This post is a transcription of Around the ‘Verse: Episode 3.05, material that is the intellectual property of Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) and it’s subsidiaries. INN is a Star Citizen fansite and is not officially affiliated with CIG but we reprint their materials with permission as a service to the community. Enjoy!

As is with any information on our transcripts and summaries, everything posted is subject to change by CIG and in some cases may not always be 100% accurate at the time. While we strive for accuracy, mistakes do happen so please let us know if you find something amiss that we didn’t catch. Enjoy the show!

Around the ‘Verse: Episode 3.05 Transcript

Intro

Phil Meller (PM): Hey everyone and welcome to season three episode five of Around the ‘Verse. I’m Miles Eckhart Lead Designer here at Foundry 42 Wilmslough.

Mici Oliver (MO): And I’m QA Tester Mici Oliver.

PM: And the big news this week is 2.5 is live for all the backers. If you haven’t grabbed it yet make you sure you head to the launcher and check it out, and congrats to the whole team of getting this patch out including all the backers who worked so hard to help us test the builds and get everything stable.

MO: Definitely a big thanks to the backers and the avocados on the PTU. Working in QA I know what a struggle it is to get through all those bugs, but the fact that we have so many players looking at it has really helped identify the issues so thank you!

PM: And 2.5 brings some great new changes to the Alpha. There’s a new landing system that makes touching down a lot easier and there’s also two new ships to fly.

MO: We have the Argo utility craft and the Reliant Kore, both are quite different ships than what we already have in the game so it’s really exciting to see them in and flight ready as well.

PM: Yeah, but the biggest addition has to be our new location Grim Hex. Outlaws finally have a place they can call home.

MO: With it comes outlaw themed stores which includes outlaw armour and guns and we also have some more clothing which is counter culture shirts, bandanas, that sort of thing.

PM: Another reason for the player to explore is being one of the core directives of Star Citizen. If you want this piece of clothing then you might have to fly to this specific store. So Mici there’s been something you’ve been helping out with

MO: Yes I made a PU clothing wardrobe which is for the Designers so they can see all the clothing that’s been completed by the Art Team. So if they want to dress a character they’ll look through all the shirts available and all the pants and mix and match and this is how a lot of the NPCs were dressed for the demo.

PM: Yeah I had to dress my, well dressed Miles Eckhart that week and it was easy.

MO: Yes, that was unusual.

PM: It was really handy. So in addition to 2.5 we also have the monthly subscriber Town Hall held right here at Foundry 42.

MO: Yes members of our Audio team have been taking live questions from the subscribers.

To find out a bit more about what Foundry 42 has been up to this week he’s Nick Elms with this week’s Studio Update.

PM: Yeah let’s check out his shirt this week.

Studio Update

Nick Elms (NE): Hi everyone, welcome to another UK update. We really hope you enjoyed the Gamescom demo as much as we did, we’re just getting back to action here now and we’re just going to start today with Will Maiden talking to you guys who wanna be budding cargo haulers and pirates and salvagers about the basics of the cargo system.

Will Maiden (WM): OK, so for 3.0 we’re going to have the ability to pick up the box, take it to your ship, put it in your ship and take that ship to market – which will allow us to sell whatever you find. Now it’s going to either come from salvage, ships you find out in the debris field; stuff you take off other people’s ships that you pirate; stuff you are going to get given on missions. You can also go to market – pick up whatever you want to buy, whatever they’re selling, that’ll automatically get put in your ship and you can take that out to sell that as well. We’re hoping to get all sorts of trade routes – buy stuff from here, sell it to there, take stuff from there, go somewhere else – traders will go to port and they will just buy from a computer two-hundred-

Video Commentator: You can both manually pick up and drop cargo as well as automatically load and unload onto full service spaceports.

WM: to three-hundred units of steel or whatever and that will automatically be generated on your ship. So they have a really time of just buying what they want, getting back into space and trading whereas salvage players, pirates – they can physically walk up to a box, pick it up, manually take it over to their ship, or take it to a market and sell it. So they have a much more lengthy gameplay but it should be fun for them to be able to see what they are taking and individually picking what they want.

We’ve obviously already got cargo boxes built, we’ve got ships where the interiors are already set up – so we can start placing: here is where cargo will fit, here is where we can store it. Those will probably come along side-by-side and then we should be good to go. We’ll be able to see very quickly once it’s down inside your ship, it gets locked to that ship. Then all we need is on the other side, markets being set up – we’ve already got a few at Port Olisar, GrimHex and we’ll be seeing some at Levski – places where you can take those items. Instead of talking to someone and buying a gun you’ll be able to say “Hey I’ve got ten tonnes of cargo in the back if you want to buy that”. So with having trade routes that gives us then the opportunity of pirates, finding out about those trade routes. Coming and camping on them, waiting for transports to come in. Grab them, steal their cargo. So then we’re going to have, hopefully, players wanting to protect their cargo. They start hiring mercenaries to come and protect them, and then bounty hunters to hunt down the pirates that stole off them in the first place. So hopefully from having that initial cargo route from one or another, we should be seeing a lot more careers being built around that.

NE: Thanks Will. I hope you all enjoyed that and you can see those systems start to come online with the gameplay possibilities are going to be expanded for you guys in the Star CItizen universe. We’re going to move over now and take a look at the Ursa Rover, which was one of the stars of the show

Jort Van Welbergen(JW): When I got the brief to work on the rover, basically it was my task to take Hobbins’ concept of the rover that was shown in the cinematic and take it up to the new level of quality for the gameplay and the systems that we put in place. Incorporate the all the cargo systems, the new weapon systems, to a level that we have the ships at as well. It was really interesting experience to work on. One of the main mechanics that I had to introduce was, I had to find a way for it to, for a vehicle with enough ground clearance to be off road capable and also for it to fit into the Constellation cargo ramp which was shown in the cinematic. Problem being that the Constellation cargo bay isn’t really fit for a six wheeled super big sort of rover vehicle. So I had to come up with a mechanics system that the wheels basically fold on to the body of the vehicle and then deploy when it needs to go outside to when it needs to do its off road duties. That as well as a deployable turret that deploys via a rail system to be able to get the rover to be able to clear the ramp of the Constellation.

Graeme Palmer (GP): So basically you’re provided a few concept images that he’d done a paint over of and then I took that into Max and cleaned it up as best I could and then modelled on top of that and then from there we just refine the mesh and start adding geometry to get a better idea of how it all works. And then on this particular one because the space was so tight I also animated as I was going along so I could, there were certain shapes I had to change, so they could fold up and work

Tom Woodward (TW): The cockpit’s interior consists of two chairs. One pilot one navigator. Both consoles for both people, sort of fold away allowing more leg room to get in and get out. When the pilot will get in the console will slide away and then rebuild itself around the pilot to sort of get in and drive. The cargo bay area consists of fold away seats, weapon lockers. It’s got a couple of access points, so the four standing crew can come in and out as they want. It’s sort of helps the planetary aspect of Star Citizen come alive a bit more. Cause you can get to the planet’s surface and you can explore more than you could if you were on foot. So say you wanted to get from one place to another without the Rover you’d either have to end up getting back in your ship and sort of fly up into the atmosphere and then come back down again, which you might miss something interesting like a ravine or something, a crater that has some sort of interesting building or something in it.

Where as with the Rover you can drive around and get much more in depth information on the terrain and stuff and possible find something more interesting than if you were just flying around the atmosphere or orbiting kind of thing. Up until now we’ve only had the Greycat buggy and it’s not been a multi crew vehicle where as this is a larger, you can get your friends, you can go down to the planet’s surface and you rove around. You can even do sort of drive by shootings if you want to and have the back door open and two guys crouched down with machine guns while you’re driving around. Which is pretty cool!

MO: Yes, I got to QA test the Rover and it’s really fun to drive across all the vast planets, new planets that we’ve got. And I loved seeing it going against the Dragonfly at Gamescom, that’s really cool!

PM: And to give us a more in depth look at what it took to hatch the Dragonfly, let’s go to Paul Jones and his team

Ship Shape: Dragonfly

Paul Jones (PJ):: So the Dragonfly was basically a new category of vehicle for Star Citizen. We’d worked with small spaceships, one seaters, two seater; multi-crew. The ships were just getting bigger and bigger. And that was working for the universe but now with 3 … well 3.0 coming up and us going planetside – which we’ve just shown in the demo – Chris was really pushing for a personal vehicle. Essentially a space motorcycle. Like a space hog.

And so with that in mind the Drake Dragonfly is the perfect candidate because it’s styling is a little bit … it’s a little bit low brow, it’s quite mechanically. Especially we’d just been dealing with the Caterpillar. And so we worked with those requirements and the Design team, with their brief that they gave us: they want something small, something that can hover above land, something that can also fly in space, so you can just boot it out of your Freelancer. And so this was a lot of fun. So this was a brand new … again it was like carte blanche almost. And so this is always what us art guys want; what the concept guys want. So you’ll see today through the process how we’ve developed it.

Gary Sanchez (GS): The ship it was interesting to design first because it’s small. It’s allowed go everywhere on ground, on planet, and we can also go in space with it so we have different functionality contrary to some other ship that are bigger or different. So the Drake manufacturer is also interesting because of this kind of low tech industrial look. So it was also a challenge to try to do something iconic but with a … not too design a bike. So it was very interesting to do.

Joe Neville (JN): So the Dragonfly was challenging at times purely because there are so many expose components to it. It basically means that the … it was a lot more expensive as an asset. With a lot of the bigger ships you can hide components away whereas with the Dragonfly everything is exposed. You have to model everything. There’s no smoke and mirrors here.

Steve Turberfield (ST): Essentially when I get given the model from the guys in the Art team, my job is essentially to start breaking that down into the separate items, such as the thrusters, and all the general parts of the ship itself, such as the nose, the body, and beginning to break them … make them detachable and add damage effects and things like that. Overall we begin just by doing a real rough whitebox flyable state on it. So we’ll just get the model flying before we start breaking it all up.

In the Gamescom demo we essentially showed off the basic setup of the ground mode and also the spaceflight mode, where we were essentially showing it going off in space, landing inside the Freelancer, going planetside, getting out again and being useable in its ground mode. We have a lot more to add to that so we’re doing further work on the ground mode flight systems – just really tweaking it, making sure that it feels spot on when you are riding on the planet.

In addition we also need to set up the rear seat for a rear facing passenger. So you will essentially have your buddy on the back, running along with you and we are eventually going to implement them being able to hold a weapons. So while you are in any chase sequences or modes you’re essentially able to have your guy at the back shooting people off who are approaching from behind.

And the final thing that we are looking to implement is a third mode that the Dragonfly has which is a compact mode where essentially the ship nacelles retract and it basically enables you to store it in it’s smallest possible state on any of your cargo ships.

Darren Lambourne (DL): I went with Harley Davidson for the kickstart sound, originally, which was heavily processed obviously to just get that “bah-dah-dah-dum” coming … okay you know it’s a motorbike but heavily processed.

And then it was a matter of finding out essentially what made motorbikes different from cars or spaceships or airplanes. It’s the connectedness with the environment: you’re racing along really near the floor. So the ground rush, particles, rocks, anything like that, that’s going to hurt if you hit it hard enough and the wind rush and stuff. I wanted to really to get all of that stuff in there for the Dragonfly. So it was in stark contrast with the other ships and vehicles we have in the game.

The planetside stuff, the in atmosphere flight, the sort of terrain traversal in wheeled vehicles and hover vehicles like the Dragonfly… I think provide a brilliant contrast between what we’re used to, the sort of… the space travel aspect where you’ve got points of sound very sharp contrasty points of sound, very clean in the void.

Then on planetside we’ve got this much more grounded… when there’s an explosion it’s going to echo around in canyons, you feel close to the ground, you feel much like footsteps different surfaces… surface types and stuff you’re going to have to feel that through the vehicle and it just gives a… I think it’s a case of, you know, the total is great and the sum of the parts, really. The space travel and the planetside stuff and those two things contrasting with each other I think sort of reinforcing each other. So, it’s kind of picking what we can emphasize like the ground effect stuff, like echoey stuff off canyons and mountains and things like that to give you a sense of where you are and the two things will provide a brilliant much, much enhanced experience I think to just space flight, you know

ST: So, I can honestly say that the Drake Dragonfly has been my favourite ship to work on so far just because of adding new things we have never done before in there and I’m really looking forward to seeing our backers get their hands on it and do all kinds of crazy stuff while on planets.

Back to Studio

MO: Speaking of great content, a ton of the backers have been working on their own Star Citizen related projects to tell us the latest is Tyler Witkin with this week’s community update.

Community Update w/Tyler Witkin

Hey everyone, Tyler Witkin, Community Manager in the Austin, Texas studio here to bring you this week’s community update. First and foremost, patch 2.5 is now live and available to all backers. This patch brings a whole slew of new content bringing us one step closer to the gaming experience that we’ve all been craving.

2.5 release sale will continue through Tuesday, September 6. We’re really excited to introduce the MISC Reliant and a pair of Argo variants. We believe these ships bring a unique twist our current line up of available ships and look forward to seeing you fly them in the ‘Verse and if you’re looking for some additional stopping power, make sure to check out the all new Behring M7A laser cannon, available now with patch 2.5.

Since 2.5 released live on August 25, we’ve seen a lot of awesome content posted on the Community Hub, YouTube and Reddit and we’re looking to feature more gameplay videos from you the backers so keep them coming. As far as content goes this week, make sure to explore the Baker system with Senior Writer, Will Weissbaum in an all new episode of Loremaker’s Guide to the Galaxy which was posted on Tuesday.

Yesterday we had our Subscriber’s Town Hall with the UK Audio team which is definitely worth checking out and remember that these are a great opportunity for subscribers to jump in and get their questions answered and this week would not be a complete without an update to our Sub Vault which will add some additional pictures to take a look at the early Anvil Terrapin.

Looking ahead all our studios have been coming together to finalize August’s Monthly Report which should be in your hands later next week so look forward to that. Unfortunately we’re not going to be at DragonCon this year but we hope everyone attending has a great time and hopefully we’ll be there next year.

Lastly it’s time for this week’s MVP award, a huge congratulations to Alysianah for her extraordinary efforts in creating contentcreatorsunlimited.com. If you have even the slightest interest in Star Citizen’s lore, you’ll easily find yourself entranced within the pages of detailed information and lore tidbits all extracted from our web based Ark Starmap and into an easy to read table format. So congratulations again, you’re this week’s MVP.

Originally we were not going to have an RtV tomorrow but all the pieces fell into place and it is a go so we will catch you live tomorrow on twitch.tv. Make sure to check the weekly Comm-Link schedule for all the details. We hope you have a nice holiday and we will see you in the ‘Verse.

Back to Studio

MO: Staying with ships a little longer, another highlight from the 3.0 demo was the Starfarer wreck, the ship team put so much work into making the vehicles look great, it’s fantastic how amazing they can look when they’re all blown up.

PM: Let’s take a behind the scenes look when taking the Starfarer from space worthy to scrap worthy.

Behind the Scenes with Nathan Dearsley

Nathan Dearsley (ND): Myself and Chris have had quite a few discussions regarding the dead ships. We, we’re also quite both passionate about having planets that potentially completely dedicated to ship salvage. So, with the derelict ships there’s always, as explained, we want to take the stuff that already exists in the game, which have broken up parts of the ships, that once a ship suffers catastrophic damage it breaks apart. How can we reuse these assets and, kind of be very creative with them. The stuff they saw in Gamescom was very much the first step of that.

We are already progressing further with it. So, the work that we’re doing, is we’ve always explained, is always got a longer path or so we go kind of 3.0 coming due at the end of the year. The work that we’re doing does fit into that. Again it’s really kind of about kind of creating these, options for designs to have. So, if you come across a derelict ship in, space, don’t be shocked. It’s not a bug. It was always supposed to be there. It’s something that we want to push more. The stuff in space is, I wouldn’t say it’s easier, because the, dressing of, all that is you don’t have to worry about like impact points and all that kind of stuff. It’s, it’s there.

If you think about the opening to Episode VII where you see a lot of derelict Star Destroyers and whatnot in the desert, we can totally focus on doing that. The asset here and essentially man-hours work that go into that. They’re fundamentally less now, so we’ve got kind of challenges how we are going to blend them with the terrain. The terrain is very much early days, but I’m very excited to kind of experiment with, what would happen if we took a Starfarer and buried it in the desert. How something erodes and decays in the desert is very different to how something would erode and decay in a swamp. So you’ve got those challenges to think about as well, but the high level goal is for sure is to have these in space in … by the end of the year. Then when the planetary tech comes more on board then we can, start collaborating with design and the environment guys and get these nice pieces on planets for you as well.

Outro

MO: Well, that’s our show for this week. Thanks to the subscribers that have made it possible and to the backers that are supporting us and to all the devs who took the time to show us what they are working on.

PM: We’ve got so much great stuff in the pipeline working 2.6 and 3.0 is well underway and not to mention CitizenCon that’s just around the corner in October.

MO: I bet the SQ42 team is really excited to show off their stuff as well as the backers are to see it!

PM: Yeah, for sure, we just need to top 3.0.

MO: Yes.

PM: Right, finally yet, thanks for watching and we’ll see you next time on..

Both: Around the ‘Verse.