Hello fellow Citizens and welcome to INN’s coverage of the 55th episode of Around the ‘Verse!

Around the ‘Verse

Sneak Peek

Images and GIFs









Transcript by Erris

Empire Report

– UEE mourns loss of Advocacy agent. How did a normal stop and scan procedure go so horribly wrong?

– With more and more companies moving to Aremis, are local businesses being pushed out?

– Silas Koerner made his annual appearance New Austin Space and Avionics show.

1:00

Around the ‘Verse

– Episode 55 of Around the ‘Verse!

– 1.1.5 is alive. Latest build went out on Friday. Bug fixes, balance changes, Merlin and Scythe are now flyable.

– A few people have joined from Quakecon.

– 1.1.5v2 was released on Monday, more changes coming soon.

– Another weekly update on Star Marine, this time with some cool video featuring the animation and weapons test. (whole video plays)

– Lee Banyard and the Audio team put together a comm-link about the new Wwise system, complete with new samples.

– Stopped work for a few minutes for team photos at each of the studios.

– Chris Roberts kicked off a new video segment called Game Commander. Watch it, you might be a bit surprised about how much coding he does. The segment was Sandi’s idea.

– Team is getting pumped for GamesCom. All hands on deck at all the studios.

News from the Spectrum

6:40 – Santa Monica – Darian Vorlick and Eric Kieron Davis

– Lot of work in the studio right now.

– Working on the Glaive.

– Doing a lot of character concepts, getting the pipeline going.

– Hammering away at GamesCom. Without revealing too much, it’ll ‘blow your guys’ mind’.

– AI programmer has been working on adapting AI to fly larger ships. Flight characteristics for a large ship will be different, not as much YAW and Pitch.

– This is for multiplayer games, and for when you might take on larger ships in Pirate Swarm.

8:50 – Illfonic – David Langeliers

– Working on cleaning up netcode and player prediction. It’s been ongoing, but they’ve made good strides this week to reducing lag.

– Mocked up ‘hit indicators’ so you can tell what direction shots are coming from. Chris has had his feedback put into those, and they’re being implemented now.

– Fixing a ton of bugs. Past the point of working on features, they’re in bug-fixing mode. Lots of bugs with gadgets.

– A requested change was having items be more of a toss than a place, and because of that change there are some issues, but they’re working on them.

10:35 – Jake Ross and Ken Fairclough

– Working on a style guide for Micro-tech. A little bit of fancy mixed in with a little bit of not so fancy.

– Lots of clothing concepts being worked on for ‘Terra – Fashion Casual’. residents of the Terran sphere of influence will be wearing Terran style clothing, and this will be their casual-wear.

– Ken is working on the Nyx market – a new way of shopping. Rather than shops, it’ll be carts, more like a farmers market. Any angle you approach it, you see the bustle and activity, NPC and player activity, lots of transactions and such. Coming along well.

– Shopping experience will be a bit different at the Nyx-Levski landing zone than on Terra.

13:20 – CIG UK Mike Dalston and Matt Webster

– Lots of work on the 1.1.5 patch. Game feels a lot tighter, balance seems more… balanced.

– Feedback that fans have been sending has been very helpful.

– Keep the feedback coming.

– 1.1.5 is the first patch using the new Audio software, Wwise.

15:20 – Super Extreme Racing – Fan Video

16:00

Calix Reneau and Matt Sherman – Balance talk

CR – Recently done an update balance pass to change everything.

MS – Lots of people in the community have brought up Time to Kill – Before the patch it was short. 3-10 second fights when you get all guns on target. That was too quick. The target right now is a minute – a minute and a half. For Ace pilots, they’re seeing fights of between five and nine minutes. That’s a bit long, but they want high skill battles to take longer.

CR – Longer engagements mean you have more time to accumulate wear and tear, more opportunities to disengage. That couples together with updated weapons: Each size brings on a much stronger increase in damage potential. Helps fixed weapons be more of a choice. Whether the choice of fixed vs. gimballed weapons is a choice based on controller type, it’s not a choice until the mechanic itself is meaningful. If you always choose Gimballed, or if you always choose Fixed, there’s no real choice. Having the two side by side but not interacting reduces the texture of the game. What this means for controllers is something they’ll deal with after. When they do talk about controllers, they want to get the game up to the point they need, so getting fixed vs gimbals matter in general, is part of that. Ties into what they’re doing with shields as well.

MS – Initially just raising the health on shields, but one of the consequences with that was that the recharge rate and how much health it’s getting, was way too fast. Was making taking out a shield a more constant thing, not as much cool, I’ve taken out their shield, I”ve got a window where I can really put some damage on their hull and try to take out their ship. Increased the times, so it takes longer without being hit to get the shields back. Also, because other things were changed, there’s a net loss to how fast shields get their HP back. Similar to with weapons. They raised health and damage, but they still raised Time to Kill by not letting one overtake the other.

CR – The Joker SuckerPunch was uninteresting. in order to make it more remarkable, drastically increased the disruption damage it does. Disruption affects power pipes, takes down ships quickly, among the highest damage you can do to shields. It won’t do hull damage, but it will disrupt the amount of power you can send to systems, some players have noticed you can disrupt other peoples’ maneuverability with the suckerpunch. You can shut down thrusters etc…

MS – If someone’s running lots of energy weapons, they’re not going to be able to recharge if you hit ‘em with those suckerpunches constantly.

Ben and Sandi

– New component system is a complete overhaul of what they’ve done before. It’ll vastly improve existing ships and everything else going forward.

James Pugh, with Josh Coons

JP – Hey guys, I’m here with 3D modeler Josh Coons, hey Josh, thanks for coming on.

JC – Thanks for having me.

JP – Yeah, it’s good to have you out here from Austin

JC – It’s good to be here.

JP – So, I heard you’ve been working on a ship, I heard it’s called the Connie.

JC – Working on the Connie for a fair bit now. It’s my second job. My first job is I work for CIG, and my second job is I work on the Connie. She’s all that I”ve got.

JP – She’s your everything?

JC – *singing* She’s my one and only.

JP – So how long have we been remodeling the constellation?

JC – February I think? yeah, February’s when we started winding up the war machine, getting it ready to go.

JP – What was the impetus to remodel the Connie as opposed to other ships?

JC – There were a couple of things that just weren’t up at the time, so there were a couple things missing that we needed. We had a beautiful ship come out, the Retaliator, and I fell in love with that ship, and I wanted all the ships to look like that, so the quality bar’s set, have to match it now. So that’s been the main drive, getting a more focused style to it, make RSI feel like a company, the ships all feel like they came from the same manufacturer, and they have a purpose and a fit, and they fit in the world, and also making stuff simply look really cool. Cool keeps me in the game, and keeping me in the game is immersion, and that’s what I go for.

JP – So cool = immersion?

JC – I don’t want to get distracted by anything other than playing a sweet game.

JP – What are some things… you’re doing the exterior correct?

JC – Yeah, exterior currently, and then Chris and I will sync our files up, swap, so some of the things you can visually see on the exterior are actually part of the interior, so we have to sync up, make sure that stuff isn’t clipping through his walls, make sure the exterior is completely solid.

JP – So if we go from the original model to now, what’s one thing you really really wanted to change, and got to?

JC – When i first looked at it, when it comes to the nerdy side of modeling, hardcore geometry and stuff, there are certain faces on the model that were improper. And what that is is a square’s actually two triangles, and that’ll reflect light a certain way, but certain angles, like that, which I call a folding square, that doesn’t light very well. So fixing that was proper, and there were a lot of polygons that just weren’t… they weren’t visible, so I could delete them, and put them somewhere they are visible, which makes it cheaper, and also more high fidelity, more detail. Just wanted to bump it up, take it to the next level, the next bar.

JP – So besides the Connie, what else have you been working on recently?

JC – Sometimes in a pinch I’ll get pulled for specific tasks. I did recently the helmet interior, trying to refine getting those done in a quick fashion, having them look good, having them match the exterior face of the helmet they’re attached to. So I did the full Outlaw set, and I did the full Marine set, for the last FPS demo and currently. Before that I did the buggy skins with the new paint tech that was being worked on in house. I think we might actually do it another way now, an even better way.

JP – What’s this better way?

JC – Well the problem we were having, i’m sure everyone’s seen the new damage system which is still… I mean, I work here, and I just see it and…

JP – Still looks awesome

JC – Yeah, I’m spoiled by it. So once that came online, it solved a problem for us which was, before we had to do all the damage states by hand, placing holes, breaking out pieces, and you’d do that for a ship, say the Hornet, and you do that once. And then you say, Okay, we need a variant. And then you do the variant. And the paint would be just more geometry on top of that. So you have to go through all the damage states, cut them all out, it was compounding the work, but now we have this shader generated damage system, we can now, we don’t have to worry about that anymore. Faster and faster. As the tools come online, she ships can be done faster and faster.

JP – Well, thanks so much for coming on, I actually really look forward to the Connie and some of the things you’re working on.

JC – Yeah, me too mate.

28:20

Ship Shape, with Lisa Ohanian

– Vanguard

– One of the premier deep-space fighters. It’s a powerhouse, with thick armour, and great survivability.

– It does trade in some maneuverability for that, but since it can travel the full length of a star system without having to refuel, it’s a good tradeoff.

– It’s favoured by the UEE navy, and many militias.

– Gurmukh has been doing concept art on the ship. His two favourite things are working on the seats and the escape pods.

– Chairs are similar to the Retaliator, but on the Vanguard they slide into place in an interesting way. Happens for both seat.

– Operator has access to the turret and missile systems, and an advanced sensor suite, which’d give the ship an advantage in an asteroid field.

– Escape pod is in the center of the ship, it’s a heavily armoured, deep-space escape pod. Can fit up to two people, has a variety of features for survivability. Radar system, hibernation pods, advanced life support, and the ability to ‘spoof’ a kill on many radars.

– Lisa likes the crawl-spaces on the ship, where engines, coolers, power plants etc… are hidden. Keeps the ship space efficient.

– Gurmukh’s least favourite part of the ship was stopping work on it. Thinks the interior is an incredibly interesting ship. Excited to be moving on to the variants though.

Ben and Sandi

– No Around the “Verse next week, as they’ll be on the way to Gamescom.

– Livestreaming the event. Might be some video filler on the Thursday though.

MVP award

– The winner is – Goose, for his 300i feedback thread, going into lots of detail about what needs to change on the ship.

Contest after Gamescom

– They’re looking for concept artists at CIG, and lots of that talent comes from the community. There’ll be a mini TNGS with character designs. Artwork, modelling, etc…

– Winner will get an Idris.

Sneak Peek

– Looks like some character art. Fashion. Sleeveless shirt? Noooooo