STAR CITIZEN: Around the Verse Episode 2.37

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] Heat. Heat. I guess you could say Star Citizen gives

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   you a lot of bang for your buck. Thank you to RSI forum user monk for the extremely cool explosion montage. Welcome to Around the Verse, your weekly look at Star Citizens development. I'm Sandy Gardner, the VP of marketing. I'm Ben Lesnik. I work with the community to make sure you guys uh know what's going on. And if you can't believe it, uh which I find it hard to believe, but this is our 99th episode of Around the Verse coming up on 100. It seems like just yesterday we were crammed into the corner of reception at the old office. It does. And we kept moving into tighter and tighter spaces there uh until I think we were in half of somebody else's office. Maybe yours is very very small space. Uh so for episode 100, we actually have a special edition. We're

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   going to split it up into three parts. We are also upping our game on the video content. So we would like the feedback from our subscribers and we should probably get something. Okay. Well, we will have a forum poll up for our subscribers to we'd like to know a little bit more about what you love about ATV. And yeah, we have some pretty exciting changes coming. Yeah, I mean it's and for all of our other video content, we want to we want to up the game. So, let us know. What's the Star Citizen development team working on now, Ben? Well, a lot of work is going into Star Citizen 2.5. That's going to be our next big content patch. We're uh we haven't hit the the cuto off where we know what's going in and what's going into six yet. So, we can't uh give too many details, but it's coming along very well. There's going to be some pretty cool additional stuff to explore in Crusader. We're also working on a Star Citizen 2.4.1 patch which is intended to

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   address some of the issues with uh 24's networking and some of the slowdowns and so on you've seen and we will uh have that out as soon as we have something to show you. Yes. And before I go on to my next line, I would like to thank Nubifier very much for his very kind message to me um about engaging with the community and replying to the hundreds of emails that come into my inbox. And thank you very much for my t-shirt. Danger spaceuit required. So, thank you very much for that. I don't know if you can see. Can you see? Oh, here's the Yay. There's one. Y the guys in Austin actually have a uh a board. The QA team has a board where they uh they mark off whenever one of them forgets to put their space suit on and dies during testing. There we go. So, thank you very much for that, Nubifier. Nubifier 1337, should I say. And the big

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   news on the ship side is that the Drake Dragonfly concept sale has kicked off. The Drake Dragonfly, our space motorcycle, is now available in two colors. And I have got a yellow one. Oh, the yellow is out selling the black about two to one. So, it looks like people like a little splash of color. There you go. Yellow is the new black. For this sale, we put together a brochure patterned off real motorcycle brures, which is pretty cool. We're pretty proud. We're pretty proud. We are pretty proud of the end result. Check it out. So, what do you think of the Drake Dragonfly? It's really, really exciting to me for two reasons. One is because

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   it's been such a long time coming. We've been trying to get this on the schedule forever and ever because it was like a stroke of inspiration a year and a half ago. Like, this would be a really cool ship. And like, yeah, it would. It would, but we don't have time. And it's it's in now and it's it's looking great. So, we're really excited about that. It's also a totally different way to play Star Citizen. Once uh once we have it zooming around Port Olasar and on planets and so on, you're you're really going to have a a different experience. And that's that's the best thing we can do when building a new ship is add to the game. What excites me the most is it replaces my replaces my real world Kawasaki Ninja. Seeing as I dropped it once in real life, I can crash this as many times in the game as I want. And uh you got LTI. Yeah, exactly. And next week, we've got a special subscriber

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   live stream. You're going to uh get a chance to ask your questions to the DevOps team in Austin. They will be uh talking about how they keep uh Star Ces patched and updated and do all the behind thescenes things you don't normally think about in a game. Uh that will be Wednesday the 29th at 11:00 a.m. Pacific. Join us. Uh it's available for everyone to view and subscribers can ask questions in the live chat during the event. So now let's go to our studios from news from around the verse. Hey everybody, I'm Eric Kron Davis from the Los Angeles studio and I'm joined by Omar Aa. We've got updates for the LA office for you. Uh Omar, asked you to come on because I wanted to talk a little bit about characters. What are

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   the updates this week? What are we working on? Sure. We've been working on a lot of stuff actually. We've done uh some new updates on the Marines. We've done some updates on the BDUs. E Shane's been working on some new PU clothes. We've also done a lot of uh uh advancements to save memory and performance, so the game is going to run a lot smoother. And we've been trying some new swappable like item port systems and some stuff like that, which is going to be really cool. A lot going on on the character team right now. Yeah, tons. That's great. And then uh the another update for you is the Caterpillar. I know Elwin and team Jyn and Daniel are working hard on the uh engineering interior as well as the turrets. Those are awesome. Those are under scrutiny right now. And then uh Justin's making some small updates on the concept side to the command module on the interior as well as some color updates. So there you go. That's the LA office in a nutshell. Again, I'm Eric Omar Wa. See you guys next time. See

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   you. Hey guys, Jake Ross here, producer of the Austin Studio, and I'm here with you this week to talk a little bit about what's gone in here in Austin. So, uh, want to talk about Grim Hex, the space station that we're looking to release here in the next, uh, next few months. Um, we are working hard to get the shops set up in, uh, in that station. So, mentioned this a little bit previously, but we finally got the inventories all set up in that in those shops. Uh, we won't have a whole lot of um, new stuff, uh, but we will be switching things around a little bit so that it provides incentive to travel a little bit more. Uh, so in the weapon shop that we will have on Grim Hex, we'll be um having all of the energy weapons situated there and all the ballistic weapons situated on

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    Port Olsar so that you you'll have incentive to travel back and forth and see u the new content we've got uh to sell in the verse. Uh we'll also have some new um piratey clothing um part of the Frontier uh manufacturer and uh and uh clothing styles. So, we'll have this a new bandana, new boots, some jackets, shirts. So, some some new clothing content to kind of to spice things up a little bit and make things a little bit grittier and griier. So, that'll be pretty cool to see some more variety. Um, and then lastly, we're we're finally get uh getting IRA Switzer here in Austin on a lighting pass uh to make those shops as beautiful as they possibly can be. Uh, once that's in, we'll actually be able to do some proper profiling to make sure that it runs okay in the in the game. Uh, and then it'll be ready for release. So, Grimx station's coming on coming along nicely.

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    We're seeing it uh coming um progress on it week by week and uh everyone's really really excited to see uh it come online here pretty soon. So, thanks guys. That's all I got for you this week. Hi everyone. This is Mickey over in the UK and I'm here with Matt Webster today and we're going to talk a little bit about the production of the Idris. Um, so if you are familiar with the Maro tour that was demoed at Citizen Con last year, then you may have seen it. Um, they've been working from that basically and polishing it. Uh, making a few changes to like stuff like the shape of the corridors and that kind of thing. And um, looking at um, putting in the damage system, which is pretty cool. Yeah, just trying to figure out how we can get the ship to be blown apart so it looks really cool. the size chunks that

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    you can blow in the ship and what how that kind of looks to the player and also how it looks to people on the inside as well. So you could blow out, you know, bits of your power system like how do we make that look to the people on the inside. So we're trying to go for the I guess you could equate it to general sci-fi. So the room goes dark, red lights come on, consoles are on, you start to blow up. So you get sparks, smoke and all that kind of stuff. It' be really really cool. It's also going to affect uh like the gravity as well. So you can like get rid of the grav gravity generators in parts of the ship. Um so that's pretty cool. It's all part of the power system where you can target specific points in the ship to affect certain systems like you just said the gravity or the life support. You could even blow a hole in the side of the ship and vent the compartments that are exposed out into space. So anyone caught inside them, they'll get sucked out into

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    space. Uh if the compartments aren't closed quick enough, it'll start to decompress further beyond where it's been affected. This is like a work in progress thing for all ships really. But yeah, but no, it's pretty cool. And we got to have a look at the uh hanger. Um Mhm. So you can currently land um three small ships um inside the address. So uh we've seen the Gladius land in there. And they've got a sort of like automatic landing system to make it a little bit easier, especially if the address is like mid-flight. Um, and they're working on getting the medium ships to fit in there as well, but at the moment you have to be ship. Yeah. Well, yeah, just one, not three. Um, and but at the moment, you have to be pretty skilled to be able to land. Yeah. All work in progress,

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    though. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's everything for this week. So, we'll see you in the bus. See you later. Bye. Hey everyone, Brian Chambers from Frankfurt office. um on the updates moving forward, we're going to try to grab one topic and kind of beat it up a little bit and dig into that um so we can make it a little bit more direct for you guys and talk about progress. Um on this week, just recently um Chris for 10 for the chairman had talked about um part of Nick's going into Staten for a future release. Um specifically on that, what he meant was Levki. Um, so I thought I'd bring in our lead level designer, Andreas Johansson. He can kind of talk about uh what's there,

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    what they're doing, and kind of what the future plans are. Um, so you were you were this is basically just handed over to you and your team a few weeks ago. Yeah. Yep. That's right. So, uh, we're making kind of final updates to it, adding in the hangers the so you can land your ships. We adding in bedrooms so you can um sleep or spawn there and call your ship. So it's kind of touching it up to making it. And then you guys are working in conjunction. I think the the art team is based in the UK. So you're working closely with them, right? Yeah. So the design side is driven from here in Frankfurt and the UK is handling the the art side of it. Plus we have the team in Austin who's doing the the shops for us. Cool. Can you can you tell us like a high level on Levki and what it is and what we'll experience? M so I mean Levki is I would call it kind of it's a bit more of the

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    this senior aspects you know it's it's kind of the outskirt world you know where the people who don't really agree with the current government politics and stuff that that's where they end up and they kind of have their their life there it's gone through many iterations of different people controlling it and different different factions controlling it. So it's it's it's a kind of a dynamic place where where maybe the UEE doesn't have perfect control. Yeah. Exactly. And it may go through some other iterations I guess slightly because if we're going to put it in Stanton right now versus it going to NYX ultimately in its own system. Yeah. Right. It'll have a slightly different feel. It will I mean um we putting it into Stanton temporarily but when once we put it into Nyx it will go probably on its original location which is a big asteroid but right now we're adding it as a landing zone on a planet. So, but it's a small smaller planet, but but

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    still. And then I think in that process too, you guys learn a lot with with the planets being procedural and coming up with those landed zones, figuring out how to work with those in the best tech and approach. Hopefully, it's it's a learning process then for the other ones you're going to populate. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, with procedural planets, we have a lot of space to to fill. So, yeah, absolutely. They're huge. So, uh, I mean, we always think think that we're going to have like hotspots around the planet and then we have to see what we do with the rest of the space, but yeah, it's it's an interesting it's an interesting way of working basically. So, that's cool. Cool. So, what I'm hoping then in the next uh weeks to come. Don't know the exact time. Once we have more progress on that, uh, can actually get a video of some early progress, I can bring Andreas back in and we can talk over it and show kind of

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    what's been done. So, thanks for your time. Appreciate it. And thank you guys. Hey citizens, welcome to another segment of ATV behind the scenes. My name is Forest Stefen, CG supervisor, and with me is Shane Hesler, associate character artist. And we've talked a lot about taking a character concept and getting it into the game. Um, but for this segment, we're going to actually show you. And so Shane has actually taken a shirt for the PU and gone through the whole process. So we're going to walk you through it for clothing. In my process, something that I like to start out my base with is a program called Marvelous Designer. So what we can get from this is kind of a start to the the high poly asset for the game where we

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    can then project all the detail onto the the low poly. So, in this video, you can kind of see me pulling down on certain areas to get different variations of folds and um volumes in the material. And something we have to consider with uh shirts and clothing itself is how it looks in a neutral pose for the character. So, something that looks very natural and almost a neutral state that will work with animation and uh clothing that may be worn on top of it. So once you're done in marvelous, you export it out. Um you open it up in ZBrush. What's the next step? Do you check the scale? Do you have to decimate the mesh and then rettopo it? Do you get to just start scanning on the mesh that gets exported? Like what exactly happens in between? So, what ZBrush allows us to

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    do is basically take uh digital clay and sculpt it on the computer and get results instantly as far as sculpting folds, details, wrinkles, adding more geometry. When we import into ZBrush, it should be exact same scale as uh the the male base model, which we're referencing the entire time. So, we always make sure it's no matter what program it's in, it's in scale. Yeah. If you're going down the pipeline and you lose scale, it's a very big hassle to scale it back down and make sure it fits your low poly geometry which is in game. So the focus is always keeping the scale uh as it's going to be in game from start to finish. Okay. So now you've taken it out of ZBrush, you've exported it out as like an OBJ, correct? I'm guessing once

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    it's in Maya that's you probably have a decimated mesh cuz I'd imagine 9 million polies is going to make Maya explode and so the decimation process is cutting the poly count 50%. Like so I think we started at 9 million at the end of the high poly process and then once it was reduced um using a tool in ZBrush called decimation we got down to I think around 200,000 polygons. Okay. Um, so my process is bringing the high poly that I reduced down to, like I said, around 200,000 polygons. Um, and with that mesh, I can reference uh the high poly inside of Maya to then trace uh on top of using uh a tool in Maya called Quadraw, which allows us to plot points in space on the

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    high poly from ZBrush and minimize the poly count uh which is represented in kind of a grid format um using edges, faces, and vertexes. So, we've created the high poly, we've created the game topology, we've done our UVs, and now you've uh gone through, you bake all your maps in XNormal, correct? And then, uh once you're done with baking your maps in Xnormal, uh you've created a Photoshop file that has our texture set. Correct. And so, the first one is the normal map. Yep. And tell us a little bit about what a normal map does. So a normal map is takes a lot of detail from your high poly and projects onto your low poly by controlling the way light hits your low

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    poly geometry and how the light reflects and uh shades your object. So it basically kind of allows you to have shading on your topology without needing actual topology, right? It gives you the illusion of detail and shadow. Awesome. Um, and then so you can see actually the fold in there and all that. And then the next one is the gloss. And then the gloss is your roughness. Roughness, how kind of reflective the light is going off your material and how shiny or rough it is. So we have a material in the engine and the material has a set specular. Um, and then this map will actually create a roughness for that specular value. So, if you have a surface that's uh super white because it has a very hot highlight, you can

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    increase the darkness of your gloss map and it will absorb basically do simulate heat and it will distribute uh across the surface and kind of blend. So, instead of having that nice specular highlight, it'll actually um crawl across the surface a little more the darker you get your gloss. Okay. So now uh the final process, you bring it into the engine and uh after you exported it out of Maya, you saved out your texture set from Photoshop. Yep. And then you created a material out of Maya and then you have plugged in all your textures and like magic, voila, you have a beautiful shirt and it looks great. So do you want to take us through anything uh particular? So we can apply materials on our low polies by selecting the faces of the low poly. So that's why you see the lines we're getting. And in order to

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    blend in the lines of the material, we use our blend map which can kind of balance out uh where materials are applied. Cool. And I think that uh pretty much wraps up the process of starting with a concept, starting with a vision, starting with an idea, taking it all the way through the pipeline into a final product. Yep. And I'm sure everyone's going to be excited to get this shirt now. So, thank you Shane so much. Thank you for making the shirt. It looks fantastic. And thanks everybody for tuning in to another segment of ATV. [Applause]

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    Heat. Yeah. Heat. Hi, and welcome to another edition of

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    Lore Makaker's Guide to the Galaxy. I'm your host for today, senior writer Will Weissbomb. And if this is your first time turning into Lower Makers Guide, welcome. And basically like what we do here is various members of the narrative team gather together and we take you through the ins and outs of some of our many solar systems spread throughout the Star Citizen verse. So today we're going to be taking a look at the redder system, which is one of my personal favorites. probably ranked 30 32 on my list. Um, it is focused on education, which is just awesome. So, let's take a look over there right now. So, we're going to hop into our handy search bar. Oh, there it is. Star system. Let's

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    click on go. Ooh, very pretty. So, this actually might look familiar to the last system we're in because redder has a similar class G main sequence star just like we have here in Soul. Uh, it's yellowish white. It's got a solar mass of 1.05. So, very close, a solar radius of 1.01, very close to our sun. And uh it is about 6,000 Kelvin, which is hot uh just in general. I don't know how that ranks against other suns, but in terms of things you don't want to touch, it's pretty high up there. So, let's get into a little bit of the backstory of this system. Uh it

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    is both one of the oldest and youngest systems in the UEE. And the reason why we like saying that is because uh its population is one of the youngests in the entire empire. Uh because of how many universities are located within it, it has a very young demographic. Uh which leads to all sorts of fun outcomes that we'll talk about a little bit later. Uh the reason why it's one of the oldest is because it was discovered way back in 2287. So for those of you who may not know, our current year in the universe is 2946. So 2287 was quite a whiles ago. Um RER was discovered by two ambitious PhD students who were attending the Martian

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    Institute of Space and Technology and they were out there doing some trial runs when they noticed some weird information coming in on one of their scan drones. and they decided to take a look and lo and behold they discovered a brand new system. So they rushed back to school to let one of their professors and the head of the school know what they found. Uh the person he told was Adrien Zmllock. Um and now uh Adrien had very strong political views. She was a former politician herself and she was really kind of dismayed by the way that Croshaw had turned out recently. It had just been developed and the terraforming was just completed and she saw this brand new space being divvied up by all these various

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    corporations and political entities and she felt that the people were getting lost in the equation. So she had the idea that this new found system that they could do some good with it. So they sort of pretty much held the information the coordinates of this jump point ransom until the powers that be agreed to set aside a large portion of the system for the public use namely educational resources. Um and uh and that's what ended up happening and it it's been really one of the uh bastions of the empire in terms of knowledge and learning and higher understanding. Um the name of the system uh redder comes from the word for master and teacher and it was Zemlock's own

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    nickname. Uh you might be familiar with uh the same base word being used in the word rhetoric. So there you go. Um it's always useful to remember that words have the power to shape worlds. It's beautiful. So now that we've talked about the star and the system overall, how about we take a zoom in here to take a look at redder one. Hey there, Tyler Witkin, community manager in the Austin, Texas studio, here to bring you this week's MVP. A huge congratulations to Romarik for creating and sharing a video that showcases all 26 of our subscriber

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    hangar flare. This informative video is a go-to for anyone curious to see the hangar flare in action and learn more details about the different items you can obtain. So, congrats again to you. You're this week's MVP. Back to you guys. Thank you to Forest, Chain, and William for uh those segments and letting us know what you're doing. And we've got a special surprise in store for you. Check out ATV's Fast Forward. We told you it was real. Uh, be sure to

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    tune in to Reverse the Verse tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. Pacific on Twitch. We'll be answering your questions about uh, Drake Dragonfly and everything else going on with Star Citizen. And, uh, if you do like us, hit like and subscribe below. Like and subscribe right down there. Yes. And check out the palm link tomorrow for the second Drake Dragonfly Q&A post, which should answer some of your questions if they aren't answered already on RTV. With that, thank you to all of our subscribers as always for making this show possible. We will see you around the verse. Around the verse. Did you know that many of Star Citizen's

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    developers are on social media? If you would like to follow Star Citizen on Facebook, you can find us here or on Twitter here and even Instagram here. And for a full list of developers personal accounts they're willing to share with the community, check out this link. You can find out uh what I bought at Amazon this week. Star Wars stuff. It Yeah, it was probably Star Wars stuff.