Hello Citizens and welcome to INN’s notes for Reverse the ‘Verse – Episode 52!

Notes by Myself and LegoRobotDude

– Sandi is back!

– Sandi, Ben, Jen, Alexis, Chelsea, James, and Lando are here.

– Lots of stuff coming later today.

– Starliner sale will be later in the evening CIG time, getting the last set of assets right now which are the last set of the beauty renders.

– Lots of background including Tony Zurovec’s design for passenger transport.

– There are mousepads in the store! They found some extras in the warehouse… including some other random merchandise as well.

– Happy Birthday to Will Lewis from everyone!

– Team saw Will Lewis @ E3 last week.

– Will Lewis is working on World War Toons.

– Amazing Star Citizen Travel Mugs!

– They will be available for sale next week. $19 including shipping.

– HOTAS announcement hopefully at Gamescom.

– They can say it is looking very cool, and worth the wait

– Merlin will be one of the next ships flyable in AC, along with the Scythe, which is why they are showing off the HUD

– Dan shows off the metals of the Merlin to whoever walks by his desk

– Erin Roberts is here!

– Working on plans for Gamescom

– Gone from 12 guys to 120 at Foundry 42 in 18 months or so.

– Working on getting AI up and running, visual side is very cool as well

– Biggest Challenge: Building huge locations, 6km long locations, huge capital ships, massive amounts of work goes into that,

– They are building big world maps right now, they are really cool

– Making the engine work with both FPS and space at the same time

– SQ42 will be a single player experience, will have co-op modes where you can play with friends

– Release date is subject to change, basically want to have a really strong experience, may have public beta near the end, but they really want you to enjoy the story

– You can play SQ42 offline totally (don’t have to be logged in)

– How many people total are working on Star Citizen total – 500 probably, including outsourcers, 300 internally

– Working with lots of different people from lots of different locations

– Last time Erin played Chris he took him out, will have to setup a 1v1 sometime

– Tom Johnson – Producer in charge of SQ42

– Ricky Jutley is in charge of Arena Commander

– Working on continual improvement for company-wide communication.

– A lot of the game takes place on your capital ship, there will be other locations you visit, and lots of other stuff going on

– Will be lots of large locations

– [Squadron 42] “will be a pretty special experience.”

– Ricky does not sleep at all according to Ben

– Sunday Erin and Tom are heading to Austin, then on Wednesday back to the UK

– Will probably go to the Frankfurt studio in a few weeks

– Update on Idris; Interesting for them, ship well used in SQ42, will make a decision of when it goes live, not sure if they will release before SQ42 goes live

– There is no plan for the Starliner to be SQ42 as a flyable ship.

– Will definitely be marine planetary combat in SQ42

– Comic Con plans, several of them will be there, have a panel there on Sunday (Ben, Dave Swafford)

– Currently keeping cast close to the vest for Squadron 42 but will reveal it later on.

– Character creation will be in place for Squadron 42

– SQ42 you are in the military, can’t really customize clothing

– Erin Roberts does not appear in SQ42. Doesn’t want to be involved in any kind of acting.

– They tried to get him to scan his face, he refused

– Sandi says acting on that set is like being 5, wooden props, there were Joysticks, no mice though, headset is a bit uncomfortable

– Have to be careful not to get too close to other actors because the headset sticks out significantly and you can hit them together.

– No hugging/high fiving bc its difficult

– SQ42 will have VR support, as all of Star Citizen will

– Needless to say, SQ42 is a pretty big, epic story

– There will be a luxury version of the Starliner

– Starliner is quite modular, can configure it however you want

– Have mocked up a freight variant

– The Vanduul work very differently to Humanity, ships are pulled from parts, kinda patched together, destroy planets, take resources, make ships

– Soon safety features will be outlined not just for the Starliner but for ships in general.

– What happens when you have a hot tub and turn off gravity? Fun times, are actually working on tech for when that happens.

– Randy likes the idea of a Casino variant, wouldn’t be hard to convert his bar variant over to that

– Starliner sale will be from Friday June 26th to Monday July 6th.

– [How many docking ports does the Starliner have?] – Randy thinks 3 right now

– [Does the Starliner require external structures for Boarding and loading?] Answer: That is still being designed.

– Foundry 42 working on large world maps.

– Large world maps can be any size and are impressive.

– Test maps take 2 hours from one side to the other. Working on being able to travel faster (I interpret that as a Q-Drive]

– Large world maps are planned to be shown at GamesCom

– You will be able to save in a number of locations in SQ42, basically will be checkpoints in levels

– Starliner has landing skids, so its more of a VTOL

– [Will the Vanduul board UEE ships?] Erin Roberts: I can tell you categorically that they will.

– SQ42 spoiler: Vanduul will not be friendly

– Vanduul children eat human children for fun

35 minutes

– For SQ42: Plan to start with Single Player, release Multiplayer content afterwards

– Co-op: Talked about putting multiplayer IN Squadron 42 but found that you couldn’t do a strong storyline that way because you have to worry about where everyone else is and what they’re doing in the story.

– Did 4 player co-op all the way through in Starlancer but it makes it hard to have a strong storyline.

– Want a strong storyline for Squadron 42 and want you to be able to play offline.

– HOWEVER, they are planning to take scenarios from SQ42 and have a bunch of people be able fly together in them separate from the campaign. Don’t have to worry about storyline and you can have big co-operative battles using some of the settings from Squadron 42.

– Plan to release the multiplayer co-op part just after singleplayer SQ42.

– Crusader Industries logo is being finished right now.

– There will be effects you take from SQ42 into the PU

– You can play SQ42 after skipping it at first, and will be able to gain stuff from it, but it will not change your alignments or your reputation.

– [Are you allowed to replay Squadron 42 repeatedly?] Yes!

– Chris Roberts was born in Redwood City, California but grew up in the UK for the following 18 years.

– Erin – What will you name your Retaliator – Something Cliche, is his favorite ship in the game

– Austin – Making Stanton – The star system will be their gold standard, fleshing out everything they can, what happening with every planet, moon, see how long it takes, so they can see how long it will take for others. Will hopefully be able to show it off soon.

– Gurmukh is currently working on the Vanguard interior and is about to kick off work on the Vanguard variants.

– The new damage tech will allow them to start working on skins and customizing ships. Erin Roberts helping get that stuff moving in Santa Monica.

– Sneak Peek from AtV is the Merlin UI.

– WWISE is now in the new stream, working hard on getting FMOD sound effects back to where they want it, trying to get back to the standards they had

– Working on getting real-time echo into the game

– Zane is here!

– Zane is working on Merlin UI including implementation. Down to the wire… he’s working both days this weekend trying to get it in. This is an internal goal, it’s not coming out immediately.

– Merlin UI is even better than the shots show.

– Zane isn’t happy with the Scythe UI. Animation turned out pretty good but design could be better.

– Working on ways to improve interaction with the HUD… currently very cumbersome.

– Coming up with new control schemes to make interaction with the UI much more fluid, same way you interact with physical controls

– Merlin – expect it to handle similar to an M50, still working on exact top speed, all fixed weapons on the Merlin with a custom centerline guns

– M50 mass, general ship mass is getting revision as they get physically based damage online,

– Started some guys on the Herald, still has a ways to go

– No update on the Avenger Variants

– Travis Day is here!

– Will be hand to hand combat in FPS, not complete in the initial release… more complex later

– Butt strokes to start! [butt of the gun]

– FPS netcode changes will impact AC as well, will increase player counts across the board

– Major blockers for FPS: Locomotion animations… need to feel good in 1st person and look good in 3rd person. Network code is one but they want to wait for an official announcement.

– Chris has a letter he is working on, has been going between timezones for 36 hours

– CryEngine has some network code challenges, are writing some custom code

– Jason is a PU producer but is helping work on this because, surprise surprise, they will need servers and network code for the PU.

– Probably will be shooting people in the PU, with guns!

– Why does the Starliner look similar to early Banu concepts – they are both space ships?

– [How many players per Star System in PU?] As many as possible.

– Likely more limited by client-side performance than network issues in terms of instance limits.

– One grenade should be able to push another grenade, they are both Physics entities.

– Alyssa is going to be a pirate in the PU

– Alyssa got married in a pirate dress on a pirate ship @ Treasure Island in Las Vegas.

– Travis thanks for having him as part of the team. The rumours are true, he is leaving as is Chelsea.

– Travis wishes everyone all the best, been an awesome ride.

– Travis looks forward to seeing Star Citizen come to fruition.

– It’s been amazing, thank you.

– Huge thank you to Travis and Chelsea Day from INN. You’ve been fantastic.

– Travis is not being fired, his leaving is for very good reasons. Travis is going on a dream of his. He’s going to Blizzard.

– Ben: We’re super proud of him.

– Lots of crying…

– Starliner is by far the most ambitious marketing anything they have ever put together, please take a look!

As an aside we have some other stuff for you to check out:

Here is our 30 second commercial for INN [possibly a longer version in the future]:

In addition, INN’s amazing CrushBoss in association with WTFOSAURUS and Trendane have created an amazing video called:

and finally we would like to give a shout out to our friend WTFOSAURUS who is a fantastic Star Citizen Twitch Streamer. Please check him out here: