Reverse the Verse: March 4th, 2016

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat up here.

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   [Applause] Heat up here. Where's my

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   overlay? There it is. Hi everybody. Welcome to Reverse the Verse. It is Friday, March 5th, 2016. It's March already. I know, man. I know. Ah. Okay. I'm your community manager, Jared Huckabe. Uh, with me as always is our director of community engagement, online strategy, and spaceships, Mr. Ben Lesnik. Our subscription manager, Alexis Lesnik, and our video editor, Mr. Justin Chambers. How you doing, guys? Good. Great. We survived another week. Yes, this was a long, long week. It was a long week. Weren't we just saying that earlier? We were just We've been saying it was a long week since Monday. It's like It's like we knew this was going to be a long week and it ended up being a very long week. That is true. Ah, so if you're just joining us for the first

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   time, Reverse the Verse is the Cloud Imperium Games Community Teams weekly semi-informal live stream with the fan. We're a little more formal than we were before, but uh still pretty darn informal. Still pretty darn informal. I mean, don't let the graphics and everything fool you. We're still going to go off the rails a couple times here. There's There's no stopping him. We got to be us. Yes. So, don't be fooled by the uh graphics that we got. Yeah. Wait, we're still Wait, who are we from the block, though? the community of the community. Don't don't don't know. So, uh, yes. Uh, if you enjoyed that 11 million intro, you can watch it on replay and and and see the text underneath. Uh, people even these guys were like, "Oh my god, those paragraphs are going by so fast." Oh, we went dark. Who turned out the lights? All right, we're back. So, yes. Um, yeah. So, lights are back. So, Ben,

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   every week we start with our weekend review. This was quite a week. We've got a lot to cover. Uh, well, obviously we should talk about 2.2 2 first because that exists. Um, yes, 2.2 went live last night at what was it like 10:00, 9:30. It wasn't as late as, you know, we still had some hours left in the day, but yeah, it it was it was a great relief to have that out. So, yeah, this was a really really exciting week for um getting for development in that sense. Um, we we had been trying to push 2.22 22 Live. Um I think starting Monday. Monday was the 29th, right? Yes. Yeah. Um so we we had a window on the 29th. We uh I think pretty much every week, every night this week, we've stayed up. We've pushed out a patch as late as possible to PTU and then we've

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   had like a go no-go at uh like 10:30 or 11 our time each night. Um which has been a lot of fun. And it's it's really really cool seeing Chris Roberts just so engaged because you know it was him and Paul who were him and Paul Sean Tracy were just shoving things into the game trying to get things you we we have a bunch of bugs that we've been working with all over the week and you know every night it came down to no let's let's try another cycle let's try and fix this one fix this one and we finally got it uh good enough to go live. Yes. Uh Chris was working on those zone transitions quite a lot. He was in chat. It was like there's there's five bugs. There's five zone transition bugs. And you you'd watch and go, I got one. I got one. And then a couple hours later, we got two. We got two. This is Chris Roberts in our chat. We got another bug and whatnot. So, it was also we need to

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   do a huge shout out to the QA teams around the around the world. You know, we say that we were up late. We were we were up late monitor. Yeah, we were monitoring. We were writing the post and monitoring and stuff. These guys were busting their butts, you know, around the clock to do doing the handoffs from Austin to LA to to Manchester and what and not just the QA guys, but the programmers who had to who had to fix the things that QA was documenting. So, I mean, just a tremendous effort this week from from the guys. So, oh, I think maybe the other way. Thomas is adjusting our microphones broadcast. We Yeah, too loud. No, we've got these fancy new mic stands blocking your free. Oh, they were broccoli faced. Ah, see I got I got a fancy different one with a wire and stuff because I got to go over the laptop here. I also

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   noticed a different laptop. Oh, is it a different laptop? Yeah, it's a different laptop. What happened to this? What happened to It's smaller. It's smaller and it's it's completely solid state. No moving parts. So, it's less less noise over the microphone. Oh, wow. So, yeah, constantly trying to improve everybody. So, 2.2 out. 2.2 is out. Hope everybody's enjoying it. Um, you saw yesterday we had to delay ATV a little bit. ATV is out. Yes, ATV is out. ATV is out live. Yeah, we we actually did cut two different versions of ATV. One where we talk about 2.2 and everything that's out and the other where we uh say it's coming soon. Um, which we do every week that we think the patch is out. We do, but this time it just we talked to Chris and we felt like it was so close then we we would rather have ATV there forever

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   talking about Tutu and giving people information they would need about it than not. So we waited until the evening. Um we are sorry for Well, this is after the this was after the immense technical trouble we had. Yes, it wasn't going to be for that because we had monstrous technical problems with So at one point the episode was so late because of the technical issues. Then we got we ended up being so close to live it was like well we've waited this long. Let's let's push it a little longer and and then there were five more hours of pack to do new builds. I wasn't quite five, but but I think we did a good job of getting it out. Yes. Uh uh fantastic look at Pedro. If you've never seen a Pedro interview before, the man is a character. I love Pedro dearly and and and he has plenty to talk about. I love Pedro, too. He's always I I think everybody who knows him gets this, but I I he's always like, "You must come in

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    summer with me in my villa." We we we meant we talk about that in the in the in the show. He actually was one of the first people who reached out to me when I first started working here, but I thought he was a fan and he was just like, "Oh." And he was just talking so highly of me and I was like I told Tom, I was like, "This guy Pedro, he's like sending me messages like do we know him?" So nice. He's like, he's the composer. I'm like, "Oh my gosh." This whole time I thought he was like some crazy fan. He's so talented, too. Yes. He's such a terrific ambassador for Star Citizen that if he weren't already such a great composer, we I'd tried to get him here on the team because he he he's a fantastic ambassador for Star Citizen and we thank him for taking the time to uh to chat with me for an hour on a Saturday uh to record that. So, thank you, Pedro. And if you haven't checked it out, uh check it out because there's also a snippet of the new Arena Commander theme fully orchestrated in

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    the episode. I was able to squeeze like almost 10 seconds out. So, and Pedro, come to America. Pedro, come to America. No, actually he lives on an amazing island. Oh, he does. Pedro, we'll come to your island. We'll come to you. We'll come to your island, Pedro. Madera Island. So, uh, what else in our weekend review? Oh gosh, there was so much this week. Uh, we did some shooting on the documentary. Yeah, last night we had a whole fancy documentary. Oh, so we're doing the Star Season Bank documentary. It was a stretch goal. Either stretch goal or an initial promise. I think it was stretch goal. It's a stretch goal. Stretch goal. Um, so we uh we had a small crew come in. Uh we rented a fancy lens. Hennessy brought his black magic nice. Yeah, black magic camera. Um and uh they they said Hennessy organized this whole thing. It was fantastic. They had a whole video village outside Chris's office. Uh Sandy and I got to

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    sit there with headphones listening to everything Chris said and interrupt whenever whenever we wanted to say something different. Um it was it was fun. a nice uh it was nice cuz we were here late last night doing that and also waiting for the patch. Uh yeah. Yep. No, it it was it was quite an even a good a good end to the week, I think. Uh what did you do this week, Alexis? Um I had some management training. Oh, management training. Yeah. Who runs different management trainings, but uh it was um I guess I mostly focused on merchandise stuff this week. Sandy and I have been working to get some new stuff organized. So that was most of the week. And then uh some stuff for events like Gamescom, that sort of thing. And the Bar Citizens. Yes. Uh Bar Citizens for

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    Concierge are tonight. Uh I believe Frankfurt and the UK are already going on right now. Um and Austin and Santa Monica are later tonight at 6 o'clock. We're Which one are we going to? I don't know. We're going to hop on a flight to Austin. No, we'll we'll be uh we'll be in Santa Monica if if you guys if anyone out there is attending. Oh, that's great. So, yeah, come see us tonight if you're in the Santa Monica area and you've already re RSVPd. If you haven't already RSVPd a lot. Yeah, a lot. It's going to be a party. Yeah. Yeah, there there there was a lot. So, yeah. Ah, so uh that's our weekend review. We have some special guests coming later for our talking ship component. So, we're going to move right into Where's My Spaceship. Uh, Where's My Spaceship is our lightning round

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    where we're going to talk about the uh current state of several of our ships that aren't out just yet. Uh, last week we covered many ships. We're going to cover the remainder that we didn't cover last week. Again, a lightning round. So, Ben, master of ships. Where's my Endeavor? Um, Endeavor is much further down in the schedule, so not not in active development right now. All right. How about that? Javelin. Javelin is actually put together by folks in the UK right now. Um, so that is uh I should stress it's being put together for Squadron 42. It's we're not going to see the Javelin in Arena Commander tomorrow, but uh it is it is getting its uh getting it it's putting words putting parts of the ship ship. Uh so our commissary is closed today. So there's been no energy drinks and no caffeine for anyone. We are a little bit dead.

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    They're dressing up our commissary to look very pretty. We'll show you when it's done for sure. But it's really hard to get to our energy drinks today. So, uh, so that's good news. We got the patch out already cuz that would, uh, that would grind the team to a halt. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, no, the Javelin is, uh, it has folks on it right now over in the UK. Okay. How about that whole series? Hall series. No, it's more uh, further down the line. We'll hit the hall a first and then build up from there. But, uh, it's it's so scheduled, but not today. Okay. And reclaimer folks like that. Salvage the same story for all these rec. But not there's a reason I avoided them last time because they all probably which we should do in this segment is tell people what ships are in development right now. We did that last week though. Just could do the same

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    thing every week. I mean yeah because ships don't change every week. But I mean we can say uh we I can talk about some of the changes. We had an artist who is moving uh if the folks who were working on the John Scout have moved on to the Herald. Um which uh is a good thing. Um meanwhile tech tech folks are working on the John Scout getting a flyable right now. Uh what else? Uh Reliant is getting hanger hangarified. Uh the Bengal a bunch of people moved over to the Bengal cuz we need it for some scenes in Squadron. Uh uh we just got the concepts in for our uh small mining ship. Um I can't say much more about it. This is one of the ones that you'll see it in the vault someday. It will look nothing like what came out today, but uh I liked it. Um Chris Roberts had more changes than I did. Is this the first time we've

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    mentioned this moment publicly? I think we mentioned it before. I don't think we have. I've seen threads about it, so we must have mentioned I'm sure I've said it on I've talked about it on Netflix. Let's see what chat says. Um, what else? Yeah, they're freaking out. Small mining ship. Yeah, that's what I thought. What else, Ben? Um, Argo pods. We've got a guy in the UK building Argo pods. Uh, because you'll be able to configure the Argo for different different missions and they're they're working on the variants, I guess. Any any progress on the Dragonfly? Dragonfly is with our tech designers here in LA. I think actually maybe the sign off was this week. So, we'll go to a concept artist uh to do the initial initial renders and such. And because everybody's going to get angry

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    if I don't ask, how about that Polaris? Polaris. Uh say that's actually upstairs. It's uh with design here in LA and then it will go to a uh concept artist. I don't know that we have someone picked out. I think uh it was Nathan in the UK wanted the dragonfly. So, we're we're actually breaking up the tradition for Drake. Normally we're doing a design here and then he's going to design it, but I'm not sure who if we have somebody with the Polaris yet. Um I know we'd love to get Ryan Church, but that's not a promise cuz he is he's very busy. Very busy. And uh we're talking about the these new ships, the the Polaris and the Dragonfly and that small mining ship. Uh we're not skipping the uh Prowler. We're not stopping Prowler today. Prowler is what we call in the uh in the parlance of game development blocked right now. Um because we're still working on the Tavar

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    and uh race stuff. Okay. Um you know. All right. Well, um now's the time when our special guests are supposed to be walking into the studio right now. Oh, here. You want Do you want to go grab our special guest, please? Okay. Um that would help if I knew both of their names, but go find Kirk to he'll grab the others. We're going to have some of our designers here to talk about the new component system with 22 in just a moment two minutes ago. Meanwhile, let's plug some other people's games. Um, Star Traders on Kickstarter. If you're a fan of uh David Ladyman and Ryan Archer, uh, their Kickstarter is going really well and they're just straight good people. Um, so if if you're interested in that kind

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    of board game, please check it out. Um, No Man's Sky is available for pre-order now and it looks really really really cool. I I saw that collector's box they had. Oh yes, I I I was already to pre-order just the like a regular person and then Clifford aka Miku tweeted at me a picture of the collector's box with a metal uh ship. It looks it looks just like the ship in Space Rogue, an origin game from 1989. Um cuz that's how I make all my references. Um but it's so cool. I had a guy to get a collector's edition last night. Um leave it to Clifford to show us the most expensive option and say buy this one and then we fall for it. Thanks, Clifford. And third, um the Humble Bundle this week is uh it's Star Wars themed, but it includes the entire X-Wing series on Steam. X-Wing, Tie Fighter, uh X-Wing Versus Tie Fighter, and X-Wing Alliance. Uh you can get all

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    four for like five bucks and it goes to charity. That is that is fantastic. Um you know, normally I would say go buy Star Citizen stuff, but buy other people's games this week. Uh there's some great stuff out there. Where's Kirk? Uh He's on a call. Oh, he's on a call. All right. Well, guys, take your seats. All right, Hennessy, let's go ahead and move on to talking ship components. He was ahead of me. Good job. So, joining us now, our special guests, Kais Renault and Matthew Sherman. Uh, let's you see the Monterey, so squeeze in if you can. There you go. Hi, Ben. Hello, guys. Oh, there we go. Hey, we actually look further apart on the screen than we do. Well, you know, the camera adds 10 in 10 in. This is really quite personal. Really quite personal. Yeah. So, Thomas, we'll just film it all in fisheye lens.

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    We're reconfiguring, guys. So, Kix and Matt, you guys are designers here on the Star Citizen team in case there's there's always new people every week. They've never seen you before. Yep. And you guys have been working on our new ship component system, which went in with 2.2 last night. Yep. The first step of it went in. Uh we rolled out the groundwork for our updated power plants and coolers. So, we're moving away from ships having just one power plant on them to being a series of uh linked and additive components. So, most of the ships now you'll have, you know, two or three power plants installed. Uh, pretty much every ship has a pair of coolers on it. So, setting the groundwork for the new system where we can build out a ton of components in the future. We'll soon start to have that applied to uh shields. It's already groundwork laid out to have it so that we can have uh an

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    array of shield generators as well. Uh which is important because otherwise you just get the one shield. Yeah. So let's start at the beginning here. We just we just introduced coolers and power plants this week. Um I know that they may be self-explanatory, but but what's a cooler? What's a power plant? And how do they affect our gameplay? Power plants make power. Yep. uh every every second they make a certain amount of power according to how healthy they are. Uh you can throttle that to affect your signature but uh that they're pretty simple components. Uh coolers uh take what the heat that are in the ship system and uh disperse it. Uh they generate a certain amount of signature as well to do so. They use power to to do it. But uh basically you just have the heat and power resource on your ship

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    um moving through the the pool system and uh power plants contribute to it and uh coolers pull the heat away. Yep. Yeah. Uh and I mean everything the reason we also went with the power plants and the coolers first is pretty much every ship and every ship system uses those to some extent. You know, everything is either drawing power or generating heat as it as it operates. Get as close to the table as you can, Kirk. Yeah. Scoot as close to the table as you can. There you go. Hi, Kirk. Please continue. Well, yep. Yeah, we're squeezing in a whole We're like a clown car show here today. Oh, yeah. So, with the power plants and stuff, why wouldn't somebody just want to use the most powerful power plant all the time? You'll glow like the sun. uh once we get

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    uh I mean one of the nice things with this is it starts letting us build out you know bigger EM signature and IR signature ranges. So as those start to grow then we can start doing some more finetuning uh eventually with our missile tracking to actually make those where okay if you're if your EM is off the chart well that chaff may not help you as much as you thought it would. if your IR is just, you know, glowing red hot that the flares aren't going to, you know, be creating as much of a disperate signature as you'd want to avoid an incoming missile, right? And figuring out the uh not only the benefits, but the consequences for getting uh better better or different equipment is going to be something that we're being working on because uh the simply getting a better piece of equipment doesn't mean it's it's across the board better. We we

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    need to figure out how to balance um things like um becoming a a bigger target for other ships. Y um it will generate more heat. Therefore, you will have to compensate by getting coolers that can cool the ship more effectively and uh other uh properties like that. Yeah. Well, another thing is that it's it's more risky to have because uh the higher power power plants, the more power going through the system. Uh when it does when when things go really wrong, when things explode, you're going to have a far worse problem on your hands if you were using a larger power plant than if you had something smaller. And why wouldn't somebody want to use the cooler that cools the most all the time? Uh similar reasons really. um just on the opposite side of the spectrum where is the power plants are dealing with uh EM and uh coolers are dealing

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    with IR uh it's it's sort of a balance between uh emissions uh safety uh cost weight all all these things like uh there's also you know you you might be able to uh disperse a ton of heat but you're possibly drawing more power to do so you know the these things don't necessarily scale one to one. So, and so you since you are cooling better, you are generating more heat by the component. Yeah. And and so the the cooler, you know, I I think uh just for a live in-game example on this would be I want to say it's the Aurora CL. It has more uh industrial tuned components. So, it's going to have, you know, higher baseline power output and a bit more cooling efficiency to it. But in the same regards, they do have much higher

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    signature multipliers. So you you get that benefit, but it's at that cost of well, if if you're a cargo ship, you aren't really caring as much about having a big er signature. You're caring more about I want to move this cargo from point A to point B. And so it's sort of that that trade-off you make. Also, there's like damage to uh consider when you're in battle. repairing that component that is more costly, larger, more beneficial, requires more resources if it actually gets destroyed. Um, having uh spare parts for repairing that that component will come at a at a greater cost. Gotcha. And so that's 22, but but uh coming soon we're talking shields now. So why why don't you tell us what do we do to shields now in the

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    meantime and where are shields going? So shields with 22. Uh one of the things that we did to just sort or less get a better baseline when we get the the bigger component refactor in is we've actually locked in the shields on ships. So uh the shields that every ship comes with uh inside of its family are going to be restricted to those ships 422. Um, and a big part of that is just so that when we do roll out the new system, we can really start fresh with the much more detailed and updated, you know, uh, damage formulas that we've been working out over the past few months. Why don't you talk about how that that system is actually going to roll out? Oh, yeah. So, um, the the biggest the biggest thing that you'll be seeing when we get the updated shields out there is, uh, the smaller generators, they'll, you

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    know, they'll fragment out into a few other parts like the power plants and the coolers, but now you're going to have, uh, poolbased shielding so that everything becomes additive. Uh, everything, you know, your your overall performance will be more an average of the sum of your parts. Um, so how much how much damage of each type you're absorbing, how much you're mitigating is going to be a lot more driven based on these new the updated components. And the specific rollout plan for that is uh yeah, so for that uh we're targeting to three. Uh some of it will be based on when we get the some of the final tech implemented and and all tested out so we're happy with it. Um but then along with that is the replacement of the existing shield generators that we've

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    sold on the store uh with the 22 patch notes. We had the uh conversion matrix. So if you currently own one of the seal corp inc or or seal corp inc mark or splash shields uh definitely check out the patch notes uh or the the patch post so you can see how many of the new Seal Corp web shields you'll be getting uh once these new components roll out. What else you got to tell us about shields? Uh some of the behavior is being updated. Uh where we're looking at having um basically you scale like like for for instance ballistic penetration. Uh you would be have a certain amount of ballistic penetration when the shield is at 100% health versus when it's at zero and it will scale between the two. Uh so

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    if you've brought the shields down a fairways, you'll be significantly more effective with your ballistics. Uh and so there's, you know, the the curve on that makes it so that you probably want to have mixed loadouts. Uh we're we're changing it so that uh the regen delay only happens when you hit zero. Mhm. Uh, so if you hit zero, you get like a big reprieve of of like now is your chance to really push because they don't they have some number of seconds before they even begin to recharge. And the recharge itself is switching to be uh basically also on a curve. So the uh you're re recharging at all times and when you take damage, it resets your regen rate which then recovers over time. Um, and it doesn't so it doesn't actually reset

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    it to zero. It it chips away at it to towards zero. So what this means is that conceivably the smallest weapon in the game could eventually overtake the strongest shield in the game. Uh, but take forever. it it will take forever. But it also means that like that uh those small weapons still have a place in a massive cap ship game because if if we're dealing with something, you know, hundreds of thousands of of shield points and you're doing a 20 damage per shot, uh that still matters even though the the regen rates clearly going to going to overtake that because you're you're interrupting the regen rate. And so if you have large ships doing like the the real meat of the damage, uh if

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    there isn't support ships, a lot of that damage, a lot of that health just comes back. Uh because at the at those larger scales, your rate of fire is reduced. The you just have less incoming hits. So you you there is a reason to have the jabs from from your small support ships. Um, probably the biggest change that's going to occur is that uh each of the ships is going to have their own um shield emitter. And the shield emitter will derive the stats for the shield that it generates from the shield generators. So faces are going to be locked to uh each ship. If it's a fourth four face shield ship, it'll always have four faces. However, things like um the overall health, the rate at which health

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    recovers, things like shield hardening when in which you choose the priority of a particular face, which means it gets more majority or a bigger percentage of the uh uh overall shield health shunted to that particular face and how fast it recovers uh the absorption factor, the um what's the other what's the other waste ratio, right? So those those um those stats are going to be derived from the shield generators that you can um um install and then upgrade on the ship. So therefore, upgrading a shield is done by um acquiring acquiring better shield generators. So, if I get a if I have three shield generators and I get one that is much better at um generating shield resource to repair the shields

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    faster, I've upgraded the way that the shield works. If I get one that is uh much better that than at um the face hardening aspect of shields, um getting one improves that aspect, getting all three and upgrading that improves it dramatically. Y the the thing about the uh shield hardening is that that's a specifically a feature for multi- crew. Um with shield hardening, we have it so that we can balance our shields so that if you don't ever touch shield management, you get basically the performance that it says on the on the tin. uh if you uh uh if if you are constantly moving your shield health towards uh incoming fire, then the result of that is that you're

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    increasing the the amount of health and the improving the percentage of health in that system. And so that improves the hardening against incoming damage. Um, and so the way that the numbers work out with some of our early tests is that you could potentially be uh multiplying your total capacity for damage by a factor of as much as 5 to 10. So, it's really powerful having somebody not in just a supporting ship, but actually on your ship managing your shields, right? That's exciting because it makes shield management a real thing. Yeah. So doing things like shunting power, figuring out which phase is going to be the priority. Um turning off shield generators if you really if you need to to conserve power or uh regenerate the shield health at a faster rate at the de at the detriment

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    of turning shields off for a limited amount of time. This these are real things that we can achieve with the system. A lot of it's coming out of it also pretty systemically which I'm pretty happy with. like uh he mentions that if you if you turn off a shield face, it regens faster because and the reason it regens faster is because it's still drawing the same amount of shield power or the the shield resource. Uh, but it's no longer using it for that maintenance cost of actually having it up, which means that you can drop your shields to bring your shields up faster, accepting whatever wind of of damage you have, or if you can think you can get behind a rock real quick, drop your shields, they charge up faster, and now you have the benefit of all that hardening back. It's It's a pretty nice interlocking system. You're going to see crews bragging about their shield game. Oh, yeah. The crew shield game is tough. You know, what's the shield game like?

39. 00:31:25

    This also are hard. This also does thing like uh actually uh allow us to do more realistic damage simulation. So if you if you do damage one of the shield the many shield generators you have in the ship, it has a real consequences to the overall performance of the shield. Destroying one completely has a has a very dramatic uh consequence, but these are things that you can see and are going to be tangible. Yeah. And this is what we hope to to have the beginnings of in 2.3. Yeah. Yeah. we're we're really targeting to try and get a lot of the the groundwork for just the core function of a lot of the things that we've been talking about. Um so some of the like nuanced ability for for players to be actively configuring these things on the fly that will sort of layer on once we've gotten the the core you know

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    formulas and back end of it implemented. But it's absolutely something that we're pushing for because I mean like Kaix was mentioning with multi- crew ships uh we don't want the engineering station to just be something you think I'm going to just assign an MPC crew member to this all the time. It's going to be we want it to be something where no this is the most badass shield managing engineer in the galaxy because he can take a 100,000 health shield system and get 400,000 health out of it in a single fight. I'm going to call it right now. my dad's gonna end up being a shield engineer and sell me a ship. The whole time you're talking like, "Oh my geez, my dad's gonna go crazy about that." That's just what he wants. And then having like internally internally accessible items is is something that we're also trying to achieve. So that you there is that excitement of shield generators a down.

41. 00:33:02

    Yeah. engineer go run down the hall, repair that component or grab a grab a replacement component from the the cargo hold and uh pop a new one in because otherwise we're we're dead meat in the middle battle just quickly. All right, guys. Well, it's 11:35. We're about to move into our question and answer period. Uh I know many of you are very busy. You got followup work for 22 and laying the ground for 23. So, if any of you want to stay, you're absolutely welcome to. if you need to leave. I understand. Probably stay for a minute. I'm done. Yeah, I'll stay. I was looking That's why I was looking at Kirk when I went when I when I said this cuz I know he was like, I I can only stay for so long, Jared. I got to go. So, thank you so much, Kirk. We love you, Kirk. So, now we're moving into our question and answer the show. Tech Design is led

42. 00:33:51

    by Mr. Miyagi. Yes. uh to ask a question, ask us a question. Please preface your question with the word question in big bold letters with surrounded by parenthesis. Um if we didn't, we forgot to say this last week, but if you notice last week, we took all of our questions from the RSI chat. Uh that is how we're going to continue to do this for some time. We want to make sure that we are getting the questions from our backers, you know, the folks who support the game and whatnot. So, if you are looking to ask us a question in RTV, uh you want you're going to want to jump into that RSI chat right now and post your questions there cuz just like we did last week, that's where we're taking our questions. Our ship is taking damage right now. Yes. Right now, we got to do this the Star Trek thing. Oh, he stopped moving the camera. All right. Oh, I just hit my mic. So, uh first question from Ed Harrington. Hi, Ed. Any news on whether

43. 00:34:40

    we will be given the material kits the art uses to build stuff for player housing? Probably not anytime soon. Yeah, height housing isn't a it's not a isn't in the original design spec. Well, maybe think of the hangers. Yeah. For the ships, we are getting we are at some point once we get persistence we're having that we're going to eventually have the ability to start customizing our hanger, move things around. So, okay. Uh what can you tell us about future component types? Asked Red Hermit. So, um, a lot of the components that we'll be rolling out, there's, uh, most ships sort of have a placeholder for them right now, and it'll just be a similar thing to what we're doing with Shields where taking something that we've had, uh, a somewhat functional but more simplified version of and just

44. 00:35:29

    expanding out over it. So, uh, you know, fleshing out radar, making that a more compelling set of choices with what the component does, fleshing out avionics, uh, getting life support to matter, so you can't just, you know, meatwag in your constellation. Um, just slowly taking all those things that we have the the stubbed in, you know, foundation for and really fleshing it out, making it nuanced, and just making it something compelling for people to interact with. gravity generators, avionics, gravity generators. Uh we probably will be dealing with the uh more specialist components on a case- by case basis until a you know becomes there becomes a strategy for unifying all that. But things like like mining equipment is probably going to be uh we build it for the ship. Yeah, it' be more specialized

45. 00:36:19

    for some of the the like ro specific functionality. Uh, somebody asked, I'm going to stop this here so I can actually see the name here. Stop auto scrolling. There you go. Somebody asked, "Will the Dragonfly be able to use a jump drive?" Uh, so the Dragonfly is still in the Mel of its uh concept design. Um, we are exploring the notion of it being the first snub that could have uh quantum, but that would be at the trade-off of it will never be able to land on its own to like a planet surface and do orbital takeoff uh like the other snubs will have. Um, in terms of going into jump, I don't want to like fully commit yes or no one way or the other. It's

46. 00:37:06

    something that we'll definitely look at, but uh we definitely want it to be something that you could do quantum on uh if nothing else. That was Moonruck who asked that question. Uh James Hobbs asks, "Are there any plans for buying components in the mini PU store like to actually earn USC for missions and use that to to buy components?" Looking towards it, but it's not going to happen immediately. Yeah, I mean it's absolutely part of, you know, just the long term where Yeah. We want you to go check all these parts out at a store and be like, I want that one. I want this one. There there there's a reason that the folks in Austin who are working on shopping right now are focusing on the the clothes and the decorative items because we can get that system in and working and then we can apply it to stuff that really matters like components rather than having some

47. 00:37:53

    awkward back and forth where clothing matters. Yeah, being able to customize a character is something that's at the top of a lot of people's lists. So, it'll be it'll be it's it's a important step to being a living, breathing universe to not have everybody wearing the same thing. I just want to leave a conspicuous clothes line out of Well, let's uh let's get you some pants and I will pick up a uh F-22 and we'll see who wins the dog. No, you have to see who wins the boat race then. Um let's see. Armored citizen ask asks asks what's the future of ship speed that folks have noticed that speeds have changed a bit with 2.2 speeds have changed a bit. Uh there's there's a lot of

48. 00:38:40

    uh sort of a holistic refactor lens going on with the ship speeds of going looking through all of the our ships and re-examining them with uh you know we've we've nailed down a bit better our metrics for determining how we think uh ships should be performing versus how they are performing and how we want to move move them around. And uh these are sort of the the first pushes into that. Um the yeah like SEM and after burner speeds and cruise speeds, those are all sort of in flux at the moment as we uh push them around towards towards a like a better uh balance for Crusader. Like that's that's really to now all of our balance has

49. 00:39:29

    been with the lens towards Arena Commander. it's been the the way to tell how our ships worked. And while that's still valid, it's no longer the whole picture. Uh, and so basically everything is getting getting reviewed and updated to to fit better into a universe economy. Okay. Uh, I'm going to ask this one because I know you're working on it. I'm curious if you remember. Boldart wants to know, "How long is the caterpillar right now?" Uh it has changed. Mhm. Uh and no, I don't know the number on hand. Um it's awesome. It but that's also because it's it's like right now I'm working on floor plan stuff with it and and doing interior white box uh implementation. Um and I'm actually really excited about

50. 00:40:20

    this ship. I wasn't I actually wasn't too keen on it uh before and now that I've spent some time working on it, I'm really happy with it. uh and the uh like like seeing seeing that floor plan actually come out and you're walking through the space and and having the doors functionally opening and having all these things moving around and uh it's actually really quite exciting. But that means that the the dimensions are slightly altered and I won't actually know the full scope of that change until we get the second art pass on it after this. All I heard was Kaix hates the caterpillar. Caterpillar. It's huge. It's awesome. Folks are asking, I no longer hate the caterpillar. I love the I've had a change of heart. I love the caterpillar. Folks are asking if I'm

51. 00:41:07

    wearing pants. Thank you, Ben. He's not. Not at all. Please send pants to I would describe what he's got. Scorch or it's a combat kill. Dear diary, today Ben looked at my crotch and said I would describe what he's got going on down there. It's It's the uh It's the belt dress that Lulu has. It's quite fetic. Let's see. Cord. Are we going to have different engine components? Asks a lunar. As in thruster engine components, I imagine. Uh that's I mean yeah you're you're meant to be able to upgrade your your engines. Um we that's that's actually part of what

52. 00:41:54

    we're looking at in in terms of the you know again the universe economy of like what is it like to to alter these things in in you know the baby PU. Um, and yeah, we we're looking to, I think, uh, simplify and unify those systems so that we can get some of the the benefits that we're now starting to see in coolers and power plants and soon to be shielded supplied engines as well. Um, so ideally, yep. Um, I forgot what I missed who who said it, so sorry I don't have your name. Somebody asked if uh, cockpit views will be getting better. It's a it's a common assumption that every well everybody has their favorite ship and everybody wants their favorite ship to have the best possible field of view. Some cockpit views, some cockpit views

53. 00:42:44

    will be changing. Probably not any of the ones you're thinking of because uh we actually do design these cockpit experiences to be as uh you know open or limited as as I mean generally we don't want every ship to feel the same. You know, first of all, you want it to fly different. Do you want it to have uh different strengths and weaknesses? Um you know the the Freelancer cockpit is fundamentally different than the Merlin cockpit or the Mustang cockpit. Uh and really the driving force to improving or altering these things is bringing in uh the improvements to HUD and uh screen MFD interactions. Yeah.

54. 00:43:33

    Yeah. And maybe you aren't seeing space, but you're not seeing static current either. And that's that's I think where a lot of the issues with uh some of the current uh cockpits sort of would fade away is when the thing that's blocking your view is actually doing a thing other than just being pretty art. Um, hey Ben, can we expect 2.3 this month or in April because 2.2 dipped into March? Uh, to be determined really. Uh, you know, the the the goal is to try to get a patch every month. We will sometimes slip, sometimes we won't. Uh, and we'll see how it shapes up. I

55. 00:44:23

    imagine we'll know a lot more in about 2 or 3 weeks. Um, but I imagine we'll know a lot more in four weeks. Yes. We'll we'll definitely have the answer in 5 weeks hopefully. Let's come around to the next March. Yeah. Uh no, it's a we we've we've gotten the patch to PTU every month on schedule. It's always important. It's it's always impossible to to fully estimate how long a PTU period each patch will need though because it's dependent on the available testers and the available resources to to fix to fix things. And I mean there's two essential criticisms, one of which is totally invalid and the other one which is true. Star C is a scam. We're stealing everyone's money. Blah blah blah blah. No, we're delivering something every month and you can you can see it. That's what really really matters to us from a public percept. We want to show you what we're doing. Um

56. 00:45:12

    the second criticism is this game is has all sorts of delays and so on. And to that I was Chris Roberts game. It will never be quite on time, but uh we will always try. I was hoping you wouldn't tell us which of those criticisms was valid. Oh yeah. All right, Dr. Gordon Odair like the name doctor. Right now crashing and ramming are major issues. Uh then there's a word I don't will we get shields so that we can repel and be protected from that. Uh I don't have a bumper shield. I don't have a good answer to that. Uh I do have um I'm that's simply not something that I've worked on directly. Uh yeah, like a lot of the the shield work right now has just been the the active like damage caused by weapons. It hasn't been as

57. 00:46:01

    much on ramming and collision stuff. Um that'd most likely I'd say be a down the road kind of thing where it'd be something to explore later, but I'd like to write with two features that allow you to to address this. Uh, and we we've talked about some of them, but uh, they're they're not the the next thing up on the plate. So, I don't know exactly their status or how it's going to come out. Have we determined whether the Buccaneer will have cargo or not? And are we ready to share that? No, we are not ready to share that. Um, sorry, Kraken. Yeah, I tried. As I had mentioned, uh, when we set the that reference image thread, uh, the description on the Buccaneer is being left intentionally vague for the moment. uh we do have a plan in place. We have a

58. 00:46:50

    a good idea on where we want to take this ship. And it was very much being left uh open-ended with as little information as possible on like the concrete specs of the ship just so that people didn't feel they were innately constricted on what they could submit as their own personal inspiration uh for a reference image. So, and that thread has definitely been going really well. Uh really happy with how that's been turning out. I think it's just short of 20 pages right now. Probably be making an update in there when it hits 20. But great stuff so far. Deep Six Six wants to know, "How will component repair work for non multi- cruise ships?" In the same way as they work for multi- cruise ships. I mean, you have to get out. Yeah. I mean, components have a physical location on your ship. Uh you can access

59. 00:47:39

    them uh to whatever degree you can access them, which is true on multi- cruise ships as well. Y um and when you when you have full access to them, you open up a panel and you uh repair them directly with your uh tool to your little older tool that allows you to Thank you. Um and then you can also do the subcomponent replacement. Uh, so you not you pop open the panel to the component, then you pop open with the panel on the component, then you have the stuff inside and you fiddle with that until it was working better. Yep. Uh, and I'm I I really want to get percussive maintenance in, but I don't know exactly how that's going to hit it till it works, right? It's part of the grabby hand system. Yeah,

60. 00:48:26

    everything is part of the grabby hand system. The weaponer wants to know how the updated ship components will work with the Vandal, Glaive, and Scythe. So, right now, uh the the updated component system is mainly for like the you know, UEE make and human or made by human type flyable ships. Uh so, it won't be sprawling out as much to like the Glaive or the Scythe. Um those are going to be more, you know, bespoke for what the Vandal make. uh they're not really on friendly terms, so they don't play with the same size standards. Gas wants to know, "What's the difference between engines and thrusters?" Uh engines generate thrust. Uh thrusters point it in a direction. Sounds reasonable. Yep.

61. 00:49:18

    Uh, by the way, again, if I'm not reading your questions, it's because I already know these aren't the guys who have the answers to that, guys. So, it's it's not anything personal. Uh, we all love the fan cave. Is there are there plans for other sets? Yes, there are. Soon, I think we have three sets of walls like this and we'll be decorating the other two in different ways. Um, working on it. All right, talking about uh Ethnne asks talking about questions. Matt said that for now each ship type will have all the same shields. Does that mean that the Gladiator now has the same shield as the Hornet or the Vanguard has the same shield as the saber? No. No, that means uh the like the all the Avengers will have the same shield on them. Uh the

62. 00:50:08

    constellation has its shield set for it. So the the Gladiator has its own shield setup fixed to that ship right now. So there are still going to be differences between the ships. It just won't be you you won't be able to move the shield components around between the ships. Yeah. The main reason for this has to do with the changing numbers and how uh quickly and easily this can break the system uh when we don't have 100% of the the components tuned up yet. Uh if you'd like any examples of this, go ahead and look at the Vanguard in PTU. Uh yeah, I mean things I I I've said a few times it's it's very much we are spinning plates as we get a lot of these components set up and um no one wants to clean up a bunch of broken plates. So we are focusing on

63. 00:50:57

    the spinning. Maybe you're spinning plates. I'm shooting ski. Well, you're sweeping up the porcelain. Okay. Uh, we get this question quite often. Draxus wants to know, "Are there any more ship commercials in the works?" Not immediately. Our cinematics guys are all working on Squadron right now. You know, we have people who kind of learned on those ship commercials. So, now they're doing amazing things on Squadron. Um, once we are finished with Squadron 42 or we're finished with Cinematic Squadron 42, we have some more assets we can do things like the Retaliator commercial with, uh, which was a stretch goal. But uh for now no big ship commercials. Um but we were also at a point with you know when we started doing the ship commercials there wasn't a game that you could actually go and see the ships in. Now you know we like to think that Alpha Alpha 2 is Alpha 2 is our uh is a ship

64. 00:51:54

    commercial. It's been a long week. It has been a long toku 101 says, "Any plans for the saber being rentable?" Yes. Yes. Uh we should go and fix that as actually it may be fixed right now. Uh uh that was on the list for Turbulent to do this morning. So when we're done here, we'll go check and if it's not, we'll get it up there, but the uh the saber will be rentable now that it is flyable. Got time for one or two more before we wrap up. Let's see all this. Let's see the post. You want to run the computer? I'm running the computer. No, I want You want to run the computer? I just want a critique over your Oh, look. It's all the same questions. Uh, please tell us something about this a Oh, this week's ATV sneak peek. This week's ATV sneak peek was That was the Reliant uh interface, isn't it? Yes, it was. Looks

65. 00:52:42

    very good. The HUD previsualization. Uh Zayn did awesome awesome work on that. Now, now a pre this is a previs. It's not something that's enabled in game. It's it's it's kind of like another word we use is lookde. It's them. It's them uh finding different ways and you know finally figuring out what look they want before they have to actually build it in the game. So the MISK UIs all tend to use 3D holograms. I think that's the the direction we've been going with that. So So you can expect similar looking HUDs on all MIS ships eventually at some point. Starfare Freelancer like. And actually sort of looping back to the earlier question about uh viewing angles. One of the the big things that helped to prompt that was, you know, we wanted the Reliant, especially of any of the other MISK ships to have just

66. 00:53:30

    unprecedented viewing angle. Like it it has the biggest open cockpit. Uh, you know, we we removed a bunch of struts from some of the initial concept art on it to make sure that you just have this great clean look. And so now the HUD helps with that. So you don't have anything really in front of your face. It's all like cleanly tucked up to the top. Okay. Uh, Aaro wants to know, "Any chance shopping makes it into 2.3 or 2.4?" Uh, there's a chance. Uh, but we can't promise we can't promise any features for a specific patch yet. Um, imagine a bunch of cakes baking simultaneously and there's a specific time and when you hit that time, you take all the ones you're done baking out and the rest are still I'm bad with analogies today. else.

67. 00:54:18

    Or analogies. I do want cake now. All right. All right. That pretty much wraps up our question and answer period. Uh Matt Kaix, thanks so much for stopping by, taking the time to discuss ship components with us. Uh uh you can hang out for the next four minutes you want or you can GTFO if you want. I'm going to hang. All right. Bye guys. Nice. And now we've moved on as the screen says to our looking ahead. uh are going to talk a little bit about what's coming up for Star Citizen. Return with your shield system or upon it. So, um in our immediate future, we've got a 10 for the chairman coming on Monday, all things willing. Even more immediate future, we've got the monthly report coming later today, which was another thing we did this week. Yes. Um I like the monthly reports. It's a nice

68. 00:55:07

    concise collection of most of the things we've been doing every week. I don't know if it's concise, but it is. Well, I think compared to everything that we do, that is a very cons. It's concise by virtue of comparing it to the sheer magnitude of of stuff that gets done every day. Technically, it is concise because sound like Tom Hennessy now shaking his head. I live to make Tom Hennessy shake his head. We love Tom. We do. Unfortunately, it'd be easier if we didn't. Also, next week we've got subscriber flare. We do. Yeah. Do we want to tell them what it is yet? We did already. It's space plant. Space plant. Not the same space plan as the uh everyone already got. It's a a different space plan. There's a stretch goal space plant and there's a subscriber reward space plan. So, and if all things work

69. 00:55:54

    out, you'll see a segment with uh behavior, the makers of our space plants and all of our subscriber flare next week on ATV space. Uh what else we got coming up? Um we've got our bar citizen tonight. Uh for those of you in the Santa Monica area, uh Shar is headed back to the UK next week to handle some squadron stuff, so we will miss him. Do we know how long he's going to be there? Two weeks maybe. Uh it's in the out report. Yes. Uh but uh everybody Oh, we're also working on 221. It sounds like they're they're looking at hot issues. They're going to do some fixes for those in the next couple days. So look for a a pure bug fixing patch at some point. Uh you know improve stability a little bit. Uh I

70. 00:56:43

    know everybody eager to tackle the desync issue that's been popping up. Yes. So um 221 and and general follow-ups collecting feedback from 22 and then the very beginnings. Oh QA has already done the feedback. I I got the feedback report this morning. It's I I don't know where they find the energy because they they were, you know, they were covering this thing way until the early morning and we already have their like 60page document about what people think of it. Oh my goodness. I love our QA team. Mhm. And then the beginnings of work on 23. The very beginnings. Yeah. Well, I mean it's it's it's sort of not that way because there are things that will go into 23 that have had people on them for six months now. And so there's imagine a conveyor of cakes and the cakes are going by. Each of the cakes

71. 00:57:31

    has a number on it. Each of the cakes has a number on it. And when the time comes, all right, we're going to put two, three together. We just grab the cakes that are ready and in front of us at that time. So much baking analysis. It's a lot like lunch cuz we can't have carbs. So there's cakes in our head. Cakes are in your head. All right. I've got a crowdsourcing request for folks out there. Um, everyone knows because I won't shut up about it that I've been archiving hers commander material and we're going to be done scanning stuff probably tomorrow. There's a couple binders left and then I'm done with that uh march. But I want to move on to these tapes. I have a couple hundred of these DT3 and DT4 tapes that contain all the 3D models, all the effects shots from the Wing Commander movie. And uh I would very much like to restore these, stick them

72. 00:58:20

    on Dropbox and give them to Chris so he can remake a movie someday. Uh but I have absolutely no idea how you read these tapes. This is a DT3 and there's DT4s and we we're just if if anybody out there has experience with uh kind of a previous century data storage, uh I'd love to hear from you. Yeah, I've got a drive that'll read them. We don't have a computer with the interface for it. Yeah, cuz you look up the drive and there's all sorts of like scuzzy things, but I don't think there's a I think there's a I think we have a computer here. So, any advice would be great. Um, also if you watched around the verse this week, stay stick around till after the credits. You will see the single greatest performance of Sandy Gardner's life because she was not performing. Ben went on and on about Wing Commander and

73. 00:59:09

    those are those are the most genuine reactions I've ever seen from it. It came together so well. And uh check out the official announcements forum. Uh we are collecting Big Benny's footage. Um not ready to tell you what it's for yet, but we we we want footage of Big Benny everywhere in Crusader. Uh if you can find a way to get him into Art Corp, you know, do it. But we need footage of Big Benny everywhere he's not supposed to be. And you'll find out what that's for in a couple weeks hopefully. So, collecting footage for that. Uh, what else? So, if you'd like to pick one of those coolers, they're permanent to the Voyager Direct store. We've got the Saber of Lean Scout unlimited sale this next week. If you are one of those people who uh who had just a base package and was offered a 300i uh discount upgrade, that goes through

74. 00:59:59

    Monday. So, get out there and uh upgrade to the extreme luxury of an origin spacecraft. The extreme luxury of an Origin spacecraft. And I think that about does it. You got anything to add? No. Good. Her her stuff's covered. She's like, I got all my stuff covered. I don't have that much to cover. Uh, so thanks for watching, guys. It's been Reverse the Verse. I'm Jared. That's Ben. That's Alexis. That's Justin. The man behind the camera is Thomas Hennessy. Thanks for watching. and we'll see you next week, guys.