Citizens! Welcome to INN’s coverage of the 58th episode of Around the ‘Verse!

Around the ‘Verse





Images





Transcript by Erris

Empire Report

– UEE Senator Janet Ali embroiled in a corruption scheme.

– Propow executives in hot water again, after a teen was injured when a gun exploded in her face.

– 4EVA no more after Syd Styles departs the group.

Around the ‘Verse

– Episode 58!

– First 2000 backers are now walking around Arc Corp. The first iteration of the Social module has hit PTU, stress-testing with ~2k backers.

– Once that testing is done, it’ll get opened to everyone.

– Earlier in the week, CIG created some Star Citizen developer cards, check them out on Twitter / Facebook #IMASTARCITIZEN

– Share what makes you a Star Citizen over the next week. 3 favourites will win Vanguard Harbingers.

News from the Spectrum

3:16 – Santa Monica – Darian Vorlick and Eric Kieron Davis

– 1.2.0 patch is coming soon, it’s been pushed to PTU. Social module is very exciting.

– Ships on the tech design side, whiteboxing the Herald to get it hangar / flight ready.

– Also looking to focus on the Reliant. Elwin, lead vehicle artist, is focusing on that ship.

– And that’s it for this week.

4:12 – Austin – Jake Ross

– Final testing phases for Social Module v0. Will feature multiplayer Arc Corp, chat, emotes, and player loadouts (ability to change characters in Arc Corp).

– Looking at bugs, mostly to do with the Generic INstance Manager. Have to make sure everyone’s synching and showing up in the right places.

– Also looking at various art tweaks. Looking at an issue where doors aren’t opening or closing when they should.

– Looking ahead to post social module v0, to what they’ll show at CitizenCon. Can’t give much away, but it’ll be exciting. Lots of stuff to be added to Social Module.

– Right now social module is light on features, cause it needs testing, but more will come as time goes by.

6:42: CIG UK – Zane Bien and Gavin Bird

– Gavin’s been working on the FPS HUD and Shubin. Zane does ship and HUD UI’s.

– Zane is normally in LA. He’s in the UK right now cause all the UI artists and devs are there for a UI mega-summit, about a month long. Purpose is working towards unifying the UI across the game in terms of visuals and how code hooks in to systems.

– Want consistent branding across the SC Universe, setting up style guides, standards, and guidelines.

– There was a summit in February in Montreal, summits are good to meet the people you’re working with around the world.

– Being face to face is nice, helps with communication and bouncing ideas back and forth.

9:44 – CIG Frankfurt – Ryan Chambers.

– They’ve been trying to get on to AtV for a while, but they’re here now.

– Now out of their temporary office, and into their new permanent digs. May shoot another office video to show it off. Hopefully will get that together in the next few week.

– Chris has mentioned in the past, but Frankfurt is driving core engine, lots of the core tech that will build off for SQ42 and evolve for numerous things for the game.

– Doing a big push on Design – Todd Pappy is there pushing on FPS, building up the FPS team to be able to drive that.

– Hiring in people to be able to handle the charge on AI, working on getting NPC’s as immersive as possible, for the amount of variety and intelligence they have.

– Pushing on cinematics as well, driving that from the Frankfurt office.

– Working on facial animations for the past few weeks. Should see some of the first stuff at CitizenCon coming up soon.

– Mainly getting the place sorted and running, and getting tons of interviews done. Attracting some really good talent.

12:40 – James Peugh and Alyssa Delhotal

JP – Hey guys, I’m here with Associate Marketing Producer, Alyssa Delhotal.

AD – Hey James

JP – Did I get your name right?

AD – Yes.

JP – It only took us three takes.

AD – Yes.

JP – So you’ve been here for what, four months?

AD – Yeah.

JP – And what does the associate marketing producer do?

AD – My main responsibilities are getting everything ready for the sales. I also helped Sandi with the organizing for Gamescom, both our booth at Gamescom as well as the Ework party. And mostly just acting as a organizational tool between the community team and our production on the development side as well as our artists and designers and so forth.

JP – First of all, you killed it at Gamescom

AD – thanks.

JP – It was a lot of fun, and it was probably the best run event we’ve ever held

AD – that was the most single most challenging thing I’ve ever done in my career.

JP – Really? But you’ve done nothing but events for the past five years, right?

AD – No. Not at all.

JP – So they brought you in, and and you’ve kind of taken over that role as you say of a structure between Dev and Marketing. What was the most challenging aspect of that?

AD – just figuring out where everything is, because we’ve gone, as CIG have gone through multiple ways of organizing how we deal with our files, where they are where they live, just trying to consolidate everything into one place so it’s easily findable, and making sure that the communication between the two teams stays tight. I think one of the more challenging things is the Community team has been doing an awesome job with their communication style for so long without me that there’s just a little bit of an adjustment period, and I”m kind of a pain in the butt when it comes to deal with that.

JP – Enh.

AD – Thanks.

JP – So what is your experience? You came from Activision? What were you doing there that’s allowed you to be so adjusted to this?

AD – So, I have a long history in the gaming industry. I started out at Activision as a temp QA tester

JP – Me too, well not at Activision, but yeah *high fives*

AD – Well, at Sony, but then I moved over to Activision, and I was really interested in how the business and production side of everything worked. The day I stepped into Sony as my first temp tester job, I knew I wanted to be a producer, so I just started gearing my skills towards that. I went from temp tester to permanent tester to, then I was an admin assistant, and that turned into a production assistant role, so instead of working on a single project I was working on five projects, so I was working on all of the active Call of Duty titles at the time, and then once I moved over into my final position at Activision, I was actually managing 17 different projects, but it was on a smaller scope, I was dealing with more of the finance side of it. So I got to see how the inside of the industry works from pretty much the bottom to the middle.

JP – Straight to the middle.

AD – Yeah

JP – so what did you have to change about how you usually operate once you got here? Cause I imagine this place is much different to how those places operate

AD – It is. There’s, first of all they’re a giant corporation

JP – You mean Activision?

AD – yeah, Activision, they’re a giant corporation, they’re very set in particular ways of doing things. There’s tons of structure and organization. Coming here i had to take my hands off the reins a little bit, cause this place runs way better without me freaking out becasue I don’t have an excel document that has all of our assets on it. Which was… that’s still taken me a little getting used to.

JP – Yeah you were big on those excel spreadsheets

AD – i love excel, which is so weird, becuase I’m such a stickler for organization, but like, my bedroom looks like my closet threw up. Here I’m very organized and structured and at home I’m just a mess.

JP – Me too dawg. Youv’e gotten more knowledge on where ships are and the ship schedule, so tell me about how that’s going and where we should improve that.

AD – So I have a high-level view of where the ships schedule is. The producers, usually Lisa, Eric, Erin, are all working on redoing our ship schedule, to make it so we on the marketing / community side can try to deliver ships that people have been waiting for for a really long time. There’s a ton of work that goes into that that requires those producers working with design and art and everybody else to figure out exactly how long each little peice is going to take, and once that’s done I get to look at it, and Sandi and Ben and I go we want this, we want this, we want this, how do we make that happen, and that’s when we sort out our sales schedule, and our marketing, which is the secret.

JP – Well I can say from behind the curtain, the past maybe two or three ship sales, since you got here, have been a lot easier to do than the ones before, cause before it was Ben and I here till 9pm trying to make sure all the images come in and now it seems we get that stuff way in advance.

AD – Yes, but the easiest ship sale that we’ve done to date was the Reliant, and that I credit completely to Mr. David Hobbins. He’s amazing. We sat down just to look at what he was thinking of going with, and we were totally happy with it. There were no revisions necessary, we took everything that he had and were just like, okay go, run, 9am ship sale, it was beautiful.

JP – Okay, what’s the next ship sale?

AD – Can’t tell. I’m not answering that question.

JP – Alright, well thanks so much for coming on

AD – Thanks so much for having me

JP – It’s great to have you here. This is Alyssa, I’m James, back to you guys.

19:10 – Ben and Sandi

Ben – Thank you James, Ms. Del-Taco.

Sandi – I don’t get it.

Ben – I don’t either. I don’t know why that’s a joke.

19:25 – Vanguard Sneak Peek with Gurmukh Bhasin

Hi everyone, Gurmukh Bhasin, concept artist here at CIG Santa Monica. I’ve been working hard lately on the Vanguard variants and the interior. Going to show you a little bit about what I’ve been doing, and how they all work.

So let me take you through a little walkthrough of how the Vanguard interior works. In the front is the cockpit, and the pilot chair, behind it there’s a long hallway, and the pilot seat actually slides back on a track, and spins around at this point here. So here’s the pilot seat at the back of the track. Purpose for that, when you’re in the cockpit I wanted you to be in a crammed space, feeling isolated, and I wanted the feeling of pushing back from a chair and sliding into the cockpit, so it gives you a different experience. It’s a little more of the style of being in the P-28 Lightning where you’re closed in the space instead of some big open luxurious cockpit.

Idea is to keep it feeling crammed and tight and personal with the ship.

Pilot seat is raised up from the floor of the rest of the ship, so the gun and the landing gear can fold up.

Walk down a little ladder to get the rest of the ship, and you get to this pod. Different variants for the different pod – E-pod for EWAR, bomb pod for bomber. It’s not like a coffin-like escape pod, more of a full room that ejects out. You and your copilot will be floating in space in something that’s slightly maneuverable.

At the back you get to the stairs to get into the ship.

So the way the variants work, the lifepod is swapped out, weapons are swapped out, and a little bit of change in the cockpit as well.

A lot of the empty space that you see in the cutaways in the top of the ship, that’s actual space that will be used for components, avionics, shield generators, it’s space for all the internals that you’re not necessarily going to see within the ships unless you open a panel.

It’s not modeled in at the moment, I’ve seen a lot of comments online saying what’s up with all that wasted space, it’s actually there so a lot of the things that are behind the scenes, that you’ll be able to take panels off and fix, that’s space for all that. And also some ammo storage.

For me as a concept artist, I’m mostly concepting things you’ll see on a regular basis.

One thing that’s unique is this telescoping turret seat. It’s on a mechanism that goes down, and brings you up to the turret.

Let me show you some art for the bomber variant. On the top, instead of laser guns, the turret is now a rocket turret. Each has 18 rockets, with a second load of 18, and it has a belt system that reloads as you’re shooting the first 18.

Here’s the ship cut in half, I can show you some of the stuff I was talking about before. The back here, this is how it folds down. The doors start to open here. This is how the turret seat comes down. This is how the pilot seats works and spins around.

So with this bomb pod. In the inside you have a glass partition and three Size 2 torpedoes. There’s a door. When you’re dropping your torpedoes out, there’s the glass partition so it keeps you safe from space.

At the same time, you get the option to see your bombs dropping out, and leaving the bomb pod.

So here’s a base render of that. There’s your beds, other side is your three large torpedoes. Imagine sleeping in your room with three huge bombs next to you.

The last variant is the EWAR variant. It’s a little more meant for scrambling systems for other ships and shutting them down, board their ships, etc…

Lots of different server racks and workstations, and screens to send out codes and signals.

With the EWAR variant, and with the Herald coming up, the design team are taking steps towards figuring out how these EWAR ships are going to work within the whole universe. Putting in a lot of work for figuring out the systems figure out how players will take down other ships electronically, you’ll probably be seeing a bit of information how that all works in the coming weeks.

It’s going to be pretty fun.

Thanks guys.

27:10 – Ben and Sandi

– Ben thinks the variants are looking awesome, and we’ll find more about them tomorrow!

27:20 – Ship Shape, with Lisa Ohanian

– This week talking about multi-crew ships and stations.

– Still a work in progress, right now there are nine distinct stations. They could change, might add and remove some, but these are the nine that they have right now.

– Goal in designing them, making sure each one has distinct functionality, but also be able to interact with each other.

– On the bigger ships, more likely to see all nine, or even more. On a smaller ship, a lot of the roles will be combined.

– Captain’s station – Usually the owner of the ship. Can see what everyone else is doing, can also override another station and take control of it. Can also set permissions, set security states, etc…

– Pilot flies the ship, helps with docking and boarding, etc…

– Engineering is responsible for power management. Resource allocation. Not all things on the ship can have max power all the time. Things like weaponry, shields, heating and cooling, etc…

– Tactics station is responsible for weapon strategy. Ammo consumption, targeting, countermeasure,s etc…

– Navigation station – Pilot flies the ship, navigator’s in charge of the star map, predicting the route, and fuel management.

– Turret station. In control of actually managing weapons being used.

– Science station – can be a variety of things. Could be EWAR, medicine, scanning, etc…

– Communications station – internal and external comms. Talking to other ships, intercom, etc… also market data for stores within the ship.

– *this gets repeated twice on the show*

– Security station. Station is in charge of crew NPC’s staffing the ship, can also perform functions across the ship – lock and unlock doors, set off alarms, etc…

– Smaller ships won’t have all 9 of those. Super Hornet, for example, Pilot can fly ship and have main weapon. Copilot can have all other weapons, as well as other things. A ship like that wouldn’t have a science station.

31:25 – Events Update

– Dragon Con

– Ben is headed to Dragon Con, with Dave Haddock and David Ladyman. Exact schedule coming this week. Star Citizen QA on Saturday.

– CitizenCon

– Plans are underway. It will be the whole UK team, as well as Sandi, Chris. More updates coming.

– Quake-Con

– Photos from Quake-Con got taken, here’s a video of SC stuff at Quake Con.

– Character Art competition

– Will launch when the Community Hub launches.

– Vanguard Harbinger and Sentinel are coming. They’ll be in the pledge store tomorrow.

– Designers are working on a post about EWAR. Hopefully will be up tomorrow or early next week.

– Glaives. Ships were set aside for backers that attended Gamescom. Now that they’ve had a chance to buy them, should the remainder be open to everyone to buy? There’s a forum thread about that, go vote.

– MVP this week

– M3Nelos. Creator of the ‘Glass SC ships’ that have been popping up on ships.

– Art Sneak Peek

– Dancing in Social Module.