Inside Star Citizen: Alpha 3.24.2 - Zeus and MFDs

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   first introduced to last year's citizen con the RSI Zeus is steadily working its way through the ship pipeline to its intended release and on this week's show we'll take a look at two of its variants as well as the new MFD rework that you've seen glimpses of here and there it's a multi-functional show let's get to it [Music] the RSI Zeus Mark I is a reaging of the original RSI Zeus the Zeus was the first mass-- made human exploration ship that was capable

2. 00:00:49

   of doing Quantum travel we didn't want to just make the Zeus again we wanted to kind of pay homage to what made the Zeus important what made iconic back then we wanted to kind of give that an update and kind of bring it up to modernday visuals and you make sure it really fills RSI it's RSI style but we feel it's almost a Improvement upon the style it's sort of an evolution of the style and so players will appreciate the consistency with other RSI ships but you can see the technological advancement of RSI you may remember the Zeus from our episode in Jump points a few weeks ago on inside Star Citizen it was very good

3. 00:01:38

   it was very good Jared tells me the Zees are a great stepping stone ship so you've got your starter ship originally uh you've dipped your toes in a few gameplay loops and you just want to be able to do a bit more uh the Zeus's allow you to do that with some friends so yeah it supports up to three crew members but you can you can fly yourself if you want and if you've got a Budd they can man the turrets the Zeus is for me are probably some of the best looking ships we've ever produced for Star Citizen I think they they really set a new visual standard in both their shape and style so when we release the Zeus it comes with both the es and the CL both together in the same patch the es is the exploration focused variant of the Zeus so it has a modest Siz cargo

4. 00:02:27

   bay larger hydrogen and Quantum fuel tanks a larger radar and a more spacious living area the CL the cargo version maximizes its cargo capacity it does that by shunting the sort of central bulkhead towards the front of the ship so that increases the cargo capacity from 32 to 128 seu at the expense of just really cramming in the living quarters to be much more compact the exterior of the Zs is got that very kind of iconic RSI Arrowhead shape we try to stick to what was like the homage that the concept made of the first Zeus it keeps the kind of central fuselage you got this big kind of

5. 00:03:17

   Central Mass with these lovely kind of quite fast and aggressive looking wings and they kind of just help to make it feel quite aggressive and quite sharp which I think Builds on what RSI as a brand are kind of really about the big details on the flat surfaces uh the mix of materials I think is very well balanced I'm still a massive fan of the underside undersides of our ship sometimes get a little bit underlooked um or overlooked uh um sorry uh yeah but I think the underside the the belly originally the plan was for it to be kind of completely smooth and completely all one surface but as we started to work it up the artists that were working on it kind like oh yeah can we can we add a little bit of recesses can we add a little bit of Rel into this shape just to kind of help build on the believability and I think it was real success so Weaponry wise uh across all

6. 00:04:07

   of them the the pilot has access to twin size four guns enemy down and the side seats have access to the remote turrets when we look at the difference between the es and the cargo with the cargo we wanted to add a little bit more structure and believability into the exterior of the ship this is supposed to carry a lot more weight so we want to kind of bulk up the main structural points so we've got some large additional bracing down the center and then the other thing that a cargo version is going to require is some additional thrust so we want to kind of bulk up the main thrusters at the rear that allow kind of take off and those kind of downward pointing thrusters have thrown in size and add to that believability that you know this this vehicle can can lift a bit more weight

7. 00:04:54

   than the base version so if we start at the front of the ship it's quite a tight space one of the things that we kind of really realized early on with the vehicle is that we crammed a lot of stuff into the space that we had to play with so the cockpit is quite tight you've got a nice kind of three person cockpit up the front and the seating arrangement Echoes that kind of Arrow shape that we see on the exterior of the ship and that just helps to make the the pilot have the important up front seat but also just ties everything together a little bit which is lovely as we go back through the ship we go into the airlock and the engineering area this area changed quite a bit during the the vehicle's development we actually opened this space up a little bit we took out one of the bulkheads one of the things we realized as we kind of

8. 00:05:41

   got into production was that there was maybe a few too many doors this really was the ideal place to kind of remove one of those and open that area up a little bit so we've got this engineering section that has the kind of main docking collar and also has the ladder exit so we've got our kind of two front exits on the vehicle and then as we go back through the Cor oror section we here we have like a bit of Crossroads so you can either go into the kitchen area which still has its nice window and looks out and it's beautiful and perfect or on the right we've got the habitation area where we've got three beds toilet nice little seating area lockers and everything you need really in terms of a a Hab get out get out get out and then as we go to the back of the ship that's

9. 00:06:28

   really where we get to our larger ship components and our cargo area with the cargo version the the Clipper there's obviously a lot more space dedicated to Cargo compared to the Basse version to achieve that what we've had to do is adjust some of the kind of like the rear layout of the ships we had to rearrange the components so that they're closer up to the doorway and we had to move the weapon locker from the Corrido into the actual cargo holds so there was a lot of rearranging but what that does buy us is enough space to fit the kind of extra Cargo in we've also had to sacrifice some of the kitchen area in the habitation you lose the sofa and and the nice seating area but on the positive We Get Much More cargo space which for kind of a dedicated cargo ship is is the most important

10. 00:07:16

    thing you'll notice that on the floor there'll be blue trimming exactly where the player can place cargo it'll be a lot easier for the player to know where you can access the components versus where you can place cargo on sides this has been a great first full ship from concept to release for the Montreal vehicle team this is one ship that took an entire year to build like the amount of work that goes into these ships is insane both in Art and Design they built on kind of what they'd learned with the Cutters and and really just done a fantastic job in taking what was uh you know the original vision of the ship and really delivering it in something that I think it it looks great it should play great and I think they just did a fantastic job across the board to me you know the final product

11. 00:08:04

    shows there's nothing in any other game that can come close to the level of detail the amount of thought that got put into every button every component Bay everything you know is is in its place so the Zeus is another great addition to the fleet of ships in Star Citizen and being RSI obviously has that special touch sharing the name with our company and founder and we are excited to see this ship set foot in the verse and push along the RSI style head of a big year for RSI ships ships don't set foot John they fly got little Fe just being argumentative the mfds and the ship HUD

12. 00:08:57

    in the Pu it's old and the actual UI itself is very small one color they're all in one color text is too small to read it's very samey right it has a bunch of stuff on it that you don't really use not very user new new user friendly any user friendly yeah and user friendly it was good for its time it did the job it got us where we are today but it's time for something new and that's what we're going to talk about the reason why we're doing this now is because we had a lot of time during the development of Squadron to create an expandable and a more robust system for mfds we have a bunch of super nice mfds ready for squadron and now we're moving them over to Star Citizen it's also uh really good to bring it

13. 00:09:45

    over now because we've got the new Resource Network system so we need to have the mfds uh here to support that new gameplay initial release there'll be five visual styles to the mfds and the Huds ages it's very militaristic and it's very Sleek Anvil is great I love the green color of anvil it feels a lot more like an F-16 cockpit Drake is my favorite it's retro and Blade Runner and CRTs there's Argo it really feels like a piece of industrial equipment which is what the brand is going for and there's the generic style that will support all the other ship manufacturers for the time being for this release the mfds are

14. 00:10:34

    getting nine different views oh how many is that even well let's go through it we'll start with self status self status includes all of the critical information about your ship dependent on your current operator mode so you'll have your ammo numbers in guns mode you'll have your missile arming in missile mode and your fuel readouts in Quantum mode there's also a unique version for turrets as well we have taken away a lot of well faf from there so this is simpler than before weapons active it's more condensed and it links into the new systems that have been developed in

15. 00:11:22

    terms of vehicle features for example it shows your updated gimbal modes and it also shows your current weapon Group which is a new thing as well Target status is the same thing but it gives you the information about the Target that you have currently selected it's mostly going to be for a lot of players the ship Hollow you're going to want to see am I dealing some damage or not you'll also have the emissions so you know what missiles to use against them and you will see their name so you know that you're not shooting the wrong person it's not as much information because obviously VI ly if you want to see how much ammo they've got you've got to scan them but it will show you their health it will show you their faction it will show you their velocity weapon config is entirely new

16. 00:12:12

    it links into the new weapon grouping system so it will list out every single weapon on your ship the ammo that you have they'll light up if they're selected and also it allows you to assign them to one of four custom groups so you can have any combination of weapons that you want firing at the same time and it makes it easy to see which group of weapons you're firing and if you just don't assign one of those groups if you feel like well fours too many I just used two anyway well you can just assign to two of them and you'll be fine this will be valuable so the player can in combat switch between different modes depending on kind of distance and what kind of weapons they want to use on a dayto day you might be tracking down a particular Target it is a subject of a mission and

17. 00:13:00

    you know that a certain weapon is going to be more effective against them than another or a certain weapon combination is going to be more effective you can stick them all in one group and have quick access to that Shields is pretty much the same as what it was you can control each of your Shield faces if you have four Shield faces if you have one you can control the whole thing and it gives you a reset button so you can set it all back to default and also you can see your total Shield usage out of the maximum for the time being this is going to be the same thing that you're already used to and along with that are scanning and Communications scanning has been moved from the HUD to an MFD State the new screens the biggest one is power management engin on it's simplified version of what you'll find on an engineering terminal but it's for

18. 00:13:48

    sort of daily use for the pilot it's using the full power of the Resource Network system and it gives it to you right there in the pilot seat so you can do the full assignments as you like them if you're flying solo this is also where you will see your emissions so if you're doing anything stealthy you go into power management you set your settings to low and you will see your emissions adjust accordingly you can turn on and off different systems in the ship you can apply different levels of power to each system you can see your total output how much you're using and you can also see different status readouts for those systems so if something is run out of power or it's offline it'll also represent that on the power management MFD engines off along with that is the Diagnostics view the Diagnostics view is

19. 00:14:39

    where you go to check in on your ship if something's not feeling right well maybe check Diagnostics it will show you the where that that component is taken as well as its current health and its status whether it has any errors and there'll be a summary at the top of the screen that shows you how many of your components have errors and last what I'm really excited about is the configuration screen it takes a lot of the settings that were hidden away in the options menu or just in the back end and uh puts them right there for you to toggle in world on your MFD screen instantly the configuration view is great you can now turn off unwanted UI if you really wish to you can turn off the cast which is my favorite part if you have screens on the top left and top right of your screen then you can turn off those casts now to clear the UI

20. 00:15:27

    a little bit so this configuration screen allows you to configure a few aspects of of some different MFD States as well as what goes on your hood and how that looks you can finally control what goes on our Hood we can finally control what goes on our Hood yeah so let's talk about the HUD using the configuration screen you can choose whether or not you're showing at your MFD casts which are simplified and more tactile versions of the status and Target status screen functionality wise it's stuff you know already you have your velocity you have your After Burner you have your annunciators and you have different indicators they show critical information when you can't look at your

21. 00:16:15

    dashboard in front of you so if you're in a fighter and you're looking up in the sky you can still see that as well as uh allowing you to still see that that information when you're in Precision targeting mode we've decided to clear up all of the nonsense we have in the middle and kind of make it out of the way of the middle of the screen so what took so long Joe I'm sorry was oh God we've also done a little bit of work making the radar in the hood feel more diagetic and making it look like it actually exists in the cockpit with grounding effects and emission rate origin points as well it all just feels so much better it feels real so with this new ship and vehicle HUD it's just going to be a clearer

22. 00:17:05

    experience overall it's going to be clearer in the sense that you don't have stuff in your face all the time it's going to be clear in the sense that you can actually read the UI so I think you'll be very happy with it it's going to be such a nice thing to just be out in space and be able to see space right so what did we learn this week well we learned that the Zeus is the first ship made by the newly established Montreal vehicle team that the MFD rework is an exciting and easily usable and customizable upgrade to what we've had before and that it plugs nicely into the upcoming Resource Network and Engineering work scheduled for Alpha 4.0 which we of course we'll be showcasing next week for inside Star Citizen I'm Jared Huckaby thanks for letting us

23. 00:17:55

    share the people and process of game development with you and we'll see you all here next next week