Hello Citizens!

Welcome to Around the ‘Verse 2.02!

Transcript by Erris, CanadianSyrup and Sunjammer

Empire Report

– All that and more on the next Empire Report, 22:00 SET

Around the ‘Verse

– This week, Jared talks with Matthew Intrieri, to talk about Explosions!

– And Randy Vasquez talks about what’s inside the Caterpillar!

– But first, patches!

– Patch 1.3 is coming soon. It’s the first post-merge patch of Star Citizen. Major technical milestone. Takes all of the different streams into one stable version. With this version, there will be some new s4 guns.

– Endeavour Sale is still in full swing. Science is doing well, the Endeavour has blown away all the expectations they had for it.

– CitizenCon is almost here! Sandi’s been working early with the UK every morning. CitizenCon will be great. Lots of great content, things they’ve wanted to show off to the community for a while. Tune in on Saturday.

– Disco gave Ben a Harry Potter spell joke to start off the spectrum, but Ben won’t say it, so we’ll never know what it was.

News from the Spectrum

3:35 – Santa Monica – Eric Kieron Davis and Darian Vorlick

– Super busy week. Working on character tech a lot. One of the ongoing systems that they’re trying to break boundaries on. Really big for the team.

– Bringing the char tech to a close soon.

– Kirk Tomay is animating the Xi’an Scout. They’re looking at some of the animations for that, looking to present alien tech in a way where humans can use it – sit in it, how the UI will work, etc…

– Calix is working on balance as well, getting feedback from the community. He’s been working on balancing missiles, making sure they’re doing the right amount of damage.

– Matt Sherman’s been doing a lot of component work as well.

– Working towards a balanced system, always going to be getting feedback from us as well.

– Balancing is never done.

– They’re trying to create an ‘ad-hoc’ feel to owning an alien craft, like from Battlestar

6:15 – Austin – Jake Ross

– Working on new shops. Dumper’s Depot, Casaba Outlet, Astro Armada, all of the different shops. No shopping yet, that’s two milestones away still, but they’re looking ahead to Nyx already.

– Lots of shops will be in Nyx, as well as ‘open shopping’ an open market bazaar.

– Utilizing lots of existing shops, rebranding them, etc… and rebuilding those to be all new, all different shops. They’ll look familiar, but they’ll be all new and all different.

– Animators are working on 0g enters and exit animations for all ships. In the near future, 0g animations’ll work getting in and out of ships in space.

– Working on faces for CitizenCon as well. Working on getting character heads and faces looking as good as possible.

– Working on hairstyles as well.

– They’re trying to break the uncanny valley.

9:00 – Foundry 42 UK – Allie Coker and Henry Davis

– CitizenCon!

– For anyone that can’t go, it’ll be livestreamed from 12pm PST, from 7pm UTC for those in Europe.

– For those who are attending, doors open at 6pm, no sooner.

– No staggered entry times, cause it’s a small, intimate event.

– Tickets are available on your account. If you can’t print, you can use your smartphone. They will require ID for entrance.

– Cameras are permitted, feel free to bring them.

– Parking will be available and free, but it’s limited. First come, first serve.

– Buffet will feature vegetarian options.

– Bar is cash only. There will be an ATM on site, but don’t rely on it.

– GamesCom was pretty heated, won’t be the same here, there will be AC.

– General CS update – they’re getting through the backlog as quickly as they can. If you have a time-sensitive issue, don’t worry, it’ll be treated as if it were answered on the day you send it.

– And have fun.

11:00 – Frankfurt – Brian Chambers, Chris, and Steve Bender

– Grew by four people in the office this week. Tech Artist, Environment artist, IT guy, and QA guy.

– Chris is QA guy.

– Steve will be there for a few months.

– From a global standpoint on animation, working on FPS core mechanics. Working on basic motion, and base gunplay. How it feels when you’re moving, how recoil and sway feel, working on procedural adjustments to it, allowing them to add different attachments to the weapons, etc…

14:44 – ATV Interview with Matthew Intrieri

JH: Thanks guys! community manager Jared Huckaby here. In this week’s ATV interview, I’m sitting down senior technical artist, tool specialist, Matthew Intrieri. Did I get that right?

MI: Intrieri

JH: Intrieri, I’m well known not to be good with names. Matt how are you doing?

MI: Glad to be here, glad to be here!

JH: So senior technical artist and tool specialist. What does that mean?

MI: Well I’ve been supporting the team for a year and a half and various aspects of the production from animation to modeling. I write the tools that automate the processes that allow us to make things go faster and I had interview several months ago, about a year ago, where I talked about tools and I described that, but today we’re gonna talk about something I’ve been moving on to that now is more of my responsibility which is ship damage.

JH: Explosions!

MI: Explosions!

JH: Say explosions.

MI: Explosions!

JH: Explosions

MI: Yeah!

JH: Ship explosions, we saw a little bit of this in the multi crew demo from Gamescom; Tell us about ship explosions

MI: Yeah well it’s evolved quite a bit. Initially we would model every piece of debris on the ship, so it was very meticulous and it took a lot of time and revisions were costly, but then allie brown our chief director of graphics and engineering, he came up with this new concept for the ship shader, damage shader and you guys have all seen that. You ping the ship and holes appear, but that only took it to the point where the battle ended and we didn’t have the explosion, So what I realized this I kinda started focusing on getting us to that explosion event and that took tech and art and design to all come together, so i’m kind of this hub of the wheel, the implementor! Of all these things and that kind of put me in a position of producing it in a way as well, I would examine each ship and list out all the things it’s missing and hand those off as tests and review those tests as they come in and support with tools and things as they come together.

JH: Explosions are important because you never want to lose your ship but if you have to you want a cool explosion

MI: you want it to be spectacular

JH: Of course and if you’ve been chasing someone down for 5 minutes or a prolonged battle or what not. The explosion, watching them go up in flames, that’s your reward

MI: That’s really the motivation. We believed explosion event is the payoff for your hard work, so it really has to be spectacular. Recently we hired a new special effects artists, Shawn ellis. Who’s working out the UK. He has some amazing work and what we’d like to show is some previews that he has put together; that has helped guide the processes moving forward and I’ll kind of talk over the videos to explain what you’re seeing.

JH: We don’t have a TV….

*Video plays*

JH: WOW

MI: Seriously yeah, yeah

JH: Sorry, for those of us who do a tour once a month and matt’s been gracious enough to show that on our tours and have been chomping it to bits to get it out to folks and I’m so glad we can finally show it. So tell us about it

MI: Well I show shawn’s work all the time because nobody cares about UV channels and per optimization of polygons, those are the things I deal with. You know if there’s one thing I care about the most is the chassis of the ship, it’s the structure that underlies all the tech, So if that’s not correct then nothing else will work via attachments, the components all the things that were adding to the ships all the functionality, if your foundation isn’t correct then it’s not going to work in the end.

JH: So we have a few more fews of the connie here

*Video plays*

MI: So what shawn did here is the pre visualized the progression of effects that are going to curve in the ships and what we’re doing is we’re making these effects systemic which means we’re going to motivatie these effects through the components on the ship so literally what we see in the video is we have electrical feedback, we have small explosions, and then we have kind of a wait and then OH KABOOM, Right?! So what we’ve done is we’ve broken that apart and what we’ve been trying to do is systemic, we’re trying to motivate the special effects through damage, through the ship’s systems, not just play an effect over the ship but just really motivate it through ship systems.

So one of the things we’re introducing very soon after citizenCon is piercability; So that means ammo you shoot at the ship will go through the hull if given a certain value of your shields and all that. it will strike a component inside and damage it, if that component takes enough damage it may explode, or it may just give electrical feedback which can then cause damage elsewhere in the ship so you’ll see arc lightning going from component to component over the hull of the ship and see explosions happening and finally if enough components die, we’ll get the ultimate explosion, So that’s where we’re headed with that.

JH: That’s very cool! We’ve just been playing the explosion on loop, no one wants to see us, we’re just showing them the explosions

MI: No one wants to see us

JH: So that was the work from Shawn ellis?

MI: Yeah

JH: And that’s 100% Cryengine?

MI: Yeah and mike’s known in too, mikes also the pre lead effects supervisor so he’s definitely responsible for the laying some foundation there, I don’t want to leave him out. Allie Brown the ship, he’s very involved. I talk to so many different fields just to get this to happen so I talk to design and to engineering and to art all the time to make sure that what I’m implementing is going to work for the future, not just what were releasing in the next few weeks. So one of those things is we want the debris to be harvestable in gameplay in the persistence universe. So what that’s led to is a redesign of how we thought about ships breaking us, so what we want is ships to explode into pieces, kinda like a movie like starship troops and we want these things to crack in half and the Titanic, things that people are falling out and fire and flames! Explosions!

We want this visceral feeling and if you’re standing there and you see the ship separate, we want you to get that first person view of what’s happening and so that’s what we’re going for. but that takes a lot of tech. So one thing is the gravity inside, we have to turn that off when the ship divides in half, because you know we need a gravity generator and you need power for the gravity generator, so it’s systemic when you lose gravity and you’ll probably be floating if you’re in a piece of debris, the interior of the ship were going to switch that out probably, we’re going to put it in a low res version but it’s going to have more gameplay for harvesting a debris. Now this isn’t all set in stone but this is what we’re designing right now. This is what we’re talking about

JH: And how does all of this work with the interior physics grid. My understanding you’ve got the grid inside the ship but if you’re breaking the ship apart, aren’t you breaking the grid apart too?

MI: We’re looking at the grid, were now dividing into what we’re calling interior nodes per hull sections so say in the connie we have the nose, the neck, and the body of the ship and each one of those is going to have a interior physics grid that combines to make one and then as we lose pieces of the ship were going to see things start to deactivate, so gravity will deactivate. Initially I think we’re deactivate the hole of the gravity in the entire ship, it’s a very complex problem but we have answers for it, it’s not that we don’t it’s just we need a little engineering time and were focused on other features as well, these things just take a little time

JH: And not letting the fact that it’s hard deter us. It’s hard work but we got our answers, we have a plan in place and we’ll get it done

MI: The smartest people are on it and chris has been heavily involved in the physics grid manipulation.

JH: Well thanks for stopping by matt. Maybe there’s one more thing we can show folks

MI: This is really cool, we haven’t seen this before, this has to do with the internal damage of the retaliator, it’s going to involve the ghost system which is our game object state machine and it will mean that when you hit the outside of the ship you’re going to see these kind of effects play on the inside, So enjoy!

JH: Wow alright! Let’s take a look at the interior damage effects of the retaliator and the gost system

MI: Also made by shawn

JH: Thank you Shawn!

25:50 – Dirty Dancing and Into the Abyss – Fan Videos

26:50 – Ben and Sandi

– Monthly report for September will go out Saturday. Detailed look into all the studios work.

– They’ve delayed it a bit so everyone can include what they worked on for CitizenCon.

– Also been working on the Drake Caterpillar!

27:39 – ATV Behind the Scenes: Drake Caterpillar



This week on ATV BTS, Jared is sitting down with technical designer Randy Vazquez



Taking a look at the initial design and layout of the Caterpillar



Interesting ship because asymetrical design, multiple purposes, modularity



Asymmetrical ships are difficult to built, make sure they run and look good



It has it’s own charm, roguish charm



First look at overall ship, what is the scaling, what is the purpose of everything



Made the ship a little big bigger



Once finished we’ll give the new updated stats



Added to the ship not taken away

Cargo Bay

Initial designs were too small



Told the community that cargo is over 500 so trying to make sure it fits



New design is a little bit taller and wider, has space for components, hard points etc.



(looking at a full cargo bay) 90 SCU + 20 SCU + 20 SCU, every single cargo module will be able to hold that much

Foyer Area

Contains airlock



Towards the middle to back of the ship



Command module attaches and interfaces



Every caterpillar will have this part, engeneering and the rear turret



The rear turret has be moved back a little to give it a better view behind

Personnel Module

Where the crew will be living



If you want more crew you can add more module but you’ll be sacrificing cargo, etc.

Total number of modules?

Front module is its own thing, plus five modules the player can swap in and out

Armory

If setting up for troops you want barracks etc. to fit more people in

Armory will host all the weapons, have workbench, holotable for previewing/changing loadouts

Workshop

Basically a shop/store



If you think about illegal activities selling contraband, buying stuff, business meetings on the run

Medical Bay

(split level: lower is full of bed)



Upper is where the doctors, connected by elevator

Mobile Salvage

Tools and equipment all around the bay,



The sides will open up into space so “stuff” can come from outside



All modules will have doors that can widened out so you can move cargo/salvage from bay to bay so you can move things around all within the ship and then open up the sides and move things around in space

Barracks

Rows of bunks below



Personal storage and little lounge above

Docking Collar

If the caterpillar becomes a meeting point



(Randy shows us four constellations all attached to the to the same docking collar module)



(Randy shows us an example of a module with its side opened like a clam shell: the lower half becomes a ramp)



(Jarred reminds us that none of this is final merely an exploration of idea)



(Randy ifnorms us that it is all done with metrics so light, medium and heavy armoured people can all move around inside the ship

Command Module

Module itself is also asymetrical so hard to balance

Ensuring it fits the rest of the ship

Thinking about removing the living space and giving it more purpose (as there is already living space within the modules)

Need to ensure the pilot, copilot and operator have space

Been playing around with keeping it asymmetrical but making it one layer

This works really well because when it is connected to the ship it, modules themselves can still open up and people can walk underneath the command module: makes it way more accessible

Sensors, remote turrets

Adding some guns: two hard points on front, one hard point on back

Added some more safety features: jump seats

Plenty of room for engineering, engineering components

Front Module

Unique, only fits on the front

Various version:

Jack of all trades: dollies, gav pallet, launch bay (launch bays catapults people out towards what they are trying to “rescue”); hard point for tractor beam; EVA Exo: like an small unmanned submersible that can be used for field repairs, salvaging etc.; basically a seat with an engine

All launch bays: four launch bays so you can launch four people towards your intended target

All cargo: dollies, multiple grav pallets, EVA Exo

Mostly EVA: 2 EVA Exo, tools, ideal for mobile salvage

Base/Empty module: you can put whatever you want in there

(Randy shows us a pre-configured Cargo Variant: all cargo bays!)

Engineering Bay

Actually two storeys

Space for large fuel tanks and has space for 2 more large fuel tanks, for example for colony transport that allows them to make it even further.

(Randy teases us with talk of attachments for outside the ship which will be discussed another time!)

Engineering station: seat on top of the wing, a bit like a crane operator; he’ll control the tractor beam to grab the cargo/salvage and bring it closer to the ship

(Randy shows us the Search and Rescue Variant: it has all launch bay front module, a couple of cargo bays, medical bay, barracks and personnel; it actually has two airlocks)

Each module will be self-contained: its own components, power supply, life support, etc. so if you want to open one module all the others can be sealed off

(Randy shows us the Mobile Salvage Variant: EVA front module, two mobile salvage modules; cargo bay (has the least amount of cargo); shop (so you can sell things while salvaging); crew module)

Randy show us some thruster placement to account for asymmetry and cargo; it needs all its thrusters up front for torque, when full of cargo the center of gravity moves so they’ve had to figure out how it moves

Still messing with thruster placements on the command modules

49:35 – MVP –

– Alastrom – Thread of propaganda posters for Star Citizen

– Gurmukh Bhasin is giving a talk at the Gnomon school of visual effects and animation tonight. Streamed at 8pm PST

– Thanks for all the feedback and comments about the new look of the show!

– Next week, Sandi will host AtV from the UK with a surprise guest!

51:00 – Art Sneak Peak

– More hangar lighting improvements!

Also, please watch at 51:45 for a spectacular BENdeavour joke!