Star Citizen: Around the Verse 3.13 - LA

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   Hi, thanks for joining us for this week's Around the Verse. I'm your host and game director, Chris Roberts, and with me is Sandy Gardner. Hi, Chris. Hi, Sandy. On today's episode, we'll dive into the latest Star Citizen developments coming out of our Los Angeles studio. And while ATV mainly highlights content that's coming in future game patches, there is plenty of gameplay that needs your help testing available right now. Yes. So backers can download the 2.5 alpha and explore around Crusader in the PU. Visit ArtCore, check out their ships in the hangers, dog fight against Vandola fellow players in Arena Commander, or try their hand at racing on one of the Murray Cup tracks. Yeah, lots to do. And any bugs you find or feedback you have, please let us know on the forums and the issue council. All of your input is such a critical part of the process. Yes, it absolutely does. It's especially critical as we get more and more new players joining us every week looking at

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   it again with fresh new eyes. We have new opinions. So, newer veterans, Star Citizen would not be possible without you and we'd really like to thank you. Yes, we would. And the support of our generous subscribers as well who help us to provide these behindthe-scenes shows and tons of other weekly content. Yeah, definitely. A big thank you to everyone. All right, so uh let's get on to the rest of the show. So let's go to Eric to learn what's happening with the LA studio. Hey everyone, I'm senior producer Eric Kairen Davis with your studio update. Here in Los Angeles, we not only get the chance to work on elements for the upcoming Persistent Universe releases as well as Squadron 42. We also work on some larger foundational systems that affect both games. Let's start with engineering lead Paul Ryan team to tell you a little bit about what they're working on. The major things we're working here

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   right now obviously is item system 2.0 finishing out um Mark's doing great job of finishing all like the the ships to get ported over to the new system. Um we're currently working also on the room system and the interaction system which um is the the whole like system where we place different module rooms, put them together and you can define atmosphere and then if something like destroys like blow off like a door the atmosphere goes out the player will die. Um and at the same time we also building the whole interaction linkage system which allows us to place different objects in a level. Um and designer can just like draw an interaction link. For example, they make a button here and they make like a power plant here and now they can

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   just draw interaction link like oh if I press that button this power plant goes on and off. um which is a huge pre- requirement for getting all like those dynamic missions um working in multiplayer since Cry Engine flow graph system is just like not working in multiplayer. Um so we have to replace that all but Chad's doing great job working on that and that's all a pre- requirement for for our um single player campaign but also for for the whole like IPO mission system. Hi, my name is Chad McKenna and I'm a gameplay programmer here at the Los Angeles studio and I'm going to be talking about interaction linking and the room system. So, this level demonstrates the room system and atmosphere containers. Um, the room system and atmosphere containers are used to create boundaries for our space stations

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   and ships and places in the game where we want there to be pressurization of different gas levels. It's something that we've to date faked in the game with the airlocks and you know you'll if you go into an airlock without a space suit you'll die but the system in place that does that isn't very general and it doesn't allow for emergent gameplay. What we're working on now is a system that is a more proper way to handle pressurization and depressurization in the game. Um and it's still pretty early days for this. As you can see, this test level just has some some basic boxes and shapes that define the room volumes. And we have some test assets in here just to play

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   around with it. The spheres that are inside these volumes represent the atmospheric composition. So here the blue spheres are oxygen and the red spheres indicate that that room is been filled with carbon dioxide. The room system uses three main uh types of entities. One is the atmosphere container which is the thing that has the atmospheric composition. So for instance, if I come over here and look at this debug output, I can see that the composition in this particular room is uh 0.8% oxygen and 0.12% carbon dioxide. But if I walk into space, um, I have nothing. There's no atmosphere out here. So the atmosphere

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   container is a very important part. The next one is the room. The room indicates the volume um, and the boundaries for the atmosphere that's connected to it. Later on, this will also be used to indicate security and power connectivity, but for now, we're just working with atmosphere. So that's atmosphere containers, rooms, and then the third important type is the room connector. So here there's the yellow box around this door. This yellow box indicates that there's a connection between this room here and outer space. Now the room system uses these room connectors to try to create pressure equalization between different areas um well between the two spaces that the room connector connects. In this

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   instance, the room connector is connecting a room to outer space. So if I open this door, the oxygen levels in the room is going are going to drop. And if I walk into the room, we can get some debug output to see that yes, the pressure in the room is dropping rather quickly. And the pressure in the adjacent rooms is also dropping, although less quickly because it has to traverse through the room connectors. Now, having a system like this is really nice because it allows for more emergent gameplay. I could, for instance, close this door and close this door off and keep the pressure uh or keep the depressurization localized to a certain space. Or I could

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   reopen the door and allow for the oxygen levels in the other room to fill up this space so that the people on this side of the of the space station don't die. As you can tell, uh the room system is still pretty early days. We are we just now hooked it up to audio and we plan on hooking it up to the player behavior and visuals soon. But for now, we're uh still developing it, and I look forward to having this into Star Citizen, which I think is going to allow for some rather interesting gameplay. So, by now you guys have started to see the new interaction system start to come into 2.5, as well as the new content that we've been putting out, for

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    instance, and the demos at Gamescom and Citizen Con. The new inner thought system gives contextual information for objects and items in the game that you're interacting with. One useful tool that we use with those interactions are something called interaction links. Interaction links allows the designers to create relationships between items so that you can build up more interesting behavior from smaller and more modular pieces. As an example here in this test level, I've set up a door that is connected to a laptop and a power cons or a power generator. In any given level, you can have a door that has certain interactions like open and close, but you might not want the player to actually directly interact with the door. For gameplay reasons, you might decide that it's useful to have

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    the player actually interact with something that's next to it. In this instance, I have this laptop here. The laptop has an interaction for an open and close which is defined in data forge. In data forge we can assign certain values such as sendable, linkable and locked by links. And this just means that we can actually link this interaction to something else. uh linkable indicates that it can be linked to by a different interaction and locked by links means that we're going to share the locking which is the semantic u locking and unlocking of the interaction. So here we've set up this laptop and in the interaction links panel we've created a link

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    which has its source output open connected to the input doors interaction of open and the same thing with close. This means that if I go into the game instead of going up to the door and interacting with it instead I can come up to this ter terminal and use the open interaction which will then open the door. I can also use the close interaction and back and forth. And as I use these interactions, you can see that the text um the contextual information given to the player actually updates in real time. And this happens because of the semantic state sharing that's implicit in the interaction links. Now, this doesn't have to be with just something that we walk up to and interact with, but anything that supports interaction links. I've also set up a proximity sensor here that will open the door and

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    close the door whenever I've entered the area here. So, if I walk in, the door opens and if I walk out, the door will close again. What's nice about this is it allows us to have self-contained behavior. So, for instance, in this case, a proximity sensor, which then can be hooked up to something else to build up a more complex behavior, which is walking into an area and a door opening. But we can hook up the same proximity sensor to anything else. For instance, I could hook up the same proximity sensor to a trap that maybe opens a door and sucks out somebody into space where they would then die. Um, so yeah, that's the basics of interaction linking. You set up interactions and data forge and then create interaction links in the interaction link panel and then just use

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    them in the game. So that's interaction linking and the room system. Uh still a work in progress. There's a lot of work to be done with this stuff, but I look forward to working on it continuing going forward. Interaction linking is some really exciting tech because it will help allow everything from simple button to action behavior and also more emergent behavior for networks of interaction links. So up next, here's an update on the Drake Buccaneer being built here in Los Angeles. So, the Buccaneer is meant to be Drake's answer to dealing with fighters. So, ships like the Hornet and the Gladius and the Saber. It's sort of in that class of ships. It's purposebuilt just for combat, um, with a bit of a pirate flare to it. Um, so its intention is to be super fast, super maneuverable, uh, but

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    very flimsy, so it can't really take that many hits. So you can see this reflected in Jim Martin's concepts. So you'll notice that the ship has these gigantic engines to emphasize speed. And uh some of the changes that we're going to be making when we move into the actual full production of the ship is uh the wings. They have a very particular shape which we're going to sort of uh make them a little bit smaller, a little bit sleeker to emphasize speed even more. And we're also going to be placing maneuvering thrusters uh all around the main engines in order to give it the maneuverability that it needs to basically outmaneuver a lot of the other heavyhitting ships like the Hornet or the Super Hornet uh which are essentially flying tanks. But this one will be a little bit more maneuverable. It just will not be able to take the hits. So with the Buccaneer, you're going to want to get in, do your damage, and try to avoid taking any damage. From

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    a design standpoint, we also wanted the main gimbbled weapon on the belly of the ship to be usable at almost every stage of flight. So, this includes having the landing gear uh deployed. And in current in its current stage in the concept, the landing gear is sort of blocking the firing arc of the gun on the bottom. So, we're going to end up having to redesign the landing gears entirely uh for a couple reasons. is one to give the gun the firing arc that it requires and two for performance reasons. We actually uh we're trying really hard to make sure that all the landing gear tucks into the ship so that way we can call that out in in the game so it's not eating up the resources the entire time in flight. Um some of the other changes that we'll be making have to do with the cockpit. So

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    you'll notice in the concept we've got uh right side entrance into the ship. We're actually flipping that over to the other side. So, it'll be standard with all the other fighters where you enter on the left side. And we're also going to be changing a little bit of the shape of the nose to accommodate a fold out ladder so that players can actually climb in and out without any problems. To give you guys an idea of what really goes into setting up these ships, we're also going to give you a quick look at what's going on with the Buccaneer and its very early white box stages. Uh, so we're really just starting the big, you know, production buildout on this ship. you know, artists are wrapping up the Caterpillar and uh and being able to move on to this now. I've been wrapping up work on the Herald and so now working on to the the Buccaneer setup. So, uh a lot of this is still going to be temp or placeholder stuff as we're piecing this ship together because you we have to

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    find out what are its custom animation needs or custom art needs or custom tech design needs uh before all those pieces can really come together. So, what you'll be seeing today has a few oddities. uh the the pilot it it's not using the actual animation template that the final ship will be using. Uh you'll be seeing some fun oddities with the Herald animation warping somebody through glass. Um some of the maneuvering thrusters and the main thrusters are going to look a little bit awkward on the ship. Uh but those are really just so we can take something that we have that works. In this case, you know, the main engines on the Herald. we can just change some of the data, bolt those onto the ship, get something put together, and get something flyable really quick and start tuning it and to find out, okay, is this delivering on the goals that we want? Is this delivering on the gameplay that we

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    want to have? Here we have the current uh white box on the Drake Buccaneer. So, just a few of the quick highlights. Uh we've got its size one and size three wing mounts. Uh we haven't built out the missile launchers yet. That's going to be a little bit further into the gray box phase. Uh some wonderfully oversized temp engines on this thing at the moment. You can see that really big back here. A lot of this though is just to get the ship up flying as fast as possible. Uh if you notice any of these little dots littered around the ship, these are its maneuvering thrusters. So, uh, 24 total maneuvering, uh, and then main and retro for 28 total thrusters on the ship. So, let's just go ahead and climb in. Uh, the onboard animation for

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    it right now is a bit off. And you'll also sort of see the uh control panels are a bit broken, but so some of the other fun oddities of White Box. The ladders won't retract just yet. Uh giant main so you can see the fire shoot out of the front of the ship. But then just basic basic gameplay is what we get in the white box. So all the controls, you can roll, you can pitch, uh, speed up, slow down, anything basic. And then we just start getting the tuning set up from here. So the white box is really just, you know, the basic functionality check. So we make sure it can start, it can stop, uh, all its axial control. So roll,

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    pitch, yaw. And then from here, we can really start getting the actual gameplay balanced. Make sure that, you know, the thruster counts are just right, the the load balance on it just right. So, one of the challenges if you're using a pre-existing animation template is we have to alter the flight controls to match the animation template. So, with the Buccaneer, we're going to be using a center joystick and a left throttle. So, in this scene, we have uh the just the rough concept model we got from the concept artist. And what I did is I kit bashed in some existing Drake assets along with some other guiding rails so I could line up the animation. So, you can see he's getting in. It's still really rough and there's clipping and not all the parts are animated yet,

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    but we're really just trying to get an idea of whether or not this animation's going to actually work with the ship. So the concept itself, we're we're working really hard to make sure that we keep the spirit of the ship and its current iteration concepted out. So it's actually really common that we make tweaks to our designs when we move into production. And the reason why that happens is because the concept artist is focusing on communicating a specific feel to the player. So if it's meant to be a quick maneuverable ship, we want it to look quick and maneuverable. If it's meant to be a big cargo ship, you want it to look big and clunky like it can't move. Uh but what happens is when we move into production, we end up having to implement some standards for gameplay reasons. So this means, you know, floors have to be a specific height, ladders have to be a specific height in terms of the rungs, the seats need to be a very specific way to accommodate for our

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    characters. And that means we end up having to make tweaks to the concept to basically nudge it in the right direction to get it to fit properly. Uh the changes that we make usually aren't, you know, big sweeping changes where we completely redesign the ship. Um, it's just to make sure that it works properly with our game systems. So, when this whole process is done, you'll be able to get your hands on an awesome ship, the Buccaneer, which is really meant to be the pirates answer to the military ships. So, we're talking about going against the Avengers, the Hornets. Uh, this is Drake's answer to that problem. Uh, you know, the pesky law getting in your way. I know. I'm really looking forward to adding the Drake fighter to my lineup. Other portions of the studio are digging deeper into 2.6 bugs. The art and tech design teams are delving into some

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    several different ships as well as concepts, characters, and animations that I can't really spoil yet, but all you'll be seeing in the not too distant future. In other news, in LA, we're gearing up for the next week's live stream, and we'll have some more information out to you soon. Well, that wraps us up this week. Thanks for watching, and see you again next time. Awesome update. With item 2.0 know being flushed out with the room system and interaction linking. It really gives us a sense of how the designers will be able to create interesting gameplay and missions. Uh yeah, absolutely. So, it's opening up a ton of new possibilities. Uh players will be able to approach the scenario multiple ways. They could charge in guns blazing, turn off the power to bypass security. Maybe they want to forget all that and just force open the lock air lock and vent everyone inside. Uh so I really think the emerging gameplay um that we're sort of

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    working on will be a hallmark of Star Citizen and it's exciting to see it all sort of come together uh to create such a complex system. It is and it seems like scanning will also be a pretty big deal uh with players gathering info and making tough decisions. Uh yeah, right. Or making rush decisions with imperfect info which can be a lot of fun too. Uh so imagine having a ship flying towards a ship and not knowing whether they're friend or foe. Or maybe your scan operator points out that a ship in the area has an uncomfortable amount of guns, so you decide to play it safe and stay clear. It's going to add a lot of nice complexity. Speaking of, let's go to CI's very own scan operator, Tyler Witkin, who has been searching the web for the very latest and greatest from our amazing community. Hey everyone, Tyler Witkin, community

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    manager in the Austin, Texas studio, here to bring you this week's community update. Just as a reminder, there's only one day left to enter the Asperia Prowler art competition. So, if you wanted to get your submission in, I would do it now. We're going to be announcing the winners to that competition November 18th at our anniversary live stream. In other news, we've been nominated for most anticipated game of 2017 in this year's Global Game Awards. If you want to follow all the progress on that, you can head over to game-debate.com/awwards and the voting ends November 25th. And now it's time for this week's MVP. A huge congratulations to Ricemated for his detailed efforts in creating a full-sized 3D printed P4 SC rifle straight out of the Star Citizen universe. Awesome stuff, and we're really excited to see what you print next. Lastly, the week would not be complete without Reverse Diverse. So, make sure to tune in live tomorrow at

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    twitch.tv/sig TV/SIG community where we're going to talk about everything that you saw on today's episode. Thanks again for all your support and we'll see you in the verse. Every week it's great to see what the community's been up to. So four years in and they keep on surprising us and it's one of my favorite segments of our show every week. Yes, they do. And up next, our character art team walks us through all the pipeline refinements and improvements they've been working on to make sure that we can not only produce some of the most amazing characters around, but that the system is flexible enough to populate whole solar systems. [Music]

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    Hey, I'm Forest. And I'm Josh. And we are going to take you through the character production pipeline from then until now. So, speaking of now, we have a big character material library of steels and leathers and fabrics and all that kind of stuff. And it's really easy to swap stuff between characters. What was it like before in the old system? So, the old system was a manual process. It was very labor intensive. You had to go into Photoshop. You had to go through each of your layers, manually mask out where each material goes. But you have to do that for every single character. So if you have a 100 characters that are using a specific leather, for example, you have to update 100 character Photoshop files. Imagine updating 100 character Photoshop files as opposed to now, right? Where you only have to update one. So that's a lot of work to do 100 obviously 100 Photoshop files for 100 characters. Um, so now we're be

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    since we're able to swap all these different pieces though. It sounds like we and we are using one leather example uh for everybody. We spend a lot more time on that one leather because it's going to be seen everywhere. I mean, imagine dedicating resources to do a leather for 100 different characters. Imagine trying to keep it consistent across the board. Uh, it's going to be very difficult. And from an art direction standpoint, it's it's kind of, you know, a nightmare to deal with, right? Because you're all about consistency, right? Yeah. And in maybe in different lighting scenarios, they were totally different where in a dark in the old system in a dark environment would look bad with something, but it would look great or vice versa. But now with the with this method, it's much more consistent. Yeah, it is consistent. Uh the old method didn't really work with all lighting conditions either. So a lot of times if you had an extreme lighting condition, you would not only have to go to your Photoshop file to make sure that everything was correct,

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    you would have to do a variant of that uh texture to ensure that it worked in that different lighting condition. And now you're getting exponentially more um with the uh the method that we're currently using. It's flexible against all lighting conditions across all characters, which is great. And one other thing that I really like about the new method is that uh when we zoom in, the fidelity of the textures is way higher than the older one. Uh you can zoom in to the to the fabric detail to the stitch detail and it's way way way higher. Exactly. It allows us to do micro detail now. So the previous method we restricted to our resolution. you had a 240x 248 pixel resolution, but your character is 100,000 polies. There's not much space to put that information. And if you zoomed in on something, it would get pixy, blurry, and all that stuff. So, we keep the old traditional method, which allows you to still have that unwrap. And that's where we bake all our normal information and all that stuff,

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    which handles the way that the light reacts and shadows on the character without needing to have the geometry there. Like the details from that are all picked up in the micro detail. The micro detail. Yeah. So we have these middle little normal maps that when you get up close you can see them. So like all the threads and all the threads. So we got a great mic macro system then a micro system. So no matter what your distance from the character is um you're never getting that breakdown of resolution, right? Which is great because now we can get up and get those really nice zoom close shots and we can get those far shots and and they're going to look equally good in every possible lighting because you don't want to break the immersion. You want it to look real. If I get like this. Yeah. Yeah. Does that make you feel uncomfortable? Yeah. Good. Does that make you uncomfortable? So, now that we have a really good then and now, right, of our character pipeline, right? What is PBR? PBR stands for physicalbased rendering.

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    Physicalbased rendering is the realistic approach to rendering game surfaces based on real world measurements. A nonPBR model means that you have no real world reference on how the materials will actually react in the real world. A physicalbased rendering system on the other hand has a very accurate shading model to ensure that when the specular and the light hits a surface it will react accordingly to how that surface would actually react in the real world. The Nomad character, for example, had both metal and fabric. In regards to PBR, that's two different ends of the spectrum. One is reflective and one is matte, which means that we had to ensure that all of our specular settings were correct. So when the daylight hits the model, every surface reacts accordingly. So the character pipeline is all the different types of phases that we're

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    going to go through to create a character. Uh it typically starts in concept phase. Uh then it moves to a high polyphase followed by a low polyphase. Uh and then texturing and materials. 2D concepting is the very first step of character development where a concept artist will provide ideation sketches provided by the design briefs. 2D concepting is very important in our pipeline because it's fast. It produces quantity of ideas. It's loose. Uh we can explore a lot of different kinds of forms compared to working strictly in 3D. The reason we chose 3D concepting for the helmet with the Nomad is because it's very quick. Because it's already in 3D, it's really easy to transition to the high polyphase. And for the Nomad,

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    it was very a very tight time frame. Because we ended up choosing the 3D concept, we're actually very very close to the end result and got to the high poly phase much quicker. High poly is usually the first step in 3D visualization of a character and it's the first time as you start to uh assemble it together you can start to see uh come to life and that's when we start to figure out a lot of the problems and a lot of the movements and most of the details that go into the character and we flesh that out as far as we can to get the character as realistic and uh to the quality level that we want and from that point on it goes into the uh low poly modeling and rotopo phase. So for the high polyphase of the sand nomad, we use a software called ZBrush. And what ZBrush is like a it's an amazing tool that allows you to

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    uh go through different levels of detail. So for example, I worked on some of the arm for the Nomad character and it's really easy to sculpt because I can kind of get a a base topology down and get the shape and the silhouette of the character. And then we're able to subdivide the polygons and continuously go up in detail, which allows us to do uh a few different types of things and get to like more of like a clay-l like substance. And as you can see, um the character gets more and more detailed as we go up in subdivision. So, this would essentially be like a base mesh that we start working with and

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    we get some of the rough shapes and kind of start filling out where all the assets go on the character and what essentially it's going to look like. Kind of, you know, get a few different reads of the character. And then we could subdivide him up. And once he's subdivided and we've done uh all the passes, all the sculpting passes on the character, we start to see our first real iteration of what the character uh could look like. And in this situation, we can kind of move around different lighting, see how it reacts with uh some of the shapes. Now, we're not really trying to like capture any materials or anything like this. At this stage, we're essentially just looking at the character as a whole. from my first read to a second read to a third read. Um,

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    getting all the levels of detail in from some of the bolts to the belt to the way the fabric folds work. Yeah. And kind of how the character might actually look when he's brought into game. And ZBrush is a critical uh component of our pipeline. And that allows us to subdivide the model into and get really really high resolution so we can see the character at its most detailed phase. The process for the low poly for the character team um is pretty straightforward. Uh we use uh Maya or Tpple gun in terms of software and our goal is to capture the silhouette as much as possible while keeping it within limits that are required for the game. The process for doing low poly in the

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    character team, we use topple gun or Maya uh to create it. Um, our focus is on capturing the silhouette and making sure that the geometry isn't too high and then we can't it will kill the frame rate in the game. A low poly mesh is a simple mesh that is built up of quads and triangles to give us an approximation of what our high poly sculpt is. So, it'll end up being little squares that build up the entire character. Our character pipeline uses a specular physicalbased lighting model. So what that means is when the light hits a surface, we define on the surface through the specular channel exactly what type of surface that is. So here we are in a test map where we're uh doing

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    some lookdev on some materials for the Nomad to show you some uh physicalbased rendering stuff. Right here we have a gold polished material. Right here we have a um a very basic generic metal. And then right here we have a um just very rough uh micro surface pattern. So it doesn't have much reflection. So if I come over here in my gold, I'm going to go ahead and go to my glossiness, which is essentially a roughness value. And when I drag it down, you can see that we start losing the perfect reflection until it becomes all the way matte. That is because we're essentially making the surface to simulate more roughness. The more roughness you have, the more the specular is going to distribute across the surface, which is essentially a simulation for heat distribution.

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    So, over on our character, we have this really slick way of actually swapping out all the materials and doing all this really awesome kind of thing. So, let me go ahead and uh get up in here and get up in here. That sounds weird. So, let me go ahead and select the vest armor right here. And we're going to try to play with these materials a little bit and kind of show you the system that we're working with. So, over here we have our uh diffuse tint, diffuse wear, uh some gloss overrides. We have our blend maps right in here. That way we can mask out the different areas that we want the materials to come through. Then we have our wear, dirt, and ambient occlusion. and then our unique normal maps. So under here you have our color. So we're able to tint the different

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    objects. So let me go ahead and just kind of make this armor piece white. And what's cool about the system too is I could come over here to my armor piece and I could just quickly swap out exactly what material is being referenced. And to make something like this gunmetal, I start over in substance and create a series of unique materials and then I start compositing them um uh to basically create a type of composite metal. So um multiple different metals, start combining them, then you get this really cool looking kind of composite, which is a little more interesting than a pure precious metal because it has some kind of diffused color and detail in there. And we export our maps and we just bring them into the engine. All right. So, let's uh let's come over here and let's

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    go ahead and uh let's say we wanted metal pants. Why wouldn't you want metal pants? And I think I'm going to go with a bronze. Look at that. Isn't that fabulous? In fact, that is just so wonderful that I want to make his undershirt the same. Let's go ahead and make that undersuit bronze. Oh, look at that. Up here, we have a cloth attachment that actually kind of moves around when you uh when you rotate the character. And not only does it move around, but it actually has a cloth shader applied to it.

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    So you can see we get this really nice for now highlight on here. So let me jump over to it. And if I shift the color, you can really start seeing that cloth shader in action. Let me go to a red. And you can see those highlights. And that other color is the secondary reflection. So let me just kind of match a little closer. Really nice red. So let me go I'm going to go ahead and take that red. And uh we have a couple settings here. We have a little uh diffuse fall-off so I could strengthen it or lighten it. So we have these super cool colors going on. We got this like bronze undersuit with this super cool black and white uh armor piece. So we're just really

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    quickly swapping out everything on these characters. Do some color adjustment. Make it look like it matches the uniform a little more. Make it kind of dark. Jump over to the cloak. Do the same. Awesome. And there is a very quickly modified So, as you can tell, we've got a whole character pipeline that's really coming along really well. One of the big things that we're really trying to focus on though right now is modularity. What that means is basically creating and combining all of our different assets so that they can work with each other. um when you're buying clothes that all the different pant options fits with all the shirt options. Uh when you're buying hats, when you're buying jackets that they fit on all the shirts, which doesn't sound like a big deal, but it's

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    actually really important. Um the reason it's really important is so that we can provide players the optimal experience for, you know, variety and what they can buy uh not just in clothes, but also in armor. So, we're doing this with armor as well, so that you can wear different types of armor on different types of suits that can mix and match and you can create the best combination for what your play style is. The other thing that we're really focusing on now, which we've had a little bit of a sneak peek about, is creatures So, in the future, we're going to be

46. 00:36:45

    doing all these awesome characters, creatures, worms, as you've seen, insects, alien life forms that are going to fill out these awesome worlds. And with a strong character pipeline in place, any of this is possible. That was great. Really interesting to see how they blend 2D and 3D concepting to create a character. Yeah. Well, PBR rendering really is a cool piece of tech. It's taken a lot of effort to bring our character pipeline to where it currently is, but seeing the Sam Nomad sort of come to life in the Homestead demo just shows all that hard work is really paying off. And there you have it. That's about it for today's show. But before we go, do you want to share an update on what's happening with 2.6? Sure. Yes, we do. All right. So, for Star Marine, Design's finished with the latest round of adjustments on the Damian map, which is our smaller space station combat map. Uh, and it's been

47. 00:37:33

    handed back to art for their pass while design moves on to Echo 11, which is the sort of bigger map, uh, that's based on an asteroid base. Uh, we've been working on approving our hit and death reactions to make them feel more satisfying. Animation's also been doing some further testing on combat signaling and the emote system to see if an override animation solution or an additive solution will produce better results. Uh, let's see. The new Arena Commander mode, Pirate Swarm, is in testing along with new IIA profiles that are currently being balanced. The VFX for the new pickups are in now, so audio can begin their pass. Just as a note, audio usually are one of the last teams to touch things because, you know, you don't want have everything change and they have to change the sounds afterwards. Um, let's see. A couple of interesting blockers popped up this week as well in Vandal Swarm players and AI were getting placed on the wrong teams.

48. 00:38:22

    seems Warlord and Vixen weren't quite as trustworthy as they seem. Uh, Tech Design had a strange bug where a mysterious force pushed players away when they had to enter ships with interior grids, and if you tried again, it would kill you. So, that's not very good. Uh, we also had a bug with the Herald where the cockpit windows turned opaque, so you couldn't see out of them, and therefore pretty hard to fly. Uh, so, and speaking of the Herald, both the Herald and the Vanguard Halite are receiving the last round of polish for their up andcoming release in two the 2.6 alpha. There you have it, everyone. And to get more insight on everything Star Citizen, make sure to tune in tomorrow at 11 a.m. PST, 700 p.m. GMT, and 8:00 PM in most of Europe uh for Reverse the Verse. The team here in LA will be answering questions on what we just showed. Yep. And also wanted to let everyone know that ATV will be on hiatus next week uh as everyone gears up for

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    anniversary live stream, which is on Friday, November 18th. We'll have more details about what to expect on the website, so be sure to check it out. And until then, we will see you around the verse. Thank you for watching. So, if you want to keep up with the latest and greatest in Star Citizen and Squadron 42's development, please follow us on our

50. 00:39:57

    social media channels. See you soon.