10 for the All-Stars: Episode 01

19 October 201500:43:161,295 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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[Music] hey everybody and welcome to a special 104 um we've got something a little more unique this time we're going to do something a little bit different we've got people somebody from each of the disciplines to kind of do a round table we've going to go through a lot of the questions that we've got from the forms and uh talk a little bit about how that impacts each of our jobs uh but first we want to thank the subscribers uh because without you guys we couldn't do this right our subscribers kick us a little bit every month to allow us to do this enhanced Community content that uh we hope you're uh going to enjoy so I kind of want to go real quick around and introduce who I'm sitting with uh to my right Adam Weezer associate writer here at the siga awesome and I'm Eric Ken Davis I'm senior producer here in Sea KX
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Rau Tech designer uh for Stefan uh CG supervisor and we are super excited to go through these questions you guys kicked us a lot of really good ones um and so we're just going to start off off if you guys are ready you guys ready dig in let's do this okay all right first up from uh zeso I think it's Zio that's what we're going to go with that's a great name uh who generally starts the idea process for a ship a planet Etc are the writers the ones who start the lore first or do they just fill in the details if an artist comes up with a really good ship idea from scratch do you follow a specific guidance from CR or are you allowed to submit ideas through a creative development process that gets vetted through each of the game features so who want to start off with this where do where do ideas come from I want to start there we'll start over here uh there's definitely you know um when it
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comes to planets a lot of the starm map stuff definitely did originate with the with the lore team um uh when it comes to ships other other elements like that they definitely our ideas that we have that we definitely you know have vetted through Chris that are going to be implemented in the game and maybe we do take a lore first perspective on it that then trickles down to the other departments but there have been plenty of uh plenty of moments that you guys have come into our office too and said hey we're working on this really cool thing how can you help us kind of build the world around it or how can we you know justify it in the lore to a certain degree so um it definitely it definitely works both ways dependent on on what it is and uh what's needed to get done yeah I've seen a lot too even from the art side is that you do get that enhanced back and forth right you may have this great script that you guys have written but then it just doesn't work right artistically and so these guys come in
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and and imply like Hey would this still work within that world and it's this cool back and forth I think it I think there I think the point of this question is there's no one starting point right there's a there's many different avenues that we follow and and it's um it's I don't know I think it's really exciting it's really cool everybody gets involved all right moving on next question um from Chaplan uh from a team perspective producers writers artists and designers how have the ship Pipeline and development SL balancing process changed since the original ship packages were on sale did those change if any uh did those changes if any change how ships and the lore of involving those ships have been developed since then to account for balancing those ships with other ships that have been introduced after the first batch so the question is from the beginning right from the
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beginning of making ships from the beginning of the idea of what star C would become has has that process changed right now right do we do things differently developing ships maybe from the lore side and and maybe there's only a few people in here that can speak to the the original but I think at the same time you know how has it changed or has it changed right for the better kind of how's it gone I think on the lore side it's quite similar only we have you know more Riders obviously and we get better fleshed out ideas earlier on we have more designers so we get better designs earlier on um previously you know obviously we started um with you know running pre-production production at the same time you know and we started from scratch with no company right and uh the ships we had to build these pipelines for how these ships work as we were building the ships themselves um which explains a lot of the reasons that we know we go back to the con we're like
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all right now that we got to figure it out let's you know let's revamp it a little bit and do it right and then um you know probably initially we've seen that you know a lot of things you know is it compatible you know the original constellation is a perfect example you know we kind of got the ship going we wanted to get it out there but it's like okay wait a minute how does actually the um uh the the Escape pods actually come out of the ship um when you lower the uh elevator wait a minute do I really want only one person to be able to get into the ship at a time maybe I want three right and so these are things that was just part of the evolution process and pipelines in general uh you know you get it going you get it started and then you have to use it a couple times and then you figure out what works what doesn't work and then it continually evolves and I think with design as well and one thing that we absolutely learned is how important it is to get design and uh the literature as early as possible and as much flushed out as possible because uh
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it significantly helps and it significantly saves time and spending that time in the beginning uh saves a lot of time at the end to to speak to you know cuz I'm at 6 months I think so right I haven't been here since the original but like even what what I was really excited about with let's say just the Endeavor the most recent one I I felt like and I know we've done this with a lot of ships recently that was the first time I saw everyone that needed to get involved got involved really early all right we're doing that actually right now on a couple other ships but I was really excited because I got to sit in those meetings that we had everybody involved Tony and Ben and all the all the key stakeholders from the beginning it wasn't like hey we got this far down the ship concept and we never showed bill over there all right we never showed this guy we never even showed the writers it was kind of cool to see that one kind of come together and and all the ones we're starting to do now it's got this level of polish from the beginning so when we're getting into these phases and we start developing that ship it's like yeah and the goal is to get it in we've learned
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uh the most important thing is to get it in the game as soon as possible even if it's just shapes get it flying get it moving see what works see what doesn't work and not try to build an entire ship from scratch and then get in the game but build the ship uh very simple what we call white box which is more like proxy based and then get it in where it's functional for design to start balance and testing and then they could already be balance and testing gu ing while we're actually doing the final art and then we're just swapping things out right as we go and then we start with the white box phase which is again just the proxies and then we move on to the gray boox phase uh which is like the constellation during the uh our previous uh Gamescom demo uh and that's like the ship is there you see it it's not final but it's pretty close and you can visualize what it will look like and then obviously we do our final pass which is our um pristine pristine
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version yeah that's I mean context is everything in in making these artistic decisions of like how this thing should feel how this thing should behave what it should look like uh and so we have we've gained all this experience from creating aren Commander creating all these ships that are are flyable and and the uh combat and the flight behaviors and all of that we can we can see what the game is like just load it up and play it uh and so that's the same thing that that informs our decisions that informs how we want to make the thing grow and to your point of like getting it in as early as possible we need to see what it is in order to see what we want it to be yeah that helps when I started we barely had a game you you I me you can fly around I mean the chis the first demo I ever saw was uh Chris showing me the Hornet on a landing pad and you can kind of fly it around but
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now uh but we didn't have all these game modes back then you know what I mean so now we can actually we have all these game modes so we can throw these ships in a very early stage and see how it how does this ship handle gets a swarm of uh you know vandu ships right of scy or and a glaive right so yeah and the ship pipeline has gone through a lot of changes but I almost feel like that's just very natural right like what you what you had from the beginning like right now if we made an RSI ship we might be able to steal pieces from previous ships you didn't have that when you for start of pip blood you're making everything from scratch right it's like doing sequels of movies and stuff like I already got exactly it's about evolving and not you know doing things from scratch a lot of times it seems like we're doing things from scratch but really revolving totally yeah and from the L perspective too A lot of the stuff that you guys are talking about like they they've done a lot of the heavy lifting before this like Dave and will and and obviously with Chris and Ben involved in that too is kind of like setting those guidelines putting
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the ideas or just kind of like our thoughts into the corporation Matrix or in certain places so designers artists can go in and look and see exactly what's uh you know what the intention behind all those is too and then kind of forms it designs to it so yeah that's great that's great all right so the next question I'm actually going to merge two questions that we've had um recently so the first one is from Monster ask the question will the Starmap be available on the app store for iPhone or iPads and then I'm going to merge that with the other person that had a starm map question which was elmac elmac asked will we be able to download an offline version of the starm map to our devices to uh for those times that we either don't have internet connection or we don't want to use our mobile data okay okay so you yeah regarding the star map
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uh we just had we did a Q&A this week which everyone should go and check on the uh RSI main site that'll explain a lot of that we are looking into the ability to have um to have it you know a tablet like a you know kind of Android app for it not quite yet but that's definitely something that we realize people want and would be a pretty cool thing to do the offline mode I'm not sure exactly where we are that that does seem like a function that would be useful um but the technical behind that is is definitely going to be a turbulent thing less of a a lore kind of team thing but uh glad everyone loves it and uh yeah it's it's awesome it's a a lot of fun to run around in yeah I just want to do that all day that's all I want to do he's doing it right now I'm doing it right now actually I just planned my next jump point now um all right Co cool the next question uh we got from buzz killer buzz killer asks in the monthly report there was talk of a restructure
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underway to bring the various disciplines together in a more cohesive team I'm guessing this is also to take full advantage of the increased space in the new LA office building how much of an impact will this have on the team's productivity and efficiency will there be any drawbacks now that the teams aren't working around the clock in different time zones oh we're definitely still working yeah so to answer that first question I I think I think we're still going to continue to be that around the Sun development right like we shut down and the UK gets going and so forth and so on that's definitely not changing um but I think the idea of bringing us all closer together and reorganizing I think is a great idea right U how do you guys feel about it what do you kind of take away from that yeah I just passed off a bug last night to UK that I was I got I got this far on it uh couldn't figure out this piece uh if you guys can take it and they did and we're done in the morning and yeah I why
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would we stop doing that righta and and I don't think that was the goal the restructure it's definitely not to get take away from that it's actually just keep enhancing it's to concentrate the disciplines right so you can put more people together that are doing the same thing to make them more successful yeah right and and that's and so it's it's not a negative thing it's a very positive thing and it's it's to actually help the employees which has already began doing so yeah yeah from the war perspective it's great because the all four of us are are based here Dave will sharing and I so that that's really fantastic we we do lunch every day together so it's us a chance to get out of the office and you know cuz sometimes some of the best work's done when you're not working kind of out and about just kind of like doing other things so it's nice to kind of bring that together and then if we do have to to Really jam on something really get it done we're all here together to kind of like support each other and kind of like get the stuff done yeah so it's great um all right next question all right this question is
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from doc doc asks can you explain in short what data Forge is and how it is used in the different areas I'm going to look at KX for this shortest version of data Forge is that it's how we integrate our XML into the game we put new stats that's what it's for uh it is to create new objects and uh because there's so many things in the game there's so like not just the entities that appear in the game but all the uh the structural elements of of uh the game rules uh and uh levels and those have their own like connective tissue and then this is to support all that and it's it's a great many files uh which without data for has a lot of opportunity for human error uh and so that's that's one of the places
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where bugs come from um this is how Mark gets to to do his deal uh but uh data Forge is still being built out so it's currently it's it's used uh for squadron 42 primarily uh it's it's built to support those things and is being uh pushed over to working on the live game as well uh and we'll be overtaking our previous tool stats monkey uh which just read from an Excel uh Excel sheet and populated XML data uh and has its own pitfalls of yeah it's it's you you take your life in your hands when you when you pull kind went from massive xmls that just
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got kind of unsustainable they're so large right I mean we do it but you know it's very large scripting file that we have to tweak and it is a lot of user eror possibilities um and then we used um you know the stat muy to help start um using spreadsheets to control all these numerical values in all these xmls and then data Forge is kind of the end Solution that's the true interface and the true machine that drives all of this data includes Integrations validations all of it air checking everything that's great so when people like me I tweak a laser something some I forget my col you guys only me touch to that stuff not yet you be involved um all right the next one I found this is actually really great question for the group by Krell k r l he says how does having the level of open development
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that s strives for impact you excuse me impact how you do your jobs compared to how a more traditional company how uh do you how do you decide what's okay to share and whenn that's a great question how just let's answer the first question how does this open level impact your jobs completely yeah completely why why do you say uh it's oh particularly the things that I do uh very directly impact the final experience like like the the balance things flight behaviors like uh if I make a change someone has noticed it uh like we have yeah it's so being able to hear back from backers is exciting and terrifying and and uh it's it's incredible and I I don't want to
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like underplay that but it also there's there's an element of I definitely have the the backers in mind like I have I have all all one million voices in my head uh when I make a change and I'm like how's that going to play yeah which is you know which is good uh I I definitely accountable yeah well and I I think to say that I'm not sure if everybody knows that we're talking to KX does a lot of impl a lot of the balance right obviously is a companywide discussion and a companywide everybody has their hands in having people you know have access so early is is a huge Advantage yeah yeah totally and then I love for me I love the transparency because uh you know being able to chat to the community in regards to the actual Tech that's involved and uh kind
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of some of our uh methods and the uh kind of the geeky side of the art is pretty fun because um like I very much grew up in you know mod communities where everyone shares and I had a lot of information shared to me which allowed me to be able to do what I do and to be able to interact with modders on our own forum and they ask questions on how some of the tech works and then I can kind of explain how we do things I think it's kind of cool because it allows me to give back what gave to me and I know if I was you know younger you know what I mean I I would have loved for a company that had this kind of high-end art to have access to one of the developers and ask questions and to get answers would have been just the coolest thing ever so Al really inspiring yeah and it's and it's you know it's really pretty neat you know to add to that the you've been doing a lot
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of character stuff recently and right and Sean just voiced over that great video that we saw at con I mean that was Tech that you guys had just shut down or gotten to that point right days before how did that feel they go I literally finished that and here we're showing everybody yeah that was exciting because definitely you know the Gary Oldman um and then the characters in the moral tour we using all that new tech um and it's you know from the heads uh to the body and there's lots of people involved to help make that happen and it's pretty remarkable Tech and I'm looking forward to kind of sharing some of that Tech with uh with our fans as far as some of our approaches and how we do it and maybe we'll make some videos of kind of some tutorial or kind of some examples of how it works that we can kind of share so when we do get modders you know they kind of have a head start that's great from the writing side right like mean it's great because it means more L
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because it means that every single week we've got something to share with you at least and the jump points too and it kind of helps us Define the world even in even greater detail than you normally would at a game at this point which is fantastic and then we also have the interactive uh the messages of being able to you know take people's responses on the message boards and and use them to to kind of like especially a lot of the role playing stuff that's been going on recently around the attack at Vega we've been able to to use some of the great role playing done there by by the fans and by everyone to kind of like help fill out certain certain aspects of that too so it is really great and we also every once a while we'll do like a lore Builder segment where if we want to help build out the history behind you know sat ball or behind you know maybe how a certain you know part of government is structured it's great to get the input from the backers because there's a lot
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of people out there it's four of us you know we we can only know so much but the community is so vast and has such a great experience and such a great you know depth of knowledge that it's great to be able to have that there to kind of like dip into and see what they're feeling or just kind of be able to tap into that that knowledge and expertise great so it's fantastic yeah it's really nice and I would say to button it up on the production side right um I definitely from where I came previously or where I've been in previous places it's just it's very abnormal it's very abnormal to share everything all the time I mean I think my first week at the company it was my second day on the job they're like hey that meeting you were just in okay now go on camera and tell everybody what you just talked about it was it was a wild experience but it was It was kind of freeing also to know that I'm getting feedback and I'm working with them and just like I get to work with you guys it's a it's a it's a wild experience but it um I think the benefits are immense because we can
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afford those benefits here at this place right there definitely restrictions coming from the business side that you can't do certain things right but I think that's great that we can we can do that stuff so yeah I think it's great like you try to try to talk about anything that's in the game obviously anything that uh Chris has talked about is always safe uh and I I tend to sort of gauge the things that I talk about either uh by the level of authority that I personally have over it like if I have done this thing that I know everything about it then I feel a bit more comfortable talking about that because the things that we want to avoid we don't want to we don't want to promise things or make it sound like we're doing things that we're not because that level miscommunication is probably the hardest thing about this is that like if if you lead people to believe something uh
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whether you think it's true or you misspoke or like if that ever happens and there's there's a lot of there's a lot to be held accountable for and so you try to to be open and honest uh but you also like you have to be very careful speaking speculatively ever totally totally uh so like if something isn't a sure thing I I try to like I I'll I'll I'll try to play with it and be like okay we're open to these ideas because that much is true we're trying to do these things but uh until until it's in the game it's not real yep that's right so like you know that's why I sort of leave it to you to tell me when things go out because it's it when until until that happens yeah no it's
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absolutely right and and I think back to our other question is if we work in the creative industry you you know that I mean we're coming up with crazy stuff all the time in every meeting all the time so if we were to say all that crap all the time out it would we would be all over the place but obviously it's not that's just how we flush out these creative ideas that's how we get to that final product yeah exactly so we I think that's the when we go to the last part of that question right I think that's the point of when do you decide to share it it's like when we know like you said it's going to be there or right in there we need your help um you know cuz we do want that feedback but at the same time we don't want to be like here's the craziest stuff we've thought of today sometimes you implement things and they don't work as well as you could you got to go to the drawing and evolve that idea to make sure that it works you know in your next attempt and that happens everywhere anywhere I've ever worked right on the writing side I mean you don't the first script you write you don't go yep that's it you don't walk
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away from it so if you shared that script and they're like wait why did that guy not say that you're like well because was dumb I shouldn't have written that anyway all right uh next question from Carl Rico asks a nice and easy question what computer games do you guys play Arena Commander doesn't count of course so we'll start to my left Forest what what computer games do you play it doesn't say ever or now or currently so you kind of take it how you want I play Battlefront all weekend Battlefront me of course okay loved it it's great anything else this Battlefront that's your game that's your jam right now well I got to play for three days nice um what else do I play uh I love obviously The Witcher I'm still playing The Witcher um are good it's all I got I got to
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stack this big at home that I never have time to play unfortunately um I got me solid at home secr of the IND right is that we work in games we have no time to play games I got so many games I want to play now my my steam backlog is intense I've I've been trying to catch up on uh some some of the Indie Darlings that I've missed out on playing uh just play through gone home and her story both which I really enjoyed uh the oil blue I believe it's called it was uh was enjoying that one uh and Metar Solid 5 which I'm like 26% of the way in after like a 100 hours I could even beat the demo I was like this is it this all that's all I need that's awesome uh for me uh I've been playing playing Witcher I got back on The Witcher 3 last last
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week the week before uh Call of Duty did I just jump in and shoot some people and jump out Battlefront I was playing play the same time force was playing but that's all that's console that's technically not PC question was computer games but console's a computer right well doesn't say a PC it doesn't matter fallout's coming over then everyone's life is going to be over that's how it and then uh all right yeah that's it for me about you yeah I mean basically just been focusing on Witcher 3 right now just trying to to get through that and it's not going to happen yeah I'm not going to be able to get to everything I can't stop hunting for Treasure yeah that's the problem there's too many question marks there's none of those yeah there's no question marks that would it would be a lot easier I'm I'm I'm to the point where I'm almost done with like the main story and I know that so I'm kind of clearing up some Witcher contracts and secondary quests just games they can you can beat them they
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have an end what I do is I balance it with rocket League then so if I'm just going home and I just need to kind of like do something and not get sucked into a story for like the next hour then I just play a bunch of matches of Rocket league and it's fantastic it's a lot of fun although the real answer is of course Arena Commander AR command yeah that's very true yeah and I haven't tried the buggies yet in N Corp that's something I want to go try to sit on fire soon so that's a lot of fun yeah I was enjoying that thoroughly all right next question uh from Kiren akari no relation to my middle name um lightwe story you'll have to guess uh in the live stream for subscribers Chris mentioned that players potentially can avoid combat entirely I have tried to play many different games peacefully in the past but most games almost require combat to advance or progress the daily
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work was just becoming a grueling grind and my IRL job was becoming more fun how is the team working together to make peaceful occupations exciting fun and intriguing and how big of a priority will this be moving forward I think the star map does a pretty good job of showing hostile zones right as opposed to Safe zones yeah that that'll definitely be a way for for players be able to plan routes around that and kind of like limit the amount of uh kind of like interactions they may have with the kind of uh unlawful forces so to say or or hostile forces so that's yeah and and the size of it too just uh being able to see how much size between everything hopefully you'll be able to like all right if I know that there's something over in this direction if I want to avoid stuff let me just go other way imagine it's about being conservative right because otherwise if you want that highrisk high reward type situation that's where it starts getting more
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dangerous but if you're going to be more conservative about it and want a steady flow um and then you're going to kind of avoid all that stuff yeah there's there's a PVP slider which will help uh you head your bets on that but ultimately you're probably not going to be able to completely avoid combat however there's all these things in the game like the contract system you'll be able to hire NPCs to come escort you places there's no reason you need to pull the trigger like just run away from those things and let these people these NPCs take care of you uh there's also all these support roles that were really really pushing on on making interactive and and deep and skill-based and fun uh all the things from like Mining and Salvage to uh repair uh to do running tactics in a larger ship um you know the engineering all these things where you
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might still be in find yourself in combat you might still be actively in danger zones MH but the thing you're doing is helping your people helping your side as opposed to attempting to harm the other side uh as like there's the Endeavor for like going for uh the research and hospital and the the uh space farming even like uh you got like we we are building that out um basically with each new ship we're looking at new ways to be okay we've got we've got combat what else are you going to do with this ship are you going to do cargo are you going to do uh repair I you know I'm just I'm just gonna have our QA Team guide me
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everywhere because escort everywhere because they're the best of the game they know everything or you can do what was super popular back when you know back in the '90s and the early 2000s run your own dedicated server because we do support that then you have complete privacy which is super awesome that people forget about that we allow Gamers to do which is very PC oriented and I miss those days cuz you don't get to do that very much with games anymore so yeah that's very true yeah from a LW perspective too we're we're obviously we we we've seen the response in the community that yeah not everyone wants to like be dog fighting or kind of like shooting all the time and that the latest lore poost was about the response the relief response to the attack on Vega and how there were Merchant Marines running supplies in people that don't want to fight but maybe want to go and help out if there's if there's some kind of Crisis there's a civil war or a famine somewhere in the verse we
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understand that there's not only people that want to go in there and try to be a part of the action but also maybe try to help the the community get better there too so it's already in the back of our mind that we're we're planning missions that don't necessarily always need to end with you drawing your gun or firing a weapon that you can you can resolve things in other ways too so we're we're very conscious of that we're ready to to make sure that's a part of the experience too for those who want it I'm always impressed with uh how resourceful communities are even in other games where I've seen people running like taxi services in in other games and like we explicitly support that like here's a thing that we're going to we're going to do and we're going to be doing you know trying to find as many of those Avenues as possible and I I have no doubt that the community is going to show us new ways to do this yeah yeah for sure next question from Phoenix Branson um he
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says we have seen many manufactured logos for Star Citizen will Sig also create new logos for fast food restaurants for the Pu go with me on this one such as pizza joints Taco stands or ice cream parlors so but the question for this group really and it kind of goes back to how we work together you know H we're gonna have a lot of stuff happening in our game right all over the place we're gonna have all kinds of shops and fun things like that what level does that impact you guys in the way that you do your job like do do again this kind of goes back to and and I'm feeding from the first question you know when you see how a shop works is that more driven by you to come up with the name or do you like no I'm going to I think the name should be this or based on the shop you know like how how does that stuff come together or and you know how's that usually work I work mostly with the ships um and so the ships obviously
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integrate with the rest rest of the game but as those parts come online we have things like the Billboards that go on the whole series yeah or the uh the whole like Merchant bizaar that goes on the merchantmen um and so we have we have those things being built out and integrated into our ships and there's sort of a back and forth on that of uh what makes for a good walkable space in your ship what makes for a a a good thing to just out in space verus what's been designed to be on on the terrestrial like when you go down the planet side so those those things definitely uh intersect we back and forth on it's generally a combination of art and literature because they'll put shops in the stories sometimes right or
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just yeah yeah we we've definitely seated a bunch of uh specific locations and and specific shops you know to that are either universally kind of like around or maybe just in a specific location so if you're going to go to this specific Landing Zone we probably already know the name of the shop there who's running it so that way when you guys get to the point to building it out having to design it you come to us and we can let you know oh this is going to be the dark bar where people are going to come in and like do info agent stuff and uh I know from our perspective too there's also um we already have a working dock just that that open for all the writers so if we have an idea for a fun billboard or something that might elicit anything and it doesn't have to be related directly to a product in the game it could be for like you know learn Shon today so it's like a you know instead of learn Spanish or learn French you know like we have a working dock if you just think of one you go and we we just drop the idea in there because we
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have had requests from the Pu team in Austin to be like hey we just need stuff to be able to populate the backgrounds and the street corners and stuff like that so it's one of those you know we're maybe not you know focusing every single day on it but if you get one of those ideas over the course of a week you go in there you drop it in and it's just you just slowly build up that list so when it comes time for them needing more of them we've got already a database set aside for that you got that seven hour Shon Workshop yep perfect for the Trader on the goat yep yeah exactly exactly perect yeah we make sure that you know all the style guys and everything are kind of taking the literature and starting to build out these logos you see it in art cor right we got some logos and then I'm sure we'll kind of repeat you know we're a very modular environment um so I don't see any reason that we couldn't have kind of corporate shops you know that or or um you know a string of shops that
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show up in different locations cubby blast and cassab outlet and and those those are meant to be all around the uee so um yeah it's perfect for us too because it it it's familiar for the player and it's also easy for designed to go in and just kind of replicate cool absolutely that's great I got another really great question here uh I think this will be really interesting for us all to talk about by CC Corp said I would love to get what the thought process is that goes throughout each stage in rebuilding or redesigning the older ships for example The Hornet or the 300 series does a lot of talk happen between each department or is it just toss back and forth until it's perfect and not something really completely different from the original because you know what I love about this question is it's happening we kind of talked about with the pipeline a little bit but we didn't really touch on older ships right we didn't talk about we talked a little about the constellation but how you know do you go this ship isn't what we
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originally planned hey guys let's talk about it or is it just Tech is you know the new like what's that normally happen usually the first thing that we do is we look at one of the Legacy ships and there's some obvious fixes that we need to do right uh make it more modular right standardize the parts that are inside the ship that way we have like an external library that we could pull from and so if you have a seat and a joystick instead of building it unique to one ship right we keep that kind of separate and that's a thing now right that we can potentially put in other ships yeah uh we also learned very early that we had to standardize all of our um interface as you're sitting in the cockpit um and create templates and create uh kind of proxy examples of how animation works because we can't have a limited amount of Animation so it has to be fairly reusable from ship to ship and then we kind of started targeting in on uh individual manufacturers so um each
00:33:00
manufacturer has kind of a specific layout that's kind of consistent with Delta ships um the other thing is you know we obviously have switched a lot of our Tech we went from you know doing kind of traditional unwraps and um doing textures from scratch to moving over to more tiling system and then uh obviously when physical based rendering came on we had to start converting all the ships over to the new rendering system which required us to update all of our textures and all of our materials um so that's still kind of a big Challenge and we're still um porting over ships from that system and then we have stuff like the cargo system that's kind of finally starting getting standardized which me we had to update all of our um cargo holes to actually support the new designs um which you know the constellation is the best example of of taking a legacy ship and now bringing it into our kind of nextg pipeline you know everything from the seats to the
00:33:47
interface to the cargo system to the materials to our modeling techniques to the reusability to the modular aspects and then the gameplay requirements um so that was kind of a big big chunk that was required and we decided to tackle that and it took some time but um now that we have all these systems in place it ended up being a very good um example of what we needed to do for some of our smaller ships so is it is it all generally systems or have you guys ever got involved later to reimagine a ship uh I think uh while I've been here the the biggest thing has been more about uh the components used in the ship is that there was a really long list of components different manufacturers that have been created in lore that we realized there were a lot of double triples that maybe just for simp sake at this point if we kind of like tried to pair those down so it was just easier for the designers for the artist like oh it's going to be this one manufacturer
00:34:34
that produces this one thing we don't need 40 different companies making Shield generators you know we can have the standard few which will have their obvious obviously pros and cons um so that that that that's been a big thing and some sometimes there are ships that we've had ideas for L that that that we want to be able to work on but maybe some of the stuff you guys are doing kind of affects that so we're like oh we're going to have to make sure and go back that that this one is feels distinct enough and it's not just a a copy of this to a certain degree yeah that's really interesting and and from the scheduling side from the production side it's we're always looking at what's next what makes sense because we have a limited amount of resources right we're all we're all a resource at this company and so it's always like Well we'd love to get back and redo some of these older ships but we just don't have the bandwidth because we really want to get on the new ships so it's always a kind kind of a balancing act um some that we
00:35:22
just become passionate about because we've been really looking at it for three years and some that we're like oh we'll get back to it let's it's really important to get on these items it's also as features come online there's more things to refactor so we could go back and we could make the Aurora and the 300 series up to up to our current systems uh but the time that it will take to do that we will have another system up and we'll need to do it again uh so to a certain extent we have to look at how out ofd things are versus how much we'd be able to bring them up to speed uh and how much we're still building the game to be yeah so we want to minimize how much we you know we don't want to rebuild the ship from complete scratch there's some situations that we kind of have to but for the most part for me really the most important thing is really uh the efficiency and
00:36:09
the optimization of it and a lot of the reasons we've had it go back to older ships and we still we need to go back to some more older ships like the cutless is because when we originally built them we built them like a traditional game model and now that we have all this Tech that you know takes advantage of you know certain approaches uh we need to go back and you know abide by those approaches to make it efficient for the game because obviously having these extremely expensive ships in the game you know kind of hurt uh performance and you know after you know we kind of initially started getting stuff out there we're like you know we really got to make this game Run well because people are going to be playing today and they aren't going to be playing when the game would theoretically come out you know years down the road a year down the road or whatever so you actually you know um we had to decide you know a year or two years ago that all right we need to figure out the most efficient way to make these ships right because this is going to be important because this thing
00:36:56
needs to sustain for a long period of time um and also you know I'm not real big into completely redesigning the old ships I think it's kind of cool it's kind of like a classic car you know I'd rather see a new model of the ship you know get it efficient get it using all systems work it design and not do too much to it right and then create a new version of the ship right that's like a new model like a car you know what I mean then when you see somebody flying around that you know 2014 model you know it's kind of special yeah MH yeah you can even break this down from a production standpoint to like we just have like a a rebuilding team right and then we have the team that's building the ships that we all want to see that we've been talking about and then we have the live team like we have several different kinds of games happening all at the same place with the same resources and I think that always comes down to pros and cons what do we want to see before other things and so forth and so on so all right the last question um this is a good one this is from Doc I
00:37:45
don't know if I already as asked from from Doc but we'll go with docs because I think this is a good question uh doc asks how do you decide priority of the different departments regarding new game mechanics ideas and Concepts is there a weekly box in fight between department leaders to decide this but we backers are missing out on it just kidding smiley face for new backers for new backers it would probably be interesting when you describe generally how the usual process goes from concept to release and how the different departments are involved so Alec can answer the first question priorities this is a very very difficult question generally the the leads of each of the teams um are aware of what they need their team to do um we meet that we meet frequently we do weekly goals reviews we have master schedule that we're trying to drive the long term of this thing so we're trying to get all the ideas out of Chris's head we're
00:38:32
trying to put it all in one place right put it all together very much on the production side that hopefully doesn't burden you guys at all you guys just keep making awesome stuff um but then we do have constant pry Clashing of course and I haven't been experienced this a lot lately because it's the same resources doing multiple different things so because we know we need to all get it done right then that's when you know if you have two leads that want to both get something done right in that kind of clashes that's when you raise it up to production and that's why like Eric's here for to help make the decision on what does come first um and it's not a boxing match it's actually a steel cage match that's right the top lad you put tax all over the ground I I think I think perfect example right let's use something very realistic to now that force and I just talked about um the amazingly wildly T talented Mark McCall upstairs right do technical ships and Technical animation for characters
00:39:19
he's excellent at everything he does and so that means everybody wants him and wants to use him for things so that's a frequent conversation between force and I and design leads and like who's going to use Mark for what this week and what's the long-term thing so we're constantly B battling the we got the long-term Vision but we got the short-term things we need to achieve right so when events come up and it's already Tech that we're been developing we're just about to show it off so we can keep going it we're we're shifting things around frequently and it and and we're all tense and we're all trying to get things done and everybody wants to use the same person and so they're aggressive conversations but it's generally healthy it's usually for getting the thing done we all want to get this thing done and make it awesome make it look great and we all trying to drive for our peace and that's usually how it works but then at the the end of the day the leads or people that are leader of places points of contact they do need to work together and go okay all right I'll give them up for you for this week but just know that'll mean this and
00:40:06
this and this for the schedule and so that kind of comes down to like you said work with production and look at the long term with all of our Studios globally so it's it's a complex the director's role you know and that's kind of you know if the leads have a clash on um what the priorities are because they both want their own individual disciplines to have priorities and then it gets raised up to the directors who can kind of work things out and and then ultimately Chris right we go we present that to Chris and say hey the directors agree with this the production agrees with this this is what the team wants to do Chris which way should we go right this I think any does a great job kind of seeing this whole somehow seeing this massive thing and going yeah let's put this there there and there it's a big puzzle right so yeah starts it is an is an experience and it's a it's a very unique one and it's driven by the things that you can do and the places you can do it yeah and so that that means that you have art and you have design and you
00:40:53
have programming and all these things really need to add up yeah to the Star Citizen experience that we're that Chris's vision is for y so it on on a given thing that balance might skew differently because uh also at a given time because you know sometimes it's really easy to get something functional but ugly yeah sometimes it's very easy to get something pretty but not functional and then we fill on the rest right so it's and it's it comes back to we were talking earlier about that context of get as much of the thing in so that that informs your decisions that informs the thing that you're creating and when when the thing exists you can say yes that is right or no that needs to be a little bit different and for
00:41:41
these reasons and that that continues to build upon itself into into a real thing yeah so it's it's really it's really important totally and I think on that beautiful note I think that's a great way to end so again uh you know I hope you guys enjoyed this very uh interesting and unique t for I think we had a great time um again thank you to the subscribers for allowing us to do this additional content we love getting this stuff out in front of you guys as soon as early as possible as discussed in question four I think it was I don't know um but again thanks come back we've got more for you uh I want to thank Adam and Kix and Forest and um hopefully we'll do this again very soon my pleasure all right see you guys next time thanks guys bye hey guys thanks for watching um temp for
00:42:37
the chairman uh if you guys would like to uh see more episodes go here if you guys would like to subscribe to our YouTube channel and always keep up to date with all our video content go here and uh if you guys would like to watch episodes of around the verse go here please and I will see you in the verse this video made possible by the ICC Stellar surveyors and subscribers like 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.