Around the Verse: Episode 1.62 (2015.09.24)

24 September 201500:49:391,455 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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On tonight's Empire Report, a shocking vid has come out of the Karell system. In it, a prisoner on low is seen being beaten by police. Who took the vid? And how did it get out? The victim's family and law officials both want to know. Can people be too happy? That seems to be the question Crusader Industries is asking with the introduction of luxury liners equipped with the new exuberant respiration systems. We talked to our very own Jillian Spratt to learn what it was like to be one of the first passengers on board. With Terra's Settlement Day Festival shaping up to be the event of the year, we are looking at some major traffic hitting the entire system. We'll take a look at which jump points will be hit
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the hardest and what you can do to be prepared. All that and more on the next Empire Report at 2200 SET. This video made possible by the ICC Stellar Surveyors and subscribers like you. Hey everybody, welcome back to episode 62 of Around the Verse. I'm Sandi
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Gardner. And I'm Ben Lesnick. The Avenger is on free fly right now, so all you guys, backers out there, should get in there and try it out. Yep, the folks at Foundry 42 are working on the Avenger revamp right now, including the two-seat variant and the you know, the various combat variants. You'll be hearing more about that in the near future, but uh your feedback on the current Fly Free is uh a big help to them. Work on Star Citizen is continuing along. The team is currently putting 1.2.1 through its paces for an impending release. Uh 1.2.1 will include a number of balance changes, some of them long-awaited, as well as the uh initial updates to the social module. Um so, our corp might get a little bit more interesting. We'll have uh more details on that soon. We'll be going to PTU in the uh near future, no date yet, but uh it's coming.
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And of course, we're looking forward to Citizen Con. Tickets will be printable 1 week beforehand. There will be 200 lucky people to take a tour in the Concord, and there will be all sorts of other goodies and swag on the night. So, we look forward to that. That's a great uh chance to meet the folks in the UK who don't get as much coverage since uh they're far away from our cameras. We held our first subscriber-only live stream on Wednesday, and it went really well. Yes, uh Chairman Roberts stopped by to answer some questions. Uh we're going to try to do this essentially once a month, give a little bit back to the subscribers who make shows like this possible. Uh it won't always be Chris, we'll have other special guests, so look forward to that. Uh we take all the questions directly from the subscriber chat, so if you'd like to take part in the next one, subscribe. Yes, and for those of you who may have missed out on the Wall of Honor, here it is.
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That is one heck of a Wall of Honor. It is. People have been asking about it for a while, and it was it was hiding in our office next door, so it's nice to see that everybody gets to see it. And we're going to have that uh posted in the new office for all of our visitors to see. We will. So, now let's kick it over to news from around the 'verse. Reeling it in? Yeah. Okay. Everyone, welcome back to sunny Southern California. I am Darian Vorlick, uh production coordinator at Cloud Imperium Games in Santa Monica with this week's update. On the production and design and engineering side, uh the first we've got
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is our one of our designers, our senior designer Kirk Tome, he's working on the gray boxing of the Drake Herald ship. Uh it's coming out to be really cool and it's looking to be a test bed of some of our component features. On top of that, we've got Caleb Renault and Matt Sherman. Uh we've got two different uh entries from them today. Both are working on balancing uh for the 1.3.0 patch coming up pretty soon. Uh so, we've got feedback that we've been soliciting from the players on top of doing internal uh play testing and balancing. But, the last part of this is uh Caleb Renault has been working on a couple new weapons. Uh one of them is a mass driver and the other one is, I believe, a uh ballistic cannon of sorts. One's a size two, one's a size four. Uh so, we've been doing some internal balancing for that. And on top of that, we're
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hopefully to see them in our PTU in the near future. Uh other than that, that's all we've got from Santa uh Southern California. I'm Darian Vorlick. Hey guys, Jay Cross here, associate producer of the Persistent Universe, and I'm here with you this week to talk a little bit about Social Module V1. Uh we're coming up here on our uh milestone deadline. Um so, it's exciting to see things kind of come together for our next iteration of uh Area 18 and Social Module. Um part of that, we've got working uh on uh props some props to help flesh out the area a little bit, some hero props. We've got our second section of ArcCorp opening up, and it's going to be kind of like this construction zone, and it has this giant huge crane prop over overlooking the whole area. So, uh
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Patrick Thomas, our lead environment artist here, personally took that on himself and it looks really great. So, hopefully that'll get in and you guys will get a taste of that. We're also working on the Million Mile High Club, which is if you guys for those who don't know, goes to our first 100 backers who who gave us 10 10K. So, that's kind of a private lounge just for them. So, it's a kind of a cool little little bonus environment that we got going and we're making some props some hero props for that as well. We're also working on the this prop for the character loadout selector. So, in the next release you guys will be able to kind of pick between different loadouts using an actual interface instead of just
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pressing F6. So, we want but we want it to be in fiction. So, we have this this kind of prop that we're we're making just for just for that interface. So, look forward to that. We've also been working on the female locomotion set. So, we've got our male animations in and working. We've got some emotes going there. And so, we're refining now our female. So, hopefully we'll be able to see her walking around in game here pretty soon as well. So, we've got the male all the male emotes in. We're working on the female ones next. So, hopefully that'll be soon. Last but not least, we're working on the Hurston white box the Louisville landing zone in the Hurston on the Hurston planet in the Stanton system is one of our coming landing zones. And we are in white box phase there. So, we're going back and forth iterating and with Tony and
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kind of it's this kind of refinery world. There's lots of coal and ash. It's really dirty and it's going to be it's going to be cool a little you know, way different than than ArcCorp is. So, look at some variety there. So, yeah, it's in white box phase. So, hopefully you guys will get to see that here later on down the line. All right, that's all I got for you this week. Thanks, guys. See you. Hi, I'm Ross Tergenza. And I'm Darren Lambourn, and we are sound designers in the audio department here in Foundry 42 UK. Um little background. Um I've been in the industry around 25 years now. Um this will be about my 60th title. It's certainly the largest, most expansive uh demanding title of my life. Um I'm working right
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now on what we're calling ship audio 2.0, um which is all about really expanding the uh complexity of of and the voice of the each individual spaceship, that give them all a signature sound. Uh such like the uh the resonances, um sympathetic resonances you hear from the physicality of the ship responding to various forces applied to it. And yeah, um and the power plant and the various systems and how they're all organically connected, and that's what uh that's what I'm doing at the moment, anyway. And it's cool. yeah, I've come from uh an FPS background. Uh I started as composer on the games TimeSplitters 2 and TimeSplitters 3, then went on to make Aliens versus Predator, and then onto the uh the Crysis titles, uh porting Crysis 1 for the consoles, then onto sound design, music, and a bit of
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writing and directing on Crysis 2 and Crysis 3, and then finally uh uh Homefront: The Revolution with Dambuster, which was more open-ended game. And uh this game being so open-ended is really what's made me excited about it. I mean, it's it's massive. It's There's never been a game as open-ended as an entire universe. It's a very exciting prospect to work on. Uh I'm working on uh ambient sound design at the moment, mostly. Just giving spaces a lot of life. Uh making it feel like one area is desolate and cold, the other area is exciting and vibrant. Just making you want to traverse that kind of sonic space. Uh also lending just some of my FPS backgrounds um on readability, just making it a pleasant experience when you're going around in any kind of first-person adventure. Um, and yeah, that's that's me. We'll see you later.
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Hey guys, Brian from the Frankfurt office here flying solo this week. Uh, give you an overview of what some of the guys have been working on this week out of the office. Um, on the engine side, uh, we got a prototype up and running for procedural planet generation. Uh, the guys tried numerous approaches. We've settled on one we think is the best, the most efficient. We're seeing some really cool results from going really far out to really close in. Um, you know, the players will have that seamlessly, which is pretty cool. Um, so making progress there. As far as uh, on the animation, we did some good amount of work on ragdoll. Um, so you would now have going in and out of ragdoll to animation and every variation and combination in between. Um, also procedural hit reactions.
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Um, and driven ragdolls. So, uh, a lot of that adds those little details. Um, if we have for those procedural hit reactions, now, you know, you're going to see less repetition as you're going through. It's going to be based off of the trajectory and velocity and so on that the players get hit. Those things like that help the player feel a little bit more immersed in the world. Um, FPS, they're working on a new gameplay mode right now. Can't really give much details away, otherwise I'd give too much away probably. Uh, cinematics, they're making really good progress, as I said probably every week. Um, it's going to be a treat at CitizenCon. We'll kind of show, you know, a snapshot of where we're at. And you'll be able to see the quality and and where we're pushing things. Uh, weapons, we are working on a couple
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new ship weapons that everyone should be able to see shortly. Um and on the engine side, we've also integrated some of the latest CryEngine animation tools, which will uh it's got new attachment features, allows for faster setup, um new debugging workflow, and ultimately will make things uh a bit more efficient. So. Short and sweet, to the point. Um talk to you guys next week. Bye. Big thank you to our studios from around
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the world. James had a chance to talk to our CG supervisor, Forrest Stephan. Thanks, guys. I'm here with CG supervisor, Forrest Stephan. Forrest, good to have you back, man. Hey, awesome. It's been a while. You're our first like repeat interview. You stoked? I am. I'm super excited. You You look pretty stoked. All right, man. you want to talk about? Well, since you were last here, you actually got a promotion. Why don't you tell everybody what you're doing now? Lots of the same thing. Same thing? Yeah. Uh do CG supervisor. I don't know. a lot of the same stuff, right? Uh make sure that all the tech's working. Make sure that the artists have all the tools that they need to make the awesome stuff that we get to see every day and play every day. Um make sure that the tech is as efficient as possible, cuz that's kind of been a big part of it is making sure the game runs well and all that stuff. Uh but to make sure that uh
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in this case, you know, we're working on characters, characters, characters, characters. And so, we're trying to uh we got a big uh uh CitizenCon demo coming up and it's going to start having some characters in it. So we're putting a lot of effort to make sure that they look uh extra sweet, right? Nice. So how are the characters looking? I know you've kind of taken over that pipeline trying to get it ready. amazing. Are they because you took it over? No. No, no, no. It's a team effort. Actually, I've been really lucky. I've had uh Omar, who you guys have met a couple times. And he's uh he's been helping a lot and then uh Ali also, obviously our graphics director has helped um kind of define the initial steps to go forward with the character pipeline. And then uh Oka um actually has written uh the uh shader and all the tech that is kind of required for the um new characters. So I'm very excited about the new characters cuz that's we've done ships, we've done
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environments, and we hadn't done characters yet. I mean, we did some, but they're more like test cases and so actually for CitizenCon, will be the first time that we kind of show off like our new characters. Going to be awesome. Yeah, it was like it was almost like in the beginning or previously, it was everything was focused on ships. So they were were character models, but they weren't the finished product or what we expect the finished product to look like. That's right. We never So everything that we do uh every discipline um we tend to take a stab at it, we see where we're at, and then we build the tech that we actually want to drive the game for the next, you know, 5 years or whatever, right? And so uh in the case of the ships, you know, we you guys saw like the damage tech, right? Um we did a lot of efficiency things where we started using tiling textures and all this stuff, right? And then uh make them more and more modular. Uh for
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environments, uh we use a whole modular systems. Everyone saw it first with the hangers, they build out, it modularly builds out, and now all of our levels um are this kind of modular structure, and then use a lot of the same shader and tiling texture techniques that we did and we learned from uh with the ships. Um the VFX, you know, we try to take that to the next level and you know, instead of using just standard billboards and stuff, we started pushing more and more and more and more and started getting very nice looking volumes and these 3D shapes, and we've kind of pushed the explosions and you know, just like getting that not less 2D feel and more 3D cinematic feel. And now character it's the character's turn, and that's what we've been working on like the last, you know, 5 months and stuff like that, to make sure that the characters live up to the standards of the rest of the game. But obviously with the persistent universe, customizing your character is super important. And
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we wanted to make sure that all characters, whether Squadron 42, persistent universe characters in Arena Commander, the overall quality of the characters are very kind of high triple-A standard and uh and efficient, right? So, kind of what we did was that we took the approach of uh going with the tiling textures as we did for the ships and the environments uh and basically it kind of allowed us to create this very high quality uh texel density, so when you get right up close to the character, you kind of have that nice Yeah, that good jean Yeah, that good fabric look, and it doesn't really break down with this like blurry low-res textures that you would normally be required for uh for an MMO. And then all of our textures, you know, are basically these small like 256 256 textures, and then we have these uh color maps that allow us to break up where the different
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materials happen. It's starting to become more and more common technique. I think more and more games will do it, but um games have done it like The Infiltrator did it in their demo, uh but we actually do it real time um in a uh game environment that actually gets the frame rates required to do it in an MMO environment. Um and then so we're able to create our color masks and create like our pristine materials, and then we create all our worn materials, and then we're able to kind of blend in between them also with uh wear masks and dirt masks and stuff like that. So, uh what characters are you currently working on right now? Uh currently we're working on characters that are going to be in the CitizenCon. Mhm. Um so, I can't give away who's going to be in CitizenCon, what characters are going to be in Citizen Con. Uh it's going to be very exciting, very exciting.
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There's the salesman in you. Yes, it's going to be great. But, you know, been working on it for a while now, and a lot of other people have been working on it for a lot a lot of other people have been putting a lot of effort forth to make this demo pretty spectacular, and it's starting to shape up. So, you know, that's why it's kind of exciting. You kind of see the light at the end of the tunnel, and you're kind of we're just kind of closing into the end now. And um Uh yeah, but so uh probably, you know, kind of what kind of like to show and kind of what already been saying is the uh deck crew and the BDU. So, obviously, that's a big role in the Star Citizen universe for Squadron 42, and um for the story line. Um so, yeah, and the uh basically, it allowed us to take these two characters um that we're going to have in Citizen Con and really flesh out this tech with them. Um and it also allows us to do what we call like the item port
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system, um which allows us to swap out different elements of the character. So, the way that the characters actually work now, now that we've kind of all figured out and wrote in the tech is um you know, you got a hand, and then you kind of got a 3/4 or a kind of a half, right, for rolled-up sleeves. the elbow or something? Uh yeah, up to the elbow for like rolled-up sleeves, like a half, and then you have the 3/4, which is like the T-shirt, and then you have like the tank top, which goes here. So, you have this, you know, long arm, right? And then it kind of swaps in and out depending on what kind of clothing you're wearing, right, to make it efficient, you know, wearing on top of other stuff. Um and then uh you know, legs, same thing. You got your feet, and then you got your legs. You can have shorts, you know, short shorts. You could have longer shorts, right? Uh pants, and you can swap all this stuff out, right? And uh you know, different type T-shirts, different type of pants. Torso separated from the legs. Um you know, the arms are
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separated from the torso, the head separated from the torso, the hats are separated from the heads. Uh you know, shoes, you can swap your shoes in and out, swap your hats in and out, swap your helmets in and out. and then obviously, being able to have these materials that drive each of those elements all separated allows us to do like complete customization. And then, also, uh because we kind of have this new tech, we a lot of our color information that comes out of the textures isn't baked all down into the texture maps. So, what that does is allows us to do massive color variations um for uh persistent universe customization. And also, it's required for a lot of our um game design. Like the deck crew, for example, has uh multiple variants that all have their specific job roles. And so, each one um kind of like a real deck crew in real life has a different color code, yeah,
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per one, right? And instead of having to build these textures, and just like get massively expensive, it allows us to use some more code-driven techniques to actually change the colors of these characters. And then that falls in line with like during the persistent universe. If you want to, you know, you have a t-shirt, you know, there's going to be different colors of the t-shirt. And then, obviously, dresses, uh shorts, pants, jackets, vests, and what other crazy costumes that we'll come up with for, you know, these futuristic characters. Yeah, I'm I'm personally very excited to see characters. I mean, we've had ships for a long time. The ships are awesome, but making the verse feel like home, I think you need to have characters and character models out there so we can really feel like a huge world. I'm really excited, you guys have been doing some crazy work up there. Yeah, it's it's very exciting. Yeah, uh we you know, we put a lot of effort um
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you know, we worked with Three Lateral, and um we have some uh great guys in the UK, uh Minnie, John Jones, uh Andy, Mhm. uh Tilsley, that's uh all been kind of really concentrating on making sure that our heads are coming in cuz we scanned, you know, 120 heads. And then, uh you know, goes to Sean Tracy and Austin, who's been doing amazing job getting those all set up and stuff. And it's this huge team working on the kind of concentrating on bodies and jumping on heads here and there. And kind of concentrating on the tech as well. Uh so, we're all kind of trying to steer it away, you know, keep it all together and like keep it in and keep that visual quality up. So, um to be able to see, you know, some real characters with personality and some acting and some life, you know, finally it's just going to be really you know, it's going to be the first time that you're going to really feel the power of kind
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of the story of Star Citizen and the power of the story of Squadron 42 and it's going to I think transition from just a this this environment that you kind of you're playing in, but you're not really know what you're playing in. will be the first time that you start kind of getting, you know, that kind of feeling that oh, I'm in something and I'm part of something. see the bigger picture. a lore and we've read the lore, but now we actually get to start feeling it and getting the emotion from it and all that stuff. Hey man, that's awesome. Thank you very much for coming on. Pleasure having you again. Go ahead and show me your hair though. What? Oh, so I cut it all off? I cut it all off. Back to you guys. Thank you, James and Forrest. Thanks, James and Forrest. Thank you. Thanks.
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I don't know what's happening here. Want to feel very old? This Saturday is the 25th anniversary of the release of the original Wing Commander. Here's the chairman himself to talk a little bit about its legacy. Uh thank you very much, Sandi. Um I am sitting here with uh man everyone already knows, Chairman Roberts. Uh and we are celebrating 25 years of the original Wing Commander. Uh did you ever think that you would still be making space games 25 years? Uh I'm not sure I thought about it. I mean, when you're like 21, 22, you sort of don't think about what you'd be doing when you're in your 40s. I mean, I certainly know that I love making games and I love space. So, I I I don't think I was thinking of uh not making games. I'm not sure I was thinking that I'd make as many of the Wing Commanders and do as much space stuff as I did cuz I actually like
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fantasy and a whole bunch of other stuff as well, but um so, no, I wasn't. I was just sort of in the moment making Wing Commander at the time. Where did it Where did the idea come from? What was the genesis of Wing Commander? Well, you know, I think I've talked about this a lot. I mean, I I think most of the people that have backed Star Citizen are you know, science fiction fans. So I mean, I grew up I was a big science fiction fan. Obviously, I've said that Star Wars was a big, you know, I was 8 years old. I saw the first you know, episode 4 and my father took me and my brother to go see it and you know, I was just like wow, that was a world that first time I was like okay, I believe that world. I can you know, we went home built like X-Wing and Tie Fighters out of Lego before Lego had X-Wing and Tie Fighters. And you know, I loved science fiction just in general as a genre read you
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know, you know, massive amounts of books, you know, whether it's from Heinlein to Asimov to Ursula K. Le Guin. You know, Joe Haldeman's The Forever War was actually one of the inspirations of uh you know, part of like the idea of Wing Commander which was sort of this war that was sort of you know, a big ongoing war that never seemed to end. And so yeah, I just I just always wanted to create an experience on a game that put me in a universe or world the same way when I first saw Star Wars and so that was one of the the bigger inspirations. I mean, I you know, I also was a big military history fan. So World War was you know, a big area of interest like it is for a lot of a lot of boys growing up in England and so I was kind of fascinated by the war in the Pacific and so that was sort
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of the model which was the you know, the Kilrathi were the Imperial Japanese navy and the the Confederation was the US sort of navy and marines. So that was so I you know, took some historical backdrop and combined it with sort of the science fiction set up in the to create this kind of ongoing, you know, war in in the future. And you know, against the backdrop of, you know, dashing space pilots, you know, so. Things like Top Gun and all that are all obviously other parts of inspiration of that time, you know, I mean I was Top Gun came out a few years before um uh Wing Commander and you know, that was one of the you know, I was first over in America and I was working with Times of Lore and you know, that was that was you know, yet another kind of
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pretty cheesy now, but back then it was pretty cool movie that was also sort of an inspiration for kind of the the pistachio elements that sort of made Wing Commander. So, how did you sell this game to Origin? Cuz everything they did before was much smaller scale, it was very role-playing oriented and this to those of us on the outside it seemed to come out of nowhere. Uh well, it was just it I mean it was different. I mean you know, I had the first game I worked on at Origin was Times of Lore which you know, was more sort of fantasy you know, role-playing. It was kind of this top-down uh it was a top-down game that had sort of the look of Gauntlet, but you could talk to people and you had sort of conversation branches and trees which was actually one of the first times you saw that in an interface that way in a in a computer game with icons and stuff cuz I sort of wanted to take the Gauntlet style of gameplay, but make something that had a story and was
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deeper which is sort of a common theme. Uh and then you know, I was just I'd gone Times of Lore out which you know, got was well reviewed and had did well, but it didn't do as well as I would hope it was going to do and partly it was because I made a game for the Commodore 64 and you know, built it to fit inside the memory and load cuz in in the UK there wasn't people didn't have hard drives, so you had to load off tape, so you couldn't just go back to the hard drive to bring in new data. And so I made it all did a bunch of technical tricks to make the resolution appear higher than it was and compress and fill the data and you know, so I was quite proud of the technical tricks, but they you know, people over over in America with Commodore 64s and floppy drives were like, "Ah, you know." cuz they just putting a floppy drive, streaming in whatever data fairly I mean, not now, but back then it seemed like it was
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pretty quick. Um so, I sort of felt like at that point I was playing around with I wanted to do a a science fiction game cuz that was, you know, one of my uh big loves. And and and back in the old Origin days, you know, I wasn't an employee, so he, you know, Origin, this is before EA bought us, Origin um you know, even including Richard, Richard was treated as a developer that was published through Origin. And so, that's what happened with Times of Lore, and they would advance you some money that you could spend on your game or hiring someone to work on your game. But, you had a publishing contract, you weren't an employee with them. So, so I had an office in Origin, but I wasn't you know, an employee. And so, kind of me working on what I wanted to work was sort of up to to what I wanted to work on. So, I was starting to research a you science fiction game I was going to do,
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which originally I was calling Squadron. And originally it wasn't going to be, you know, sort of first-person 3D, which is what Wing Commander came out it was going to be sort of a more tactical top-down bigger ship combat. And I was sort of going through you know, reading books, looking at board games, and just sort of looking for general inspiration. And I sort of decided that I wanted to create a game that was more visceral, that sort of put me sort of in the in the cockpit. Um you know, I the the the work that Larry Holland had done on Battle Hawks 1942 had sort of shown a way to do it in 3D to deliver sort of detail in a sort of 3D ship in this case, you know, you know, aircraft from 1942, you know, fighting in the Pacific theater in a way that you couldn't do at that time in 3D
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cuz 3D straight polygon 3D was very simple and basic back then, so I didn't feel like it had the detail I wanted to the of render ships in. But, looking at what Larry had done on Battle Horseway too, I said, "Oh, I can sort of take this." And had a routine I'd written for rotating to basically scaling a rotating sprites very quickly and fast. Uh and so combining that, if you rendered out all these different views of a ship, um that you could take these sprites that were essentially much more complicated, uh you know, I mean, compared to what we use now, nothing, but back then, you know, you could only you could only render offline and I think we used uh uh you know, one of the very first sort of Amiga 3D programs, uh which I think eventually was sort of came out of the Toaster and all that sort of stuff, which I guess sort of became LightWave, but um so so we we we built these ships
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in 3D and pre-rendered out the different views and it sort of afforded to have this sort of higher level of detail that at the time you didn't really see in 3D and you put the cockpit there and it was, you know, it was a big thing for me to sort of have the point of view and see your hand on the joystick and your knees, uh you know, in the cockpit around you and see damage when the ships getting damage and stuff like that. Um and uh but you know, no one at Origin was interested uh at all, um but I sort of worked on this myself as sort of a skunk project and sort of uh begged, borrowed, and stole some time from people like Dennis Lee Bay to to help uh do some graphics and you know, like things like if you see the running in Wing Commander, that's uh you know, basically shooting video. I think that was Paul Isaac, who was uh the programmer that worked with me back on Times of Lore and then eventually came across to help work on uh on um
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Wing Commander and running on a treadmill and filmed and then we sort of rotoscoped that um into the graphics and uh I can't remember, I think it may have been my hands and legs in the joystick in the cockpit, I can't remember which we did there, but I basically put a prototype together where it was you could be in the cockpit flying around showing how the 3D how it would look and feel, uh shooting some ships and stuff. And then I showed that uh to Robert and I showed it to Fred Schmidt and I showed it to Martin Davis uh to sort of show what I was working on and they you know got you know very excited by that cuz it was very different than what Origin had done before and and so that was kind of the point that I started to get some traction for the game and then sort of went from there but I mean it was you know in the early stages
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it was all about Ultima this and Savage Empire that and um and then when Wing Commander became a hit then it sort of became sort of the second Origin franchise but at the beginning it was mostly because I you know had this idea and I wanted to sort of prove it out and I sort of put together a sort of proof of concept which is I think a way that I work. I like to sort of see how it all comes together and play with it visually rather than just sort of pitch an overall design that's a bunch of words. I want to put out something on a screen so you can sort of get a feel of the emotional reaction which was kind of the same thing I did for the Star Citizen you know crowdfunding campaign where I sort of put this prototype together to show this is what the spaceships could look like and this is what the scale could feel and look like using all these tools that we're going
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to use now and actually if you go back to the 2012 presentation it looks pretty pretty primitive to what we got now but back then it was I think it was pretty impressive so but that's kind of how Wing Commander sort of came to be inside Origin. So how do how you mentioned Star Citizen how how does working on Star Citizen differ from Wing Commander back then? Well it's a different scale in the project. I mean you know obviously Star Citizen is spread between multiple locations so you know we're here in Los Angeles we're in Austin we're in Manchester we're in Frankfurt and we've got people in you know partners that work in other areas like Montreal or you know Illfonic's finishing up the FPS in Denver and so we're pretty spread and we have you know, well over 200 people,
00:32:38
actually more like 300 if you include contractors, working on the project. And you know, back when I was doing Wing Commander, we're in one location, we didn't have a network, internet didn't exist back then. So, you know, if people went between sharing some code, they would take a floppy drive and walk it to someone else's machine, which was called Sneakernet back then, that's how it was it was phrased. And you know, the team was pretty small. So, the first the first year of of Wing Commander development was pretty much just me. Paul Isaac came in at the end and and sort of started adding in and helping out a bit. Dennis Loubet did most of the graphics back in the very early period and he'd done a bunch of stuff on Ultima Underworld and working on Richard's stuff. And then as
00:33:26
we got further in and it sort of got, you know, a bit more backing and and enthusiasm, we sort of added up more people to throw onto it. But you know, in the early days it was like Glen Johnson and Daniel Bourbonnais, if I pronounce it right. And then the team sort of sort of grew for the last 6 months to try and get it out for the ball important Christmas season. So, we went to show it at CES in 1990 and CES is I think back then it was in June. And we sort of, you know, we had this big monitor and some speakers and people weren't really expecting anything from us and we sort of played like some of the space combat and like the scramble mission with the the sort of now very famous sort of Wing Commander refrain that was done by you know, Dave Govett and and the Fatman.
00:34:15
And you know, it sort of drew crowds and everyone was really quite excited by it. And so, when we went back, we're like we got to we got to get this thing out for Christmas. And you know, it's not like now where you can sort of have a get, you know, have it oh, we'll release it on December 19th and everyone can download it then. I mean, you had to get it manufactured, put into boxes, shipped out to the store shelves. Uh Uh so, you know, we had to have it wrapped up for September. In fact, maybe even had to like go sort of master before that, if I remember correctly. I think it was the very beginning of September or the end of August. Uh so, we sort of just threw a bunch more so more resources were sort of thrown in. Um so, there's a fair number of people that came off. Richard's came for a period of time to help out. So, you know, Herman Miller was one of his long-term uh programmers. In fact, when I first came
00:35:02
to Origin, he was the only programmer besides Richard working on Ultima and he sort of did the sound system. John Miles, who I worked with a lot, was helped out on the graphic side. And we had people like Ken Demarest came in to do the AI, which Aaron was over from you know, going to university in England and Aaron did the scripting. You know, we had Jeff George who did sort of paper design and you know, and actually it's pretty interesting in Wing Commander we didn't really balance anything. It was all sort of designed out on paper and the missions that everyone played were the missions that were designed out on paper from the beginning. So, we we didn't even you know, adjust any like I I cannot recall of an instance of us adjusting the numbers that we came up with the ships or or the mission design. And we had a few other people help out like Steve Mucko towards the end and
00:35:49
Steve Beeman. So, I think I've got pretty much everybody. And if I haven't, I apologize. I mean, there's a bunch of people in QA and we had you know, various sort of uh uh you know, sound and other stuff that was happening. So, Mark Schaefer can I think did our sound effects and stuff like that. But anyway, it was a much smaller group than we would have now. So, you do have the advantage of not you know, having the communication issues or the the complexity of the scale issues. Game was obviously much simpler in terms of what you were what you're doing. I think I mean, it's been a long time since I looked at the code, but you know, you had you sent me you had to been in 20 years and you sent me like oh here's here's the yeah I've got a zip of all the Wing Commander code and you know I used to look at it and go wow okay. Look how small this is. Uh you know, back in C. Um
00:36:38
But uh but yeah so yeah there's just a difference in scale. I mean now there's just a lot more complexity and simulation. There's a lot more communication you have to do. I mean you can just do a lot more. So I mean that part's exciting. I think I can make a much more uh interesting and living universe with uh what we're doing with Star Citizen. Uh so I I'm not sure I miss the old days. Certainly was quicker to make games back then cuz you know Wing Commander 1 was 18 months start to finish. Uh which you know is which you know it would be nice to do something in 18 months in today's world. All right. So um you know I'm going to be streaming Wing Commander on Saturday. Uh Kurosawa 2 how do I save that Rallari? Uh well the way I used to do it when I did my play-throughs was I would just do
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a lot of taunting. So the key is to uh I think it's the gra- I think it's the the graffers, right? Uh that to get them off the Rallari as quickly as possible because the Rallari doesn't have a lot of hit points. Can't remember if we sort of uh gimped it like already started it damaged or it just didn't have that many hit points because we made obviously the the the Kilrathi ships a bit weaker than the human ships. Um but yeah that's kind of the that's kind of the the the key. Uh at least it was for me. I also think depending on which wingman you select that would potentially help. But yeah I always used to go I used to have to burn her in, taunt as quickly as I possibly could to get people onto me and then I would fight them and then uh if you do it quick enough you manage to get it. But that was definitely the hardest mission in the whole game. Do you have a favorite wingman? Uh my favorite wingman I don't know. It's sort of uh
00:38:13
probably would be Maniac. so uh you know it's it's uh he certainly is I think the wingman that people remember the most. If it if it wouldn't be with Maniac, it would probably be Hunter or Paladin. So, those would be the two that are the the three. But, I would say it would be Maniac just because he was the I would say he was the strongest personality. And he's definitely, you know, that's that was actually one of the times that um when the game first came out and you know, back then you didn't have internet, but you know, you could go on bulletin boards and read what people were saying and people were discussing the Wingmen uh the Wingwomen and Wingmen, the Wing people uh Wing- Wingmates uh as uh real people. They weren't discussing it of like, "Oh, well, if you take so-and-so, then he's best for this mission or she's best for that mission."
00:39:02
It was like, "Oh, this person's a complete I hate him." or you know, they like, you know, and so it it had sort of transcended sort of the normal sort of computer gameness of it and became more like they had personality associated and and uh people were in that world. And that was that was sort of the moment that I was like, "Okay, I think this is it. This this sort of whatever it is coming together like that, that works to pull people into the world." And that's where we sort of took it from there onto Wing Two and later on where we sort of doubled down on, you know, building the the world and the characters and stuff. Well, you certainly got me uh in the universe. but yeah, thank you any uh any final thoughts on uh 25 years of Wing Commander? Uh I mean, to be honest with you, I I would not have guessed that I'd be
00:39:50
sitting here talking about Wing Commander uh 25 years on. Uh also, I mean, it's a you know, I'm always constantly sort of honored and uh flattered every time uh I you know, we go to the you know, we go to Gamescom or we're going to go to CitizenCon and I run into all the people that have supported Star Citizen. So, thank you very, very much for supporting Star Citizen. But, you know, the amount of people that come out and say, "Oh, you know, I played Wing Commander when I was 12 or 14 and you know, it it my first gaming experience and I fell in love with it." or you know, it made me want to go off and be a computer programmer, maybe want to be a pilot, or do all these things where for me, you know, I my my version of that was I saw Star Wars, right? So, I didn't think anything I would do that would have any impact on anyone else. So, just to actually realize that all these years later is actually pretty special because you don't It's only in re- It's only recently that you you, you know, with
00:40:38
the internet and and sort of the ability to connect directly to, say, your community, like we're doing now, that you get to interact with people that played your stuff. So, the old days like, "Yeah, it sold well, got good reviews," but you sort of were off onto the next game, and you had none of that human connection. So, uh it's really awesome to, you know, it's really nice to, I mean, you know, anyone that does anything, if you do something and you care about it, and other people play it, and they get enjoyment from it, I mean, that's the best thing that you can get. So, so, that's a that's a gift that, um you know, Wing Commander gave me, and uh you know, I'm I'm So, I'm always, like I said, flattered and humbled, and um pretty amazed by that. So, uh that's that's that's cool. So, thank you, and and thank you for, you know, the folks that have played Wing Commander all those years ago, and then uh you know,
00:41:26
wanted to see sort of the next generation uh space game, and have supported uh Star Citizen. So, thank you all very much. All right. Well, we'll see you back in 2040 for the uh 50th anniversary. Yep. There you go. Thank you, Chris, and me. Thank you. And you know what else has ships? Ship Shape. Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of Ship Shape. This week, we're going to be covering the Caterpillar. Specifically, we're going to be talking about some of the challenges that having an asymmetrical ship like this poses to the team, and also some of the modules that we're
00:42:13
currently working on. Right now, we're slated to kick off modeling of the ship early next year, and so we'll show you what we have right now, which is, of course, very work in progress still. The Caterpillar is an infamously asymmetrical ship. While this is pretty cool for the ship itself, it can pose a lot of challenges to the development team if not approached in the correct way. We've had a lot of conversations, even recent ones, about the best way to set this up on our side. And we found a creative way to approach this by having the cab of the ship, the command module, be symmetrical to itself, and the hull symmetrical to itself, even though the cab is up on one side. This gives the Caterpillar its signature asymmetry, but it makes things a lot easier for us when we're balancing out these two parts of the ship.
00:43:02
It makes it a lot easier for us to place thrusters. It's going to make flight balance feel a lot better for players. So, in the end, it makes it not only a lot easier for us to implement in the game, but it's going to feel a lot better for you guys. So, one of the cool things about the Caterpillar is that the command module can actually detach from the hull of the ship. It's essentially like two ships in one, and so we are building them as essentially two different ships. This is going to help us when it's attached because, as I mentioned before, it helps us balance-wise because all of the balance controls will, of course, be coming from the command module when it's attached. Since this is going to be such an important part of the ship as a whole, we're spending a lot of time right now working on polishing the cab. Again, making it asymmetrical, so it feels
00:43:50
better for you guys, but also the layout and how the balance is going to work. One of our designers, Randy Vasquez, is currently working on the ship. You might remember some of his work before from when he talked about the Starliner and helped me do a Ship Shape episode on that. In talking to him, he told me what some of the biggest challenges were for him at this early stage in the process. And one of them is making sure that all of the people and components that need to can fit on the cab of the ship. Again, since it detaches, we need to make sure that a lot of the pieces that modify a ship can attach not just anywhere, but to the command module. So that when it detaches, they're still helping you out. On the tech side, we're also looking at some creative ways to approach the fact that the cab is going to have different functionality when it's attached and
00:44:38
when it's not. For example, when it's attached to the hull of the ship, it's going to be able to interact with every piece of it. But of course, when it's detached and when it's flying off somewhere else, it's not going to be able to do all of those things. Last but definitely not least, we have some work in progress images of some of the modules we're working on for the Caterpillar. You'll see the medical module. This has some beds and some medical equipment. You'll see the personnel module which has a living area with tables. You'll also see the workshop module which has chop shop machinery. The final module we've got here to show you guys is a cargo module. It's a little further along you can see in concept art wise. You can also see in this one how modules are going to attach into the rest of the ship. Finally, we have a screenshot of what Randy's screen looks like when he's
00:45:27
working on all of this. As you can see, with all of the different modules we're working on, it can get pretty messy. All right, that's it guys. Thank you for joining me this week on Ship Shape. Back to you Ben and Sandi. That's about it for Around the Verse this week, but there's more Star Citizen to come. There is. The Star Marine status update will be live tomorrow. Check out the comm link for the update. Those are always fun. We we're in the process of closing down Star Marine. Uh we're going to have something to you soon. In fact, we are getting ready as we speak for a company wide play test. Hopefully that's going to go go tomorrow and we will let you know the results next week. Pilots, man your planes. Our own Ben Lesnick will be hosting a Wing Commander live stream Saturday at 12:00 p.m. Pacific. Yes, I'm going to play through the entire original Wing Commander from start to finish. Um, watch me make a fool of myself in that
00:46:15
manner. I'll have, you know, historical commentary. We're going to have some special guests stopping by and we're going to raise a little money for Extra Life. It should be uh should be a good time. And where is that happening? Well, that's happening right here at uh Cloud Imperium Games in uh sunny Santa Monica, California. All right, very cool. The Endeavor is here. We are getting ready to kick off the long-awaited Endeavor sale and uh you can expect details on the ship and its various scientific modules very soon. And it's 200 m long. It is it This is a big ship. This is uh up in the uh original Idris uh size range. It's uh it's a big'un. Oh my god. Cut. Cut. That's it for Around the Verse
00:47:02
forever. We're never making this show again. It's a beep. All right, Ben, who does this week's MVP go to? Why, I will give you this lovely envelope so you can tell us. All right, drumroll, please. Surface. Congratulations. Surface had a fantastic hub post this week that was uh all about the scale of Star Citizen ships compared to uh actual objects and cars and so on. Um, he created all these cool photoshops. It's like the M50 extra race car, the Avenger next to a breaching whale. Uh, they're great pictures. Here, check some of them out. I like it and we can't leave you without an art sneak peek.
00:47:49
Here it is. Be sure to tune in to Reverse the Verse tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. Pacific on
00:48:36
Twitch. We'll be answering all your questions about that sneak peek, Star Citizen in general, and our exciting exciting lives. Thank you to all of our subscribers for making this show possible. As always, we will see you next week on Around the Verse. Around the Verse. To end it all. Time to do the dance. Everybody dance. Make sure it ends now.

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.