VFX will be needed that's all for this week we'll see you next time for more pee-yew progress back to you in the studio thanks Ricky so we'll have more pee-yew updates in the coming weeks and you can always follow along with the road map wait a week on the RSA website one of your features set for alpha 3.2 that we've been tracking on the road map these last few weeks is item kiosk shopping yes as you've seen in previous project updates the functionality UI and visual presentation of the kiosk continues to evolve let's see where the teams are on this system which will open up the ability to purchase a lot more items than we have room for in some of our stores what's planned for three two's release and

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   beyond in this week's feature so right now we're working on a shopping kiosk and what that's gonna be is that said in Weld screen that the player can walk up to in any shop and location and actually purchase items from that shop for the item kiosk work we actually took some inspiration from the VMA and the PMA we started adding those systems in terms of like displaying items displaying the ship items and giving the option to select the items that we wish to research we took of course on some notes from the commodity kiosk system that we currently have and adding those two systems to one step actually showing the character loadout and also the

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   vehicle loadout and presenting with items that we have available in that store for that particular let's say cooler or engine or missile that we want to browse by time we finished the implementation it's not gonna look like the the PMA or the or the VMA on the mobi glass they'll obviously have a complete reskin there'll be additional flow when trying to explain how the VMA and the PMA actually work is that we have a request the user makes a request we go into our what we call persistency we make a request for let's say player number one requests the items that he has on his vehicle number one and the server will return to us a bunch of items that belong to that vehicle to

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    that character and we then with those items well we basically need to transform the data and make it presentable for the user in a really nice way how Discipline kiosk is let's say a player goes into a store he has his Gladius pre-selected he goes into the store and he wants to see which items apply to his Gladius let's say he picks a cooler player will need to request to persistency i want to see every cooler that works on my Gladius for this ship and the server will return to us all of the items and then we have the data that we can then present to the player in a nice way in the item kiosk shop we already have a kind of dynamic platform that we can use

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    to create loadouts may they be for let's say you character or it'd be a ship or a ground vehicle or something like that we can reuse these systems to actually load in let's say items that we have available in a store though going through that steps of following some systems that we already have in place would be the easiest step to actually getting a new system up so essentially the user interface is an extension of the personal manager and vehicle manager where their navigation scheme is largely the same however there's some key differences that we need to take into account for the shop so in for instance displaying price as factoring stats and

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    the comparison functionality well it's the flow for just purchasing in general and selling it so in terms of the actual skimming of the UI we've worked on a branding system where this kiosk can basically be in multiple different shops and what we want to have is the actual branding being reflected on the kiosk but in the way that its scalable for us so if there's twenty thirty shops fifty different shops a hundred different shops we can just slot in different branding and styles that will make a big impact on the experience we are trying a new kind of presentation for these item kiosk shops the user will go to the item kiosk he will pre select like I want to buy

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    items he will have for example his ship loaded in automatically he will then get to pick the item port that he wants to actually make a purchase for let's say a cooler he will then see the one he has equipped on that vehicle and then he will see a list of items that are available on the store every time he clicks an item on the store he will get to see likes sistex for that item how that item compares to the one he has equipped and also the availability to buy that item to actually buy it and equip equipment to the ship or to actually just buy it and store it somewhere and do whatever he wants to do with it the first thing you'll do on a shopping kiosk is you'll

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    choose whether you want to buy something or whether you want to sell something because the sell functionality is gonna be important for us going forward as well the player could actually go to a store let's say he finds a sweet deal on let's say a couple of missiles and he says like okay I have this couple of missiles but I don't want to equip them right now in my ship okay let let me just store them somewhere and what we call the global invent inventory and let me just keep it there for a couple of like days or so until I actually need that the shopping kiosk is obviously important for a mission and allowing the player to access some of the things that are currently outside of the game in the game sort of in fiction but it's also important for as one of the big first

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    steps for the economy Satan shops in certain locations are gonna sell items that potentially are made from materials that are local so this is gonna tie into the mind and system and everything so a particular weapon is made from a particular metal that is my noble locally so that's gonna be kind of in abundance at this location but it also it might mean that they're cheap there but it also means that maybe you can't get them elsewhere where that material isn't my Noble and then obviously the no cons there are if I go and buy some stuff from there I could potentially sell it where it's rare you know the kind of economy side of things really kicks off when we start to look at supply and demand of things like that to that level so where we're at right now

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    is we've had our initial sign off on the general flow and the functionality that we mocked up in our prototype so it may not be perfect off the bat but it helps us to as artists and as engineers do realize what are the exact requirements how's this thing supposed to work and how is it how does the how's it flow it's all about kind of giving players options it's speeding up gameplay effectively it means that they don't spend forever looking through different menus it also really kind of helps the new players so someone new to the game might not know that they have to physically buy something go into a different app in the movi bus equip it that way with this item kiosk they know

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    I bought this thing I'm equipping it to this spot and it's done and it's all simple and easy for them to use so this release will have our first iteration of the item shop kiosks you know we're reflective of our prototyping or art and implementation but it'll be the first pass so right now we're at the step where you can now purchase items and it goes into your global inventory we've also got the system working so you can select an item port and it shows rather than stuff to ship to by next stop fours is to get shop items and what you own side by side in a list so that way you can see this is why I own this is why I would be replacing and this is what my options are in terms of future development we will take a look at the

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    feedback that comes through from the playerbase testing the UI and our internal usability testing as well so future development will have future iterations you know there'll be things that we'll want to adjust and tweak in terms in order to optimize the flow and the experience in general so there are things that we can't really force see now and there and most of the time that is the case but we've gone as far as we can in the time that we've had allotted and we we have a solution that we think will work well but it really comes down to how is the how does how is the player ultimately going to experiences where we're currently at is probably the most

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    exciting part is we have a functionality already working so a person can go into a shop can actually see the items can actually buy them and stay with them so it already makes the call to persistency the fun part now comes word we are starting to reskin the item kiosks so instead of having that kind of look and feel of the VMA and PMA they're going to have their distinct feel of like okay this is an item kiosk it's gonna have like feeling in terms of stores it's gonna have a slightly different layout and the VMA then the PMA it's gonna be familiar enough that players know how to use it but it's going to be a little bit different not to just reuse assets it's gonna be

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    unique so to speak thanks guys with alpha 3.2 not far away we'll see further improvements to the shopping kiosks in upcoming project updates yes it's always a work in progress big we have a whole bunch of stuff that we need to do so 3 2 is going to have the basics but we'll get to need to improve in 3 3 and onwards because shopping kiosks will be one way that we'll be able to allow you to purchase a lot of items that you may not always have shop space for space for so always be accommodation so the 3 2 will be the first time you'll have a kiosk you can actually buy sort of larger items than we let you buy and most the shops now and but it's a lot of work also due out with 3.2 is the Vandal blade let's go to jared huckaby for another installment of

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    shipshape taking a look at this menacing fighter greetings citizens and welcome to an all-new edition of shipshape where we take a look at what's making its way down the ship pipeline towards release into the star citizen universe I'm your host Content Manager Jared Huckaby now you might be asking yourself hey I thought shipshape was a monthly thing well it was but as with many things the only constant in video game development is change so we're gonna be trying something new here over the next couple episodes with a shorter more refined by weekly format so what does that mean for you guys what let means you'll still get the same shipshape content that you would have gotten throughout the remainder of 2018 we're just gonna chop them up into smaller and more digestible portions so you don't have to wait as long between updates I

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    know you want ships I got shapes it's not my best metaphor on today's division of ship shape we'll be sitting down with some of the team members in our winslow united kingdom studio who've been working to bring the sleek vanduul blade to life let's get started by taking a look the blade is a small single-seat fighter it's kind of like the scythe but smaller whereas the scythe has a couple of size five guns the blade actually has four size two guns instead it's just a little bit smaller a little bit more easily destroyed but at the same time it's still got a vicious punch so you'd expect from the Vandal essentially it's the Vandal equivalent of the Gladius so we have Vandal blade it's a very agile single-seat fighter with four weapon amounts to of size - yawns concerts and

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    gates a size 1 missiles on top 2 multi-purpose fighter really it's just one of these smaller band duel ships and they're supposed to be coming out of maybe bigger ships gets deployed by the kingship and the idea behind me a plates landing mechanism it's got the wings fold in towards via cockpit and then there's a panel that pops off underneath the wing itself on both sides and then access rear landing gear and in the back recipe ribs which just fold out and revealed the landing gear in the back and just acts as a counterbalance to the rest of it as a voice just tip over maybe blade authorizes very curvy

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    similar to the other vandal ships curve sweeping in and out of each other with lots of the animated elements and some biomechanical influences like from HR Giger it's as fast and aggressive as Wendell ships tend to be it's also got a fairly interesting profile where it's almost shaped like the batwing it's got this little u-shaped curve to it basically it's just a fast aggressive ship it's not particularly durable but you know it's a bad guy so if you're supposed to blow it up some of the organic elements it glows pulsus continuously throughout the ship - and to give it a lot more life and then immerse some animated ribs but open up to reveal the landing gear I don't want to call the profiles sinister but definitely it's it's nothing that the

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    humans particularly their design their tips for in addition to this it's got this of accoutrements you'd expect from the vanduul it's got like little spike blades on the front of its wings it's got some spikes on the back of the wings where they're like vents just poking out the back for little spikes coming out of it it's a spiky evil sinister looking ship with red glowing lights all over it I mean very clearly you look at you like that about go show the interior of a blade is very organic and feels similar to be exterior same kind of basic curves going everywhere it's bit more intricate as it's an interior it needs to be the dashboard is completely hologram based except for me joysticks to steer the ship everything else is just holographic which gives it a bit of a distinct look from the rest of the year it ships for

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    sure some rubber ships rather similar in with lots of holographic I think me a vandal stylus pushes that a bit further one of the main things is how you get into the ship with the Vandal ships you have the seat which is kind of on a runner and the Hat will pop down and the seat will slide down to you and you grab onto the seat and it'll pop back up again taking you with it the blade has exactly the same thing where even though ships smaller we're trying to keep it design metrics you'll yell come down you'll get into it you'll be able to go up and you'll sort of rest on this seat rather sitting down in a seat in the ship in addition to that the cockpit area is don't call it Spartan if I'm going to call it Spartan there aren't it's not like it's not got loads of screens in there like you'd see with a lot of other ships the Vandal

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    kind of have like little hollow predictors which will which display your information for you and it's not cluttered up with lots of screen stuff it's cluttered up with evil bad guy stuff so you know there's evil vents and pipes and stuff everywhere but you know that's fine it's also got a similar flowing organic feel to the like the structure between the glass panels so rather than having like hard angles it's all smooth curves which again handle design philosophy we did follow the lore of vandal quite closely and we actually developed some new ideas while working on it how do they actually make their technology where does it come from how does it run how does it put together that's a quite an interesting way of looking at vandal I think trying to move away from portraying them as those

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    mindless just warrior like you know frenzied creatures and then put some intelligence and some interesting aspects of the culture that make them maybe a little bit more I would say sophisticated but definitely not mindless and quite intelligent and purposeful in what they want to achieve they are scavengers they don't create their technology they absorb all the racist technology and make do what they want with it so so they are really really capable in understanding how stuff works and making stuff work for them by modifying it and like combining stuff together obviously they are not like the visual aspects of their stuff they don't care about that stuff that's a wave like they don't have art they

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    don't have you know pop culture or anything like that they just out there to basically concur and absorb and and assimilate and and then just be stronger that's why their weapons they don't necessarily have a consistent style per se as you can very often see some other races and some other technologies inside for example see a weapon that has a laser emitter that's clearly based on biotechnology you can see completely different lines completely different style than to the what would call von deuce vandal style you can see some human stuff in there because for example there was a battery or or a generator that they really really you know they looked at it they reversed engineered it and connected it to some other stuff and you know it

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    works and if it works that that's already happy about everything is put together using a some sort of bio mechanical I what I call it I call it paste but it's basically this is like all the resources that they scraped and and we find from the planets they conquered they use those ships called harvesters they just set them down and they just basically take everything and refine it and I create because I don't think it's silicon I don't know we actually really know what it is but it's very very strong and and it has this kind of biological look to it and they basically put whatever the weapon they wanted they put it together and then they stick everything was like almost like an outer framing so it don't doesn't fall apart so that's like their equivalent of our I would say welding so

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    all the kind of weapons and a lot of their tech is surrounded by this biological mesh or biological like a structure or framing around so basically it's stood and six together and you can actually use it when I was talking to Dave haddock our director of narrative about it because when we create stuff I don't personally like to create stuff in vacuum I like to have explanation for everything something that came up which I really really like is is this idea of vandal they don't build outwards like humans would so human is going to get a component and attach another component on top of it and an another component and it's kind of growing out like outwards the vanduul like to do is they create a shell a volume and they put

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    stuff inside of it so they call most building inwards that's why I you can see a lot of weird pillars coming in and holding stuff together in a Midland and they kind of work like that as people have seen the Vandal changed quite drastically in looks we had this very very noisy very very grungy almost a scrapyard look to them initially and that was how the first wave of the concept art and a lot of the models was created a few years ago there wasn't necessarily anything very wrong with it other than it was incredibly inefficient and incredibly expensive to run we wanted to to have massive fleets and that's our goal to be able to run a lot of those ships at the same time almost like a swarm like formations so

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    we had to really really cut down on polygons and that when Matt and Colleen couple of years ago they created a vandal driller the the big career of the Vandal fleet in the new style with much more kind organic and smooth curves we followed that with other shapes and we had to kind of pretty much to build a ship according to that and that also affected weapons you can see the old style of vandal weapons on the some of the ships that are currently in PU and you can currently fly like a sigh and glaive try to balance all the smooth curves will be more spiky aggressive shapes it was also also the issue of scale where Barristan feel about much you can can use to to get the scale reference for it verse variously cockpit of course with the glass windows but having one

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    berth there's not much you can really gauge scale by one of the things with the redesign was at one point there was some experimentation with getting like a real room where you could get out the seat and walk around the back of it but at that point the ship started getting a bit too big it was starting to approach the size of the scythe and obviously being a life fighter that was making it too big so that got scrapped to go scale back down again a little bit essentially the ship the core of the ship has stayed the same for all the different iterations the blade is still it's one of the last ships we've made it has a lot of the ideas what we want to do now is we want to kind of go back again from from blade duty driller to get all those ideas and then expand them over the whole fleet again and just to add few more things blade has a little bit of that we want to create few more like common

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    bundle visual elements and maybe add to it a little bit later and add to other ships but it's probably the closest one the closest ship right now that to what we actually want bundle to look like but it it might change a little bit visually in the future obviously like anything else is bound to change Reserve right to change the stuff it's definitely not final we'll see what works it's very iterative iterative process especially when you're working on the whole fleet almost at the same time which is kind of what I'm tasked to do as a bit of life fighter I mean it's gonna go in fast it's going to fire a lot of guns it's going to Harry smaller targets you might you might use multiple of them in conjunction if you've got like a bigger ship to try and pepper it and take it down so something else can come in and strike the killing blow on larger targets it'll be your general-purpose dog's body for fleet it'll fight whatever you want it to and

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    it'll only give him a bit of a bad time now I heard it a few scoffed at the line it's like a Bandula version of the Gladius remark but let me tell ya a while back when we were doing those uh electronic access imitations here across the studios my boy Biddy Sinatra in the QA department was mowing through the rest of us so quickly he didn't even bother to take the names and what ship was he flying the Gladius now it's one of the most exciting aspects of star citizen's continuing development that finding of an effective mix between pilot and ship ships like the Gladius and the blade can seem underwhelming at times that folks like me who need every single advantage they can get on the battlefield in order to not you know embarrass themselves but for those at the top of their game and for anyone that values speed or maneuverability overall firepower ships like these too

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    often end up being just as devastating as any other the bando blade is scheduled to enter the persistent universe in the upcoming alpha 3.2 now also coming in that very same alpha 3.2 let's do a quick update on two ships currently making their way through the pipeline for the aegis Avenger rework in progress now it continues its development with EMP tweaks work on the cargo room LEDs and this look at the work being done on the Avenger renegade library while the team working to bring the stylish origins 600 idle life are making progress with the captains quarters as well as a lighting pass to what's being referred to internally as the hub area now still with plenty of work left to do on both these ships it's exciting to see them moving closer than ever before to their intended release into the star citizen universe with next month's alpha 3.2

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    content patch and that my friends is what we have for you this episode but don't worry cuz I'm gonna be back once again at the end of this month with updates on even more star citizen ships more star citizen spaceship stuff and more well everything that will make star citizen the best damn space sim ever for shipshape i'm jared huckaby i'll see you in two weeks everybody thanks jarred always fun to get a look at alien ships yes it definitely is and although designers have really locked in on the style of the Vandal their ships are becoming very distinct and very threatening and cool-looking threatening for more jarred tuned into reverse AFER's live tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. PDT and if you missed it on monday check out calling all devs for more QA yes because I also have Jared on it

39. 00:31:07

    and you can never have enough charity yeah anyway so big thanks to all our subscribers for sponsoring the show's giving us this platform to share the development process with all of you tickets to citizencon are still available and we couldn't be more excited to share the development process with you in person with a full day of developer presentations and interactions yeah well after last year being successful we're going to expand the format and there's going to be bigger and cooler than before like basically the UK ship department and all the ships they ever do and it's gonna be a long Center in Austin Texas which is also very cool venue so we have a lot of fun in store and can't wait to see hopefully a bunch of you there and October for our latest concept ship the Hercules star lifter from Crusader industries we have a short story contest running to give all you aspiring lore makers out there a

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    chance to craft your own Hercules adventure and win one for your fleet you can't say that I know seriously it's gonna be fun to see all the creative uses the community comes up for the ship it was always fun seeing what people could do with their Cutlass on 3.0 so imagine what it is on a trip as big as the Hercules and also thanks to everyone who participated in our Intel screenshot contest these last few weeks congratulations - winner hosaka Marianne n7 and captain rail rail who all took home their own Intel obtain solid state drives by capturing and showing some spectacular in-game shots and I have to say outside of the three winners there's some amazing shots in the whole screenshot contest every one of the series there was three rounds had I mean it was really hard - for me personally

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    to pick and I think a lot of the people here at the CAG felt exactly the same way so I would say people that haven't gone to the screenshot contest you check it out inspection because the in-game photography that people are doing is amazing and that's all for this week thank you to all of our backers for making this possible until next time we will see you [Music] thanks for watching for the latest and

42. 00:33:49

    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