Star Citizen Live: Making Ship Up

31 May 201901:08:051,605 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

00:00:00
there are these little bristles are these are these are all through the desk looks like one there yeah yeah so I can do any other meetings would you just play with alright so there's a star citizen life-making ship up which I believe you came up with from the car the other day I believe so people like it so you know dreams alone so you're a very funny individual people don't know that I'm renowned for that so I started in life making ship up how we make spaceships in if this were the Doctor Strange lévesque subtitle there we are in our Aegis comics room because our studio is undergoing a construction at the moment so we are we are here to
00:00:48
do this year Paul then John you're here with us in LA I wasn't gonna pass this up this is a pre-taped so for the people who watch and they're like oh this is pretty taped I'm like no it's live well you're right this week you're right we aren't pre-taped this week due to schedules and constructions but you still want to get you the steps so let's that's right off the batlets for assuming that somebody has never seen the show before somebody has never seen who you are before let's just go real quick who are you who are you Paul it's a tough question you know I'm Paul Jones I'm one of the art directors at Claire Imperium and I am responsible for working with concept team working on spaceships working on weapons FPS and ship weapons and first
00:01:43
time on Star Susan live or our TV or Friday broadcast but we did we did see one time before I'm calling all the apps pentose we are in what you do for senses that you been called thank you well then you've never done this before it's like you weren't your the vehicle Wow usually everything so everybody thinks this is easy to do I'm the pipe line producer kind of working nailing with the vehicle inside not vehicle features of it right so basically you wrangle these guys and everybody else lent to you to make sure ships get on he basically makes ship happened yeah it makes ship we go there we go but only had some post we do a little makeshift happen graphic it is pre-taped
00:02:32
maybe we'll do it we'll see and then John I'm John Kerr I'm the vehicle pipeline director and the funniest man at the table absolutely I think so so you make a good ship so we put up a thread clanking questions ahead of time because this was not going to be able to air live lots of questions came in a lot of questions about specific ships you know what about this ship what about the ship today show though is about process and I'm in the over Russia process so the questions that we're going to do today are most mostly focused on things that apply to every spaceship if it where the the pipeline from from design to concept to white box to gray box to find a large to to flight prep to where the ideas for spaceships come from - why
00:03:20
do we prioritize some ships above others and so on so we're just going to jump into it let's start at the beginning of this process where does the idea where did the ideas really should come from they come from a variety of places as obviously we have a lot of ships in the game we have some very obvious gaps in line up so it's only natural to want to fill them up sometimes you have a new gameplay feature coming online that may not require a spaceship to do that job but a spaceship would help extend that gameplay and then there's there's also the wildcard director and executive and really anyone in the team can pitch an idea for a spaceship and sometimes if they gain enough momentum thing they worked away it's really true anybody is
00:04:10
really opened to pitching spaceships I'm not showing those what's what you've already dish array did did the Vulcan it's done and unfortunately I'm someone responsible for the Pioneer which I need to apologize to you for but but we take strip ideas from all over the place what are some of our inspirations do we look to real-world inspirations very often occasionally yeah quite often there's certainly real-world analogues for a lot of space ships particularly in the military side so there's everyone's got their sort of favorite world war two dog fighter fighter bomber modern day things and the vanguard always gets hard back to the p-52 lightning right number there keep 38 38 lightning everyone knows it we
00:05:02
have the Eclipse that looks like a b-2 stealth bomber so that the military side definite has a lot more analogues on the less combat side they sort of have their they want a space trucker chimp we have a space tanker ship so when we have a design and we know this design is going to go in a process flipping my formula for this lightening up here it then goes to you guys to start the process of creating a concept now we all know we were just talking about the influences new design how often do real-world influencers come into play with concepts often as you would think really because I mean
00:05:51
obviously well you know we'll have the designer action from John you know we'll have a have a steer from Chris you know because often often I can get caught sometimes I'll follow one direction in Crystal right now it shall be this I'm like okay but yeah you're you know I guess that you're you know pressure from a you know from a functionality point of view you may your reference whatever you can just pull something off the internet obviously with spaceships it's kind of harder but we've ground you know ground vehicles that sort of stuff you know there's a lot more things we can pull upon but really now I mean the team is pretty is pretty well-versed and so we kind of you know there's a lot of stuff to pull on a lot of just natural experience as well so these old feeding now we
00:06:42
obviously have concept artists that work internally in the studio and also externally how is that wrangling than those who how do we decide what goes to an internal artist what goes to an external artist it's mostly Paul's judging of skills and I don't know it's basically his choice if will usually give we have an external eyes we've used for a long time and he trusts them he'll give them more complex stuff if not then we'll we'll use internal that can be done maybe quicker as less risk minute varies I mean likes of the experior prowler I think that had four concept artists on him because weeds you know because it was a new it was a brand new yeah everything I mean it was on the one hand
00:07:33
it was awesome and the other hand it's kind of terrifying because it's you know it's just a completely clean board so yeah so basically we use different concept eyes for different stages just to sort of push it along and get the best out of it because the timelines never changes it's like okay how do we get this timeline and you know you sort of use new your assets basically to the best of their abilities before we move on to white box I want to go back to influences while not necessarily grabbing direct influences how important is it to find things that connect emotionally it's it's we look at the temple Ranger most recently it's number Ranger is performing very well and it
00:08:21
because it's it seems to evoke a lot of a lot of emotions and people and they see it is that we've sequencing people compared to judge dredd or compare it to a character into the Batpod and it well it doesn't necessarily look like any of those there's this evocative sense that you have that you that you work into these things yeah yeah and it's I think you know that's the sort of that's the promo stage you know sort of it's you know I call it solving the dream basically you know it's about selling selling the experience of what a player could have and yeah you know when when I'm working out what shops to do and I'm working with the marketing team you know we'll pull reference from familiar movies or you know you know we'll sort of say okay
00:09:10
it needs to be this moody kind of this moody scene you know it needs to have this sort of vibe going on in it and so you try and tie it all together it's just to like say just to sell you know whatever it is whatever the emotion is you want to want to bring with that image so I mean it was great I think the bike the bike worked out pretty well in the end took a lot of people got on board with it how easy as he did keep on schedule it's quite easy he's quite self-sufficient actually and you know the thing is he knows what he wants he like he'll plan out all the shots and he just told me where it's gonna be light or not okay I removed the blockers for him okay so once we're done with the concept then the Consul promotion has launched and we we then
00:10:00
when we eventually put the ship into production the first stage is white box give me a real brief rundown of what the what white box is so white box is getting the fundamental geometry and so quite often a depending on the concept and depending on the concept artists it could simply be taking the concept mesh doing a very rough retopo or recreation of it putting the absolute bare bones functionality and so you'll grab a seat from another ship grab a dashboard from another ship and get that ship functioning so it functions thing yeah because you don't care that the concept has this style of seat you care that the ship functions will take the the main geometry will start splitting up in the
00:10:48
places that it needs to split up so the idea for white box is that you have all that base set up in there done by design so design in an ideal world which doesn't always happen can just be hands-off and I can just sit there and just iterate on that file and a fully functional vehicle is maintained at all times it's just the art progresses doesn't always happen and there's always another backwards and forwards between design tech er but that white box is really taking that concept and giving it an in-game presence that can be tested because I've entered the day when we do a concept we can only check for so much and we have to assume some things will work especially for like ground vehicles
00:11:38
you you can't do a full suspension test in a bit of 2d eyes you need to get that vehicle in-game and run it over rough terrain because the clearance might been not be enough the axles might not be wide enough I said that point we go yeah wait Alex web box is almost a validation of the concept and there are the place where we address all those those issues that weren't founder in the concept yes certainly we've changed the process over the years and we run into a lot less of them now a lot of the the older ships never had that level of concept done to them yeah they didn't have a metrics yeah they looked there were no metrics it was just this look cool I mean we have a whole suite of metrics now that we can just give to the
00:12:26
concept artist and say okay here's only chair Heights seat Heights toilet heights here's where the sink should be here's like all that sort of stuff here's where the button should be if you're getting out of beds you need this much space on the floor if you've got beds on each side of the corridor you need to account for both people getting out of bed at the same time and not clipping into each other that's why ships over time especially from concepts can grow in different dimensions is why they just made this ship randomly wider most 99.9% gonna be it doesn't work with our animation system yeah it's one of the students within like a you know real-world submarine you can have these super tight corridors because human beings can can put their arms up like this in space good pass each other in a hurry but in a you know video game setting when you're
00:13:14
in a hurry and you're running you just hit each other stop you know things have to be a little things that often cheat a little wider than they normally would in real life and the white boxes the things where we get to they're out here that's our character models like if you were gonna make a collision mesh for me here I'm not a big cylinder I'm sort of squish cylinder so I if I turn sideways to of me can go like that down a path but in reality I alkylation is the same it's a capsule so really something with rounded edges because if I spin around on the spot my shoulders fill up that entire void as I don't we we don't having that is a lot simpler to calculate than having a more complex shape so we can't have like you say the submarine example of two people going sideways past each other we need to have a wider corridor they can fit two people
00:14:02
going shoulder-to-shoulder I think we learned that lesson on the Valkyrie well yeah it's a lot like the doorways were wide enough to fit two people through if they're wearing the largest armor so we widened them slightly and then yeah cuz the vodka had those true plays in it went it over this little conga line just wasn't quite tall enough either the Valkyrie was interesting because it was developed you know straight - straight to fly yeah so it still had that concept phase it still had a white box phase but the but the the community and get to see that until it was you know all said and done so I thought there's quite a few story it's alright I'm gonna put you on the spot didn't he said he just told us about white boxes what's grey box grey box is where the geometry is essentially finalized and going from
00:14:51
gray box since finalize geometries lot and it doesn't change so then it's just about you know finishing off materials maybe dress in with props if if needed but gray box final great gray box is what GL and shouldn't change a lot of the times when we show ships and development in around the verse or inside star citizen they're often being gray box face where it's very easy to look at gray box and think oh that looks done exactly like when we showed the we showed the caracal while back some of it was very pocket-sized and people are flipping out we're just like that's just you know so a great great box has that wonderful danger to it where it can look finished but at the same time you go well that doesn't seem
00:15:40
like that's all that much but it seems like it's finished but it's yeah and so so a lot of a lot of times when when folks see a ship in grey box a lot of the eight nine each jump they've seen this quarter has been in gray boxes stuff it's very easy look at that and go well that's not you know is there more to that and of course that leads us to the final art face you know you don't even work in fine art yeah you was trying to guess sure I would say well fine laws basically you know it's just a level of polish you know it's basically just at least in my head anyway it's going through it you know validating that's good word isn't it you know going through checking all the shaders materials performance in terms of amount of shaders does everything
00:16:31
operate as it should do animations V effects lighting fog volumes you know decorating the scene is where this work set there's at least a decoration you have adding props and finding opportunities for life basically you know where you want my little blinky lights or whatever it is that you want to put in the ship how do you do good enough and of course the the at the end of final argue it was think the ship is Bellamy could certainly load it into an engine and take some pretty pictures of it but there's still the last phase flight breath yeah as you say like once vehicle gets to define a lot that is that's a fantastic portfolio piece but it's not a game ready I say so not for our game because that's what we call the is 100%
00:17:22
pristine model that's what you see when you spawn that vehicle we don't need to do all the damage set up so that's the UV to wrap around so when you shoot it you see the little burning of the textures and seeing the hull underneath that one is being said or needs to be set up or the shield set up the optimization Lords all the stuff that isn't really glamorous today but is essential to get that vehicle to work in game alright so we've basically taken us through that's super high-level of course if anybody watched the old shipshape episodes you they can save seen how the pipeline those are the six you know tenants at the top and they break down into you do a hundred different subsections but I wanted to just set the stage for the folks who haven't been following you who didn't see the shipyard series of articles from crash two years ago now maybe maybe maybe three years ago now we haven't
00:18:11
seen the old ship ships or whatever so now that we're kind of caught up in the overall process I want to get to some of the questions that came directly from our backer community right off the bat have you prioritized what ships we work on you know we've heard that squadron 42 needs can can bump something up to the top of the list but not every ship that we've put into the game is used in squadron 42 so how do we decide what the next ship to put into production is so it's a very fluid thing I don't think there is really warm Pitino so there's many different aspects to it so you have summation squadron that's as a big driver of it another one is ensuring that there is some ship content and every quarterly release and as every ship takes a different amount of time and we have
00:18:57
different amount of resources in different Studios if you gave the same ship to the three studios that work on vehicle content they would all come back with a different end date because they're different capacities so depending on when we want to ship to release it defines where we want to start it which also puts other gaps in the schedule so if we know we won't have a ship finisher X date and that team is currently working on something that's going to finish at Y date which is six months before we can't just have those guys sat around for six months just not doing anything so if there's a ship that we have that with those guys continue in six months that will go in there which explains why some sometimes it seems quite random move where a shim will just be not on the roadmap to certainly on
00:19:45
the roadmap done for the next quarters because that swap has changed there might also be tied to gameplay for as we try and work with the gameplay guys to go right this coursing you're doing this gameplay feature so when possible yeah when possible we'll try and deliver a that's not always possible sometimes we'll slip on the vehicle side sometimes I'll slip on the feature side sometimes with both slept with looks like different amounts needs company as well needs the company sometimes what Chris wants what he wants to see in game 2 yeah what John wants a seeing game what makes sense with other things are in game yeah there's no point just I mean we could sit down now and complete change schedule and just focus on doing capital ships that we have in our backlog but we wouldn't see a ship for nine months yeah you insertion for
00:20:33
nine months and then that ship is for a very small amount of the community that have it you could argue that every better time spent doing multiple smaller ships I think you also made a point earlier on about picking the right artists I imagine you know not every person who builds just for clutter brain games has the aptitude or skill set to work on every type of ship like like some artists you know would be that their personal styles would be more appropriate to work on a drink ship and so sorry that artists their styles would be more appropriate to work on a mischief and when you have an artist come free you want to keep that or disengage like you said you want to keep them working and yeah we wanted to do Drake ship next but this artist is it really the right fit for Drake but they are fit for Miss so maybe we pull
00:21:20
something or miss got bad didn't a team since they have that opening they keep them going yet so it works the opposite way as well for instance on the 890 jump there's you know certain artists that needed ramp up time to get used to that art style because they'd been working on something from Aegis or uninvolved beforehand which is you know there's an of the curvy the curvy flows to it so we need to think about that one we're also scheduling in the ships as a reverse of that as well we can also sometimes find that if someone's worked on the same style of for a long period of time they're great doing that but they're absolutely sick of doing that absolutely to do another one right keeping your artists engaged has to be a super important aspect you can even work the coolest spaceships of video games must because must be kind of tedious
00:22:09
working on your 11th Aegis ship in a row junker everyone loves Aegis ships make some more we took a whole year off I was so happy year of Ages yeah what's the year of Ages for a while there all right when does not even look at layout of a ship how do you wait functionality and Sensibility versus obvious rule of cool well yeah but we've so Scheider we have a shied away from we've moved away from just deliberate rule of cool stuff it's a lot more informed so you're admitting that for at least a little while we were very rules like trick question but let's just say that we're not more considered narrowing about you know is the functionality which is king
00:23:00
but then it does have to look badass and Chris never lets us get away with you know what I mean we all know I've had some Horrors in my past but we always get there so it's just it's it's sometimes it's just difficult isn't it you know what I mean you're you're reliant on the artist and you know you're sort of you've literally just starting with a blank piece of paper and it's like okay how do we make this super cool thing that's not been seen before but hopefully doesn't get accused of being someone else's if it's not and all that sort of stuff and so yeah it's always a bit of a struggle because you know sometimes functionality does define where you end up at especially if you're making a
00:23:49
realistic kind of game you know if we do something that just utterly ridiculous of a fantastical quest is just going to go now that I wouldn't work and so you know you're brought back to reality and again those that that effects the stripes of the pen basically yeah the next question from the backers that was great for this how hard is it to design and build spaceships when certain gameplay mechanics are fully implemented its yes big challenge if we're doing a ship that has a gameplay feature that we know is not going to come up with a ship or is not going to come out anytime soon near the ship we'll try and talk with like Todd Tony Chris and get their high level download of where they see the feature
00:24:38
to be and then when we're building that ship we try and think of a way that minimizes rework for us down the line say we've got a ship with a feature that requires a big interactable thing in the room we'll try and build that room where the thing you interact with can be easily taken out and replaced down the line it's not integral to the room it's not built into the mechanics of the room so instead of having to redo that entire room you're just redoing that one-piece building and modular yeah building a module a or just building it very carefully you know you're almost certainly gonna have to go back and do something to it you might as well not let me do the entire ship for the sake of that there's a common misconception
00:25:25
that that folks who build the spaceships build the gameplay systems that those spaceship utilize do not want those guys and it's gameplay designers ship design or stuff like that Paul starting from the concept stage now this is that they've got to build it but when your concept in a ship that's for a gameplay feature that had that that has a basic design to it but it's not implemented as it's we don't know how it will actually work in the game how does that affect your design it's tricky I mean John don't know that has teamed a good job of giving as much information as we can I mean but it's I mean let's let's take like you know the
00:26:15
vulture that boy yep and so we did quite a lot of designs for that one and you know sort of we went one direction it was quite you know was quite basic it was gonna be that sort of translate bang with this sort of some kind of like recovery at home money or something like that and then yeah we did a whole bunch of things initially Chris was just like now this is it was like the ugly and then like all right I came back to the drawing board and so I was then just very much okay initially then it was a little bit of rule of cool but it's driven by a game play it's like okay I'm sat in a cockpit I've got this
00:27:03
I'm doing this I'm doing this task how do we make it as visceral and interesting as possible basically was how how it arrived and so you know that's how we got the team arms and got the tractor beams pulling all the pieces and it was like okay that that is going to make it pretty like pretty cool experience or the snake but I mean there's always that you're not sure what's may hit and so you you don't know what you don't know exactly so you come up with a couple of options two or three yeah there's the key stages of the concept phase where we you know we provides some options to caress of possible looks once he's like happy with one will move on to the next stage where
00:27:51
it's like a first pass it's like a white box of like the production phase and at the first pass review we get every single discipline involved to call out what they see what could go wrong with this ship so we can change it now going from that is the second pass where we it's like gray box final where everything is a lock that's like you know this will go into production next again but we give them the opportunity to call stuff out and if it doesn't get cold out there it becomes a very expensive thing to change actually yeah you want to try to minimize the risk that place what the next question is actually about that is it says what is what are some of the what's the biggest problem we've ever encountered down the line that what that wasn't there from a concept like you designed a concept one
00:28:39
way and then when it comes time to build it look at all but this it's a really nice image there's a really nice concept model but there was some serious metrics problems with it which is why in the original comedy region which is why I ended up the way there was other reasons why I end up the way I did but a big reason of why it ended up like that was having - this was made without the metrics that we have when we built the ship so like I said earlier there's when you have to fear certain things of a certain dimension into a space sometimes you cannot keep the integrity of the visual and when you say without the metrics we mean that the metrics themselves had developed since that the compass was
00:29:26
done yeah so the concept was done under one set of metrics and then the game progressed yeah and then when it came time to build it those metrics no longer applied new doors had to be wider chairs had to operate somewhat differently completely all the components when that was done I don't think we had metrics for the ship items right and that was a key feature of the Vanguard was it has double the items redundancy which when you have to find space for all those things in there is a lot of space there's actually a great article coming out in this month's jump point about that I think I could rework the virus so I don't spend too much time I never could suppose you can check out jump point and read about it there is great and that's my plug for jump oh okay all right let's just take what I saw lighting and everything else is going I
00:30:16
mean you would know best because you just create the problem see is the one that has to deal tactically okay so we just talking about a rework the Vanguard's undergoing a rework or rework right now say you go there what are some of the main reasons that we have to rework ships number one is probably the metrics if it's not four components or because every every ship has components they are all going to be in a physical eyes location in size obviously we don't want to achieve things if the ship physically can't fit everything is supposed to have inside of it something has to change on the ship we've done a huge pass on the animations which I think people people have noticed in the
00:31:04
recent patches but they're perhaps not understand why things have changed like the cockpit or the little Terrapin fans with a cockpit CFI thing that was fixed as part of a completely global change to every single animation in the ships so previously they were just one canned animation for getting in we've split up into the individual chunk so now design animation can stitch them together in any different combinations so when we were designing ships before we'd say this ship uses the Gladius enter animation so we had a template file and it had third ladder touch points so that ship was built around that animation the entire animation so you had to get in a ladder of the exact same metrics as the Gladius into stepping over a bit of the wing that is the same size of the Gladius down into a cockpit that is the
00:31:52
same size the Gladius that's all now split up so you have sequence enemy again so you can mix and match say going up the guidance ladder with getting into the Hornet so it gives us a lot more flexibility but that meant all the ships have to be vetted into to fit things we found examples the Avenger in Eclipse supposedly used the same animation turns out they did not in game so when we fix the animation the Eclipse just you were walking inside the geometry as you went up the ladder that's because someone had just done a sneaky little fudged the animation saved it as Avenger wrote a job done so we had to remodel its of the Eclipse to get that to fix have someone
00:32:43
as well as the more we make the ships the better we get it and the mall mummy are a style gets better so look at the 300 series for example they were one of the first ones to be made no I wasn't around then not that old but you're only six years that's correct good beard but with the 300 and the 600 I completely different styles so reworking it made it look way better than it does so art style involve an iteration yeah and the I think in three five the m50 nobody will have noticed this because you just can't have seen it but the m50 was actually carrying around the old damage model this entire time where instead of having
00:33:30
the UV to damage they had to fall oh people know for misspoke modeled damage states for every single part because I didn't have you eating literally to swap the left-wing from 100 percent to 75 percent so in the old days we had to model ship four times and to do that and then you just walk between it that's gone now and that's probably the oldest ship in the game that hasn't had a touch and bless on the on the roadmap soon issue for yeah update pass no I'm glad you said update pass we on the public road map we see a lot of different terminal terminologies thrown around we go for it for it for the so this is just a selenium on the list is it just might we see improvements yeah we see updates we see reworks toss what the difference between
00:34:19
these three and now they're more than three well what are what is improvements mean when we sit there and we look at Merlin improvements what is what is what is it Merlin improvements hi I would say there's really only two and it's just different people saying the same thing so rework is like a completely ground-up rework of the ship nothing remains of it improvements or updates is like what we're doing with the Merlin so that cord geometry stays the same we just perhaps redoing materials to modern standards we're updating the Lords the big thing with the Merlin is just redoing the interior of the cockpit to match the the metrics we have the UI now so it had bespoke UI before but it was very small compared to what we had deemed as a
00:35:08
minimum screen space for UI so that's been adjusted to fill that and really that's just it's an update or improvement it's not rework because it's only a tiny part the shippers how they're completely the rest is just had a touch up and oftentimes we've been going through in doing minor improvements to ships for like ship components in steps make sure that they have the appropriate spaces I just adding doors yeah we did intend to put them on the roadmap layer of those ongoing quality of life challenges if an artist is spending a considerable amount of time on it then it goes on the roadmap because I some folks may have seen your slight you know subtle changes to existing ships no mention it on the roadmap whatever it is and that's for the component work and updates and all the sizing and stuff like that too
00:35:56
alright we just did those two right there and that thanks patience um alright so let's get into some of the the meteor why we do things the way we do can you explain always a good question when it starts with can you explain can you explain I don't know why I'm getting so high in nasally shape keep going can you explain can you can you explain why we placed turrets the way we placed them on many ships they're not really an optimal placements like the star ferry back turrets or the freelancer trait that blocks the cargo entrance constellation turrets etc why do we do this three very different answers to those things part of it is it the old concepts where those things were really thought about as much as they are
00:36:45
these days we just go want a turret on the top on the bottom that would give great range of fire done whereas these days we do a lot more the concept stage of putting cameras in the turret positions going that doesn't quite look as good as it should do it doesn't cover where we want so we'll change and then Paul will work with the artists to adjust that generally at the design brief stage will go it needs to be five turrets ideally one or two pointing this way one or two point this way and then we leave it to the art guys to pick a combination of what can hit those goals and what best the consolation ones there they're not great but if anyone's a fan of them but it's that's its consolations our
00:37:37
starter ship well it's one of them one of the ships that is one of the ships yeah you can start starting with its new you pledge for dealerships that you get any at a game package with the campaign those turrets are also sort of part of the style of the ship if we change them to be something that was significantly better you ruin a lot of the aesthetics of the ship the stuff very rare ones the old flip you upside down turrets didn't work well which is why we spend a lot of time on the Valkyrie blowing ball turret where you stayed the right way up you gimble with the turrets that makes the experience much nicer ideally first ships like that we'd want to go back through them and change them there are some other considerations we need to do for that he commits ins a lot John yeah I was going to say that is not the same as committing to go back that's that's
00:38:24
in an ideal world we'd love to do that we learnt a lot during the Valkyrie and that you should be put back into the other ships what was the other one freelancer freelance said that these prongs were always supposed to fold up into the ceiling we will do something about two someday that one I will guarantee all right we're done here today all right I have to imagine there's also an element of game balance not every ship can do everything you don't yeah it's it's it's very what we see very often is somebody will pick a ship that you know you'll create some imagery that's just awesome maybe not to us there's some what
00:39:13
awesome and and and we'll fall in love with that ship and now instantly we want that ship that's now become our favorite to be able to do anything like we wanted to have turrets that covered 360 degree firing marks around the entire thing we wanted to have the best armor we wanted to be the fastest off the off of the starting line how do you balance that how do you just know how do you resist the urge to just not make every single ship the best ship they could be the gay checks that we have at the concert phase that is exactly what that is for every discipline will get involved and so I don't like it this way this will do this this will do this they'll be our feedback to go away reiterate on it come back show them again and then maybe they'll be happy then we do balance again the stats and that's during the
00:40:02
flight prep phase you saying there at one point there was a burden on the Dragonfly where was the best dog fighter in the world he just had to scale it back that's pretty cool let's go the other direction from the most capable ships to snub fighters this question just simply says how are some fighters supposed to remain relevant what are some fighters that worried exist and children that question let's ask each one first what are one of the rule what's the wolf style some fighters snubbers stuff is not crap not off not all of them are fighters yeah pigeonhole them they're parasite ships in terms of they require ease of mothership to transport around they don't have quantum drives if you have a quantum job you're not really a stop shipping we give them a different
00:40:50
name it like be the Scout craft or something like that so they require another ship to cart them around and they're really there to provide protection for things like the Corsair it's a constellation competitor constellation has a snow craft and two turrets of course there has three terrorists no stuff craft so they sort of they provide that alternate defense then offensively they're not they're never going to win a huge fight they're there to provide protection from things or provide deterrence nodosa so it's you're not in the merlyn's the Archimedes the 85 axes is like that you know they're do you consider them full spacecraft in there yeah they're alright
00:41:37
I mean consider them full spacecraft they're just they they serve a particular subset of a role so thoughts that fighters are there for that deterrence and defense the ones that races there they're great racers in their size craft if you in Archimedes against a souped-up m50 you're probably not going to win unless something bad happens to the m50 the a5x is a great little two-person runabout if that's all you want to do is cut you in a friend around places between relatively local destinations great it's not startling like comparing apples and oranges you brought any part of that I immediately upon saying Starla and I regretted saying it I'm saying Devon
00:42:27
knows about you want to open this can of worms okay a lot of players often see uses for ships outside of the strict concept of the first releases I need the Valkyrie having cargo or the vanguard being used for exploration the Vulcan Vulcan means for savage and salvage and not repair how open are you to allowing more creative flexibility in designs and do you ever think of alternative uses for ships when you're designing with it that's right because it's not I mean oh yeah I mean I could I could take somebody that's been Martin and put a luggage rack on it and put the cargo on the top of it yeah but just because you
00:43:20
can just you should but you know yeah it's like a trans day panel as well you know you can get to make it a racing trans even could make it come over and keep making another baby is trans you can spend a lot of money on your transit button to make it a racing transit van you probably go spend less time buying an actual race car but in two different experiences you can but finally on the deal with the market so is this ever considered you ever think about like how players might be able to swap out components and yeah we we always think about we we know what the players do so we always know what did they do to everything that we think they're gonna do and more so when we're designing ships we know like this is what we want it
00:44:06
we can make a safe bet that people are going to try and do this with it forever asking what fits in was yeah we know that everyone's always going to try and cram another ship inside another ship yeah so we know what we wanted to do we know within reason what it could to with some stretching we can never think of why everyone reclaimer armwrestling yeah rely on Chow stink and then we're gonna do like a big bonus check doing I really don't like trying to figure out having a big band music vending machines can get into the back of something if it's designed to fit something particular we'll check that but we don't tend to check every single object to that universe can fit inside it I think the phrase we use as emergent
00:44:54
gameplay it's we put it out there for the intended purpose and then the community you know that shows us all of its other capabilities the thing is you know we know cuz we're quite an agile company anyway you know people are doing something repeatedly we can then we can start to incorporate that into future deserve yeah I kind of the dream of using the caterpillars of broadside bit machine you know said they're loading it up with with with cannons or with real guns or whatever and using it like old old style sailing ship and broadsides you know it's I've seen people even think about it's just doors open power has landed on every single one it's now our aircraft and I was never designed to be absolutely
00:45:44
that's cool next question is just about the overall ship pipeline it's the current ship pipeline mostly optimized or do you have more tools coming online that will decrease the time from design to fight ready are we happy with the pipeline are we are we said like if we figured out the the another optimal way to make space I'm never happy it's never I was always unhappy things can only be done quicker hopefully being counted in terms of tech I think we're we've got a good pipeline now it's come on a long way mmm things can always be better smoother and faster game development anything can happen yep I don't think there's a single big thing missing on the pipeline really
00:46:33
there will go off we had this wave two ships in half the time we're at the point of diminishing returns on improvements that's why I have to do the disclaimer again building ships and building the gameplay systems two separate things we're talking about building the physical ship yeah building the salvage game player the Riddler game is terrible programmers speak fils off all right this is this is almost like that can you explain can you explain know when designing ships why is the pilots of you so often overlooked is it depends on this question yeah it was game is it's one of those questions that
00:47:42
come up every single first pass concept review is what's the pilots view like and we we can accommodate and show them and then they say you need more space restrictive you may be to for the characteristics of the ship so that's why we take that sometimes it's hard because space ships for other mass media for movies TV shows comic books video games whatever there they're never built one one they're never built to actual proportion using and and built out to you know direct specifications so they can cheat a lot of those things I mean you look at the interior of the million and you look at the exterior at fall can you go I mean I'm sure Disney had some had some struggles the last couple years when they're building their life-size sit down at Disneyworld but you know look those were some of those lessons we had to learn quite frankly
00:48:30
the hard way yeah you know from those early days when we were Constantine ships the same way you would for a movie or a TV show and then getting in there developing the metrics over time and seeing how these things actually work in practice you know one one environment and going yeah and the concept team you know they they put up the game shapes valuating sort of all historical stuff mm-hmm so they they're very much on board in terms of fixing those issues and like you said earlier the thing with the Terrapin view wasn't actually specific to the Terrapin it was it was a global thing what's happening yes it was one animating it wasn't ever that the seat was designed to be that low it was it was using an animation from another ship that was
00:49:16
just incorrectly put on that ship I think the Hammerhead the on the window at the bottom of the ship that came out of her first possibly because somebody said it because you could see downwards and then pause like you know okay that's exactly that how that happened yeah okay that again no it's one one time I how often do you take into account internal modularity like changing the talk about this a little bit before but changing the rooms decoration sturgeon furnitures for example the example they give us switching a weapon rack for for a shelf I do ever wouldn't when building these how how modular do we get how how much do we protect ourselves for the future
00:50:04
depends on the ship sometimes you build the modularity for gameplay reasons I think the retaliator modules that entire room can come out and be a different room but also sometimes for our production reasons so the Vanguard rework the hoplite central pod room is well across all the Vanguard's it's essentially four bays now two on each side and you Joe the artist who's worked on it has built those bays to be modular I mean if you want to go nuts you could build a vanguard variant that has eight beds in it and no bathroom or anything because they all just fit in those big slots is partly for ease of use in production because for the other
00:50:51
variants now we've moved some of the bits around and rather than building two beds on the left-hand side built into the wall now we have to build two on the right side it's literally taking the geometry and putting it back in another way for the hoplite we built a set of two jump seats with gun racks that go in that way they can be cut and pasted around so it speeds up our production it's more efficient in memory you're just loading one asset and instancing it you're not having to load duplicate geo but for for gameplay reasons we tend to stick to big wholesale changes rather than swap your wardrobe for a gun rack now we have we use the term modularity a lot and it was a stretch to go over and shift modulating whatever and whatnot we
00:51:39
have we essentially have two types of Anjali we have we have developer modularity what we use to build the ships let me have player facing modularity you touched on that a little bit they rigged the retaliator rooms the living room the Bombay I can't remember what the other ones are same seats the jump seats all though that's player facing reality the stuff that's come the stuff that that will come through the ship customization feature when that comes more online you can learn all about that on inside star citizen watch that's player facing module again but what we're talking about here when we build the ships that's that's the developer modulator that that's to help with performance that's to help with the draw calls it's the same like the interiors of big ships as well those Courage's aren't unique pieces there
00:52:28
it's a two meter wolf section of one meter wall section a four meter wall section and inside curve and outside curve just repeated everywhere it's part the reason the hammerhead was so quick to paint production because that is the interest case yeah with a new material on it and some new bespoke component hatches the rest of that is all the work we've done on the idris we branded and so the example of the Dabra modular you're supposed to play a face have you taken into account how cargo or components will in turn exit ships physically this Britten's does in real life you've never load with an angled ramp I think all ramps are angled I've seen seen can you have an unanchored it's a fear I've loaded up enough maybe they've talked about the specific maybe
00:53:16
they're saying that angle is too sharp yeah we do have metrics for like ideal metrics or ramp angles - it is shallow it always causes problems but we do have a maximum one that we don't tend to ever go past ideally in the real worlds professional haulers load off dogs so it's just roll on roll off well I'm and elevator rally kind of thing but we it's less thinking about the ramps but more thinking about the access sizes so if this is a cargo ship can actually take one I see new cargo boxes in and out of that space if I stack it for high can I get them out somehow if this is a ship that's not gonna use one se once it's going to use the big ones if they're
00:54:03
actually space in there to do that but one of the big ones come the there's one I see you yeah they go up in quantities like the biggest one is a 32 or 64 s in Ukraine which is what you would see strapped to the side of a hole see you and have four thousand and however many individual 1s see new boxes on the whole Sina it's just not efficient grete so the box of them so don't have a bespoke name it's just a finish to us SCU box yes that's just a 64 su box good things come in like some predefined ball games phase there are a few ships that have beds and no toilets I'm just thinking about your your eight beds and no toilets vinaigrette that you mentioned earlier he said when they were watching the show they probably saw that look on my face I'm like just reminded me of Semak and there are few ships to have beds in no choice it's I went to
00:54:53
and and if we're spending enough time we ship don't we okay let's try this again there are a few ships that have no beds in their twinness and if I'm spending enough time in my ship I wasn't broken words here hi hi basically say if I if I have to sleep don't I have to poop that's basically what the there's like there's like four lines here that's really what the origin yet if I have to sleep don't have to poop this is sort of another one of those legacy things when we do our design briefs now we have I can drop down tick box quantity for what level of onboard facilities do you have do you have no onboard facilities do have Spartan which is a bunk in a toilet do you have basic food making on there
00:55:42
do you have a full kitchen so yeah there are some ships out there that might have a beds but no toilet you might have to look at those in the future there are some there's just ain't better it's not designed to be that bed is there for a gameplay purpose for providing logging and logging out reachable areas we first talked about reachable areas back at Gamescom 2015 if I remember correctly I do you implement reachable areas on ships outside of man turrets doors randoms airlocks I wish are we still thinking about that stuff less like fully dynamic breaching there is some big tech turtles to to go there there are certainly gonna be
00:56:32
predefined air as I say that the door is about destructively non-destructively breach through those all the turrets entry holes a metric which is convenient in the same size as docking collars make of that what you will and then there's our seas like the windows they can get in elevators there's there's very few ships where there's only one way in and those ones that's a nice quirk of the ship that provides some defense so the as we're making these ships they still have these areas the turret areas the door areas but as far as anime no specific more specific than that I would say that well probably depends on the development of the actual feature itself by the future King James okay
00:57:21
okay go enjoy me visible one for Ben why is there a disconnect with the ship specs listed on the RSI website and the actual ship itself even after the updates the website is more wrong than right in the majority of ships even flight ready ones I think well do here is I'll defer to the ship pipeline director great thanks so there's a few things both CID in turbulent want that to be better it's a very manual process at the moment obviously we're it's a manual process there's room for error yeah and a big problem we have with it at the moment is those stats pages show
00:58:12
stats for in-game attributes that just don't exist at the moment so in an ideal world we'd have a nice automated system that would look at the game files and then pull that put it on the website what do you do for tasks that don't exist in game like jump drives right do we just fill out in game data with fake data is that that's going to be is program to errors is manually putting something on the website yeah that's that's the big fundamental thing that stops it from all being automated in forever correct again when we spot things we tend to save them up for batches and just push it out in a bunch cuz if every time someone spied something there was wrong on the stats page and we go call
00:58:59
someone a turbulence a drop are you doing this value is wrong they would never get anything done either because they have their own sprints and work today right and so we just factored into update chunks it's showing because there are designers that work on ships in three studios yeah around the world and the process I've witnessed the process of balancing tinkering these things it's it's flying it's flying around for two minutes and then going in tabbing and changing a number value and then go in a flying I've seen a designer make 30 40 50 changes to just one single number in the span of ten minutes yeah and and be tracking all that and documenting all
00:59:47
that making sure that that I mean having every single successive update would be a disaster because if that does that it updated automatically on the fly yeah to the website you could go to the website and in any 10-minute period you watch the stats of the vehicle key and change but what the hell is going on so it definitely has to be in batches even if we have this automated system it would definitely stuff to be in a badge like a script that's run every two weeks or something and go okay you know grab the current set of data plus there's the there's the very real consideration that and this is something I can speak to that while we are constantly saying all stats are subject to change and you know in this is game development on game construction and all things are you know we're all things are being developed and
01:00:35
subject to change we have a responsibility to minimize the number of those changes wherever possible it's it's it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't do anybody any good to see the numbers on the Hornet change 15 times in a week yeah so or two weeks or three weeks it can it's well that's a normal part of game design a normal part of game development is that tinkering that balance having that be forward facing and seeing those numbers changes and when there are folks who don't follow every broadcast you don't read every article who don't follow a spectrum who won't know what's happening they'll just see that these numbers just constantly you know and dramatically change over and over again so there's a
01:01:22
responsibility on our part to the to the feelings and considerations of the backers to make sure that while we have to change these things as many times as we need to to figure out what the balance is that when we update them we do it in as responsible and as timely and as limited a manner as possible so we're not just constant turn that keeps coming in ahead as you're playing with my emotion now every time you tweak something so there's definitely a a middle ground there there's there's the answer is is us getting better with our documentation and keeping up together and making sure turbulent gets updated and not go swing the pendulum so far the other direction that we introduced its stability yeah in the stats so it's a it's definitely a
01:02:13
challenge it's one that we've been working on here some time when we did the big stats page update I forget when those when all the shipyard articles came out mhm we had every single system designer that worked on ships look over their ships tests they looked over each other stats and all the marketing and community aims look over those stats so it must have had 30 40 people looking for multiple versions and they still missed things that the community spied within seconds it's the same story for brochures oh the number of review packages is ridiculous we have so many eyes player relations community customer service legal it's in their design gets in there the Lord team gets in there I'm in there it's we're all looking at we
01:03:01
all spot things I'm like okay in this versions this is version it says and just even with all those eyes sometimes yeah when you look at the same brochure in 30 40 versions of it it gets tough to keep track of what's happens and then someone will change the phrasing on something that when you're looking at it you go yeah that was what it was before but it's completely changed the context of it but because you've read 20 versions of it before your brain just doesn't process so do the way we bring so many people in because we need fresh eyes to catch things that you're not capable of catching but 30 or 40 is turn the jail look at something and of course it's definitely something that we still strive to do improve on and get better definitely we're in for improving we're actually at the end of time at this point I got one last question from the from the community I want to give you
01:03:49
what's your favorite challenge when designing your building stations I thought it was into your favorite challenge with your favorite challenge what's the thing that about your job that makes your job difficult that you like the most it's essentially what they're asking a lot me and Jonah two of there are people who get to see it from Chris's head or John's head right up until the game they end the game so I think from me it's my favorite challenge is getting it out to the backers but it's very challenging sometimes just keeping everybody on track making sure everybody's communicating with each other making sure metrics are correct making sure that um I don't know Chris is Cena and he likes it's all
01:04:40
those key stages that add up to the end point of getting out and it's challenging but I like it I really sort of hate it's also part of the process which is go basic going from the ideation phase of you know sketches where you can you know you can go in so many different directions and then and it's and it's that sort of coalescing and transforming it into the 3d and really sort of picking your direction like that part is for me the it's the most difficult because it's the most troublesome you know there's my feedback
01:05:26
and iteration but once we're on the road on the road to Rome on the road to success you're like okay well you know we're heading towards you know second premise great okay know what I'm doing so it's just you know you can't hide from it it's just part of the process I think the favorite but also most challenging thing for me is not leaking ships but I know how they're in production because we often work sometimes like a year 18 months ahead of what people know about and there's been many times where I've been so events and took them in the background they're really cool if you could just do the shit's like this you want so bad to say
01:06:15
like I think I've already almost a full time during this interview so there's there's many things I've said today in this I'm like I'm very careful how I describe this thing yeah the shift pipeline is very much living in three time periods it's it's it's having to address and iterate on the things that come before it's working on the things that are actively a production right now and it's still planning laying the groundwork for things that are a year 18 months in advance it's it's it's it's crazy and keeping it straight isn't always the easiest thing so it's the only way I manage to do it is just a constant I'm constantly talking about it so I never get a chance to like let it slip and let it fall ya back it's just always there in the front of my head
01:07:01
Paul Ben John thank you so much for taking your time for flying all the way from there you play just to do this we didn't do laughing you didn't even let me have it alright that's it thanks and uh for everybody watching this special a pre-taped version of star citizen live stars isn't not live making ship up how we make spaceships we'll see you next week everybody you thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in star citizen a squadron 42
01:07:48
you can subscribe to our channel or you can check out some of the other shows and you can also head to our website at www.uvu.edu/library

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