Studio Report . Sq42 Concepts & The Mining Colony . February 26, 2014

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:05

   Welcome back to Foundry 42 in the UK. Um, what we want to do today is give you guys a much more in-depth look in what we've been doing here over the last few months. Um, so we're going to talk about the concept phase of a lot of the stuff we're doing and how that's going to work in the game. We've been working on the first section of the game. Um, this is basically mining operations and a huge asteroid belt. And so, we actually have to make sure that the whole operation, which will be also in the persistent universe, works properly. We've got to make the player feel part of the universe. Everything's got to have a purpose. Yep, living, breathing. The start of the game we go to a place like a Shubin mining outpost. So, you fly there and you put down, but then you you if you want if you want to go sightseeing, you

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   can go around and you can actually study how stuff works. When we first came up with that, we just came with like the the small asteroid base with like the generic, you know, mining platform just plugged into the side, but then The concept guys get all the change it a bit. Yeah, that's the fun bit, you know, watching it evolve, you know, cuz it you know, it went from like, you know, what was it about a kilometer long? And now it's 6 kilometers long. It's just huge. Look at the size of that. Yeah. Starfarer. That's massive. Yeah, it's huge. And there's going to be on foot stuff and first-person combat on the station as well as dog fighting around it, so it'll be pretty cool. Yeah, definitely. There'll be some cool opportunity for dog fighting and zipping between cables, the asteroids, the base. I think it'll be great. Reaching the visual quality and the fidelity that Chris Roberts is pushing for. It's I don't know, it's kind of

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   movie quality. There's there's no rock left unturned, basically. The level of detail in these in these large ships is so overwhelming that you can see basically see every bolt, every nook and cranny. It's not just a case of of having a ship and and and basically saying, "Okay, well, it No, it sort of looks good." Every single mechanic on the ship has to work. All the systems on the ship has to work. We know how the weapon systems work. We know how the weapons are controlled, how they reload. All these things are really important to the design. What I got with the um the Idris was a sort of a rough concept of the kind of the shape of the turret, so it was my job to kind of look at that and look at the space that we had inside the Corvette itself and try and figure out how we could come up with a modular system that could be placed into not only the Idris, but any of the capital ships.

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   The original design by Ryan Church had these missiles stuck at a slight angle. Um, so we had two options. We could have brought the the actual turret itself down into a horizontal position and then just have the missiles load horizontally. But, I actually thought it was a nice little extra layer of animation just just have the the missile reloading rack just tilt slightly and slot the missiles in. You've been Well, I've been looking at turrets as well. That's a big, isn't it? Yeah. So, we came up with like the turrets, they weren't manned initially. Yeah, we thought, "Well, I want to get in there, you know, I want to get in there and start blasting away." Yeah. So, then that was another one we passed off the concept and they came back with some awesome stuff, didn't they? Yeah, they they can be automated, but but you know, the the the way that everything's sort of looked at, I think in in this universe is you know, the player could potentially do a better job. So, you know, if he wants to get in a turret that was automated, then um you know, he can get in there and he can start he can

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   start choosing his own targets and and blazing away. Yeah. And there's damage states on them, so you can sit in there blasting away, then a then a armor plate there goes flying off, a barrel there goes flying off. They just Yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun. Everything we do in Squadron 42, we've got to consider the persistent universe. We can't sort of go off a tangent. We've got to plan for everything being functional in the persistent universe. Yeah, we had those harvesters, didn't we? And they were just like yeah, we'll just put some mining drones in the background. They fly around and they just go and harvest. But then, initially they started off pretty small, you know, like the size of a transit van, but now they're like absolutely huge. We kind of you know, the initial sort of brief was these sort of deep sea mining rigs, weren't they? That you know, go

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   down and and you can fix things, but you know, they've grown and grown since then. Then then we came back, wasn't it? Going to stick a cab on it. Yeah. So, a fully working cab so you could get into it and you know, fly around. in in the persistent universe, you know, people could take these these rigs and you know, if they if they had a big enough um setup and go out and and and mine themselves. So, you know, there'd be a cost involved, obviously, cuz these things are huge. Thanks for joining us today here at Foundry 42. Uh, hopefully you've enjoyed what you've seen today. Um, we're obviously going to come back to you with some more cool stuff later on. Maybe talk more about some of the cap ship stuff we're doing. We'll probably come more in-depth in some of the way the operations work past the sort of concept phase we've shown you today. Um, but yeah, we'll be back with you guys, so um see you soon.