This post is a transcript of Around the ‘Verse: Episode 2.22, 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. INN edits our transcripts for the purpose of making the various show participants easier to understand in writing. Enjoy!



Around the ‘Verse: Episode 2.22 – Full Transcript

Intro

Jared Huckaby(JH): This week, Star Citizen Alpha 2.2.1. is out and bounty hunters are heading to Crusader in force.

We chat with community content creator Bored Gamer about his youtube tutorials

Our partners at Behavior share our growing spaceplant collection

And we explore the galaxy with Cherie Heiberg in our Lore Writers.

All this and more in this week’s Around the ‘Verse.

Sandi Gardiner(SG): Right, despite TheSpike64’s word to that, the new criminal system, do you have a laser weapon yet?

Ben Lesnick(BL): I do not. It’s a great system and it’s really cool that we’re not having ships randomly stolen constantly, but I cannot bring myself to be a bad guy in video games, I generally feel morally bad when I do that, no laser weapon here.

SG: Ben is our good guy all around. Welcome to Around the ‘Verse, your weekly look at what’s happening in the Star Citizen world, I’m Sandi Gardiner and I run the marketing at Cloud Imperium Games

BL: I’m Ben Lesnick, Director of Ship Development

SG: And Ben what can we do in Star Citizen today?

BL: Well dogfighting dogfighting and more dogfighting, It’s plenty of space combat with a little bit of ground combat thrown in. We kicked off Alpha 2.2 for our mini PU or Persistent Universe which lets people sample the kind of nucleus of what Star Citizen will become. You can crew multi crew ships together, you can fly missions together, there’s FPS, ground combat on the various stations, it’s pretty cool. We also have dogfighting in Arena Commander and you can explore our first planetside location in ArcCorp.

SG: It’s not just dogfighting though really.

BL: There’s a lot more than dogfighting.

SG: yeah, no because.

BL: dogfighting is the bases and then we’re kind of building it around that.

SG: I’ve more recently just like to kind of goof off and fly around, not really into dogfights.

BL: Which is good because so many MMO’s recently have been just, “Here, do this quest, do this quest, earn gold, earn gold”. The great example for me was Ultima Online where I would just log in and I would be like a fisherman or would hang out with my friends or something, Star Citizen kind of reaches for that and it’s getting there.

SG: I would like to be your local Triple A person. Incase your ship breaks down and I get to be the mechanic I always wanted to be.

BL: Well I will have to get you a Crucible.

SG: Yup, there you go. Star Citizen Alpha 2.2.0 went live last week and the team is working on a smaller patch to address some of the technical issues we’ve discovered with this release. As long as everything goes according to plan we will be seeing 2.2.1 very shortly.

BL: Yes! On PTU first, but soon after to live.

SG: What else is happening.

BL: The Sabre and Xi’an scout are available on the pledge store right now through Monday. This is in honour of the fact that the Sabre is flight ready with 2.2 and the Xi’an scout is now available in Hangar so if you’re interested in either of those ships you can pick them up. We also have the Sabre on the Rec store if you’re interesting in trying it out you can earn Rec in Arena Commander to do just that.

SG: The February 2016 Monthly Report is now live. Backers can pour over lots and lots of details about Star Citizen’s development and we have it on good authority that there’s a surprise or two in there. Something about Big Benny’s song.

BL: Hmmm.. We’re also happy to announce that 2.2 has brought out not one, but two stretch goals. The J-Span Cooler is now available to everyone now as is the Xi’an space plant. There’s also some more interesting facets of the spaceplant which will make themselves appear down the line so keep watching that spaceplant.

SG: We kicked off filming of Star Citizen’s “Making Of” documentary this week by shooting talking heads of Chris Roberts. We began the process by putting Chris in front of a camera and asking him to talk about the early days of Star Citizen and the result was some fascinating footage. Thanks to Tom Hennessy and his team for making this shoot a great success

BL: We’d like to thank everyone who came out to the Bar Citizen events that were held in Santa Monica, Austin, Manchester and Frankfurt. It sounds like a great time was had by everybody. Check out the pictures

SG: I had a lot fun at the LA one.

BL: I had a lot fun too! And I was there with you.

SG: Yeah, there was a really good turn out, it was really quite cool.

BL: Our backers are amazing and I as said at the time, letting the team interact directly with them it energizes everybody, it makes us believe all the more in what we’re doing. We’re really grateful to all you guys out there making this game possible, whether you can make it to a Bar Citizen or now.

SG: Yeah and I enjoyed how everybody wore Star Citizen or Squadron 42 stuff it was very cool. Because I didn’t feel left out I showed up by myself and everybody was there! It was nice. And did you see what I have?

BL: Yes

SG: Yes! Dogtags! They are going to go up on sale as of tomorrow.

BL: Tomorrow at One O’clock Pacific we’ll be kicking off our new style of dog tags specific to Squadron 42 so the layouts a little bit different, it’s got the squadron logo and your navy serial number and so on. If you’d like one of those tomorrow at one.

SG: If I go out flying then I’ll put one of these in my boot.

BL: I’ve heard that’s how it’s supposed to work.

SG: Now let’s go to our teams around the world and see what they’ve been up to this week.

News From Around The Verse

Los Angeles

Eric Kieron Davis: Hey everybody and welcome back to Los Angeles. You’re here with eric Kieron Davis and…

Patrick Mathieu: Patrick Mathieu

ED: We’ve got a bunch of cool new updates for you. But first one is this gentleman to my left just started with us this week, and we’re very excited to have him. So I wanted to have him come on the news and tell us quickly what his first task was. So he’s working alongside Lead Engineer Paul Reindell. So Patrick what is one of the first things Paul has you tasked with

PN: Alright. So the first thing i’m doing is taking the vehicle powerplant item and porting over to the new item system you guys already have going on. So that’s basically my first task. I think i’m going to be working with Chad ‘cause he’s already been ported over a few items.

ED: Cool! Awesome, that’s great. And then on the other side of the building we’re working on several different pieces of art. We got the Heavy going back into concepting phase. Which is upgrading sighting, Jeremiah Lee’s working on that. Then on the Tech Content side we’re working on component LOD pass as well as just LODs in general. They’re always a big part of the process for us to make sure we optimise, it’s kind of an optimisation pass for the Tech Content Team. So that’s the quick news from L.A. Thank you for stopping by. Again i’m Eric

PM: I’m Patrick

ED: See you guys next time.

Austin

Tyler Witken: Hello. Tyler Witken here, Senior QA in the Austin, Texas studio. Wanted to give you guys a little bit of an update about how things are going over here. It’s been a crazy couple of weeks. Live Ops and QA have been burning the midnight oil in order to get 2.2 into all of your hands. Luckily we were able to do so at the end of last week. There’s still a few issues we’re concerned about. Some stability, some desync, some issues with the 300 series and a few others. But we’re actively testing those fixes as they come online and hopefully we’ll have those fixes in your hand very soon so we can consider it squashed. Then pick up momentum and run with it towards 2.3.

We’re actively testing 2.3 right now in our Game Dev stream which will eventually branch out which will become patch 2.3. On the animation side of things there’s a lot of cool stuff going they are currently working on the NPC world population animation sets. So things like the Astro Armada set, the G-Loc bar, the Living Cidity etc. So lots of cool stuff like that, that will help bring the world to life. They are also working on some Squadron 42 animations. Some animation sets for Mark Hamill. And then of course very exciting stuff with the Starfarer. Some animations for ladders and stuff like that.

Additionally we got some continued development for persistence, which is something i’m really looking forward to. And our back end engineers have been working feverishly to accomplish our goals to do with that. From a design perspective. Lot’s of cool work being done on the shopping front with Casaba. And then also a lot of work being done on the economy. They are actually doing a deep dive study into what ship components cost for ships in the real life. So they can better gauge what pricing should like in game for various ship parts and ships. That’s all that’s going on this week, see you guys next week.

Foundry 42 DE/UK

Brian Chambers: Hey everyone. Brian Chambers from the Frankfurt office and this week we have:

Tom Johnson: Tom Johnson

BC: So yeah we’re combining UK and Frankfurt this week. We haven’t told the editors that we’re going to put it together, we’ll just dump it to them and see what they do with it

[Disco Says: You’re SO LUCKY this is a long episode or i’d spend some time doing weird stuff to your footage, but it’s 4:48pm and Justin wants to go home so you get off light]

BC: So this week teams working hard as they always do when I say every single week. At the end of last week though we had Bar Citizen

TJ: Yeah bit of a minder, I think this is a global thing. All the studios took a moment to meet up with you guys. Had a lot of fun in Wilmslow, and I hear you guys did to?

BC: That was..

TJ: Good opportunity to get some face time with the guys

BC: Yeah, yeah. I think we had in Frankfurt, we had about 85 backers there and it was awesome we have probably 20 members of the team went out, hung out and had drinks, talked, chatted. The energy from the backers at least for me personally and the other guys who were there. If you’re buried in your work and sometimes the details and there’s stress and so on, it’s like feeling that energy from the backers, knowing how excited they are and how pumped they are it totally pushes us

TJ: Yeah it reminded me of Citizen Con a little bit. It’s been a while obviously since that event and reminded you about all the passion the backers have got, it definitely spurs you on when you go back to the office, like we did on Monday just following this one. We should do more of them I think!

BC: You guys were in a big bar as well?

TJ: Yeah. We picked a bar in Wilmslow and hung out with them. It was almost like very strange speed dating!

BC: Yeah it was very similar! I had some people that were like “Ok i’m here, what’s the agenda?” I’m like “The agenda’s to hang out and talk!”

TJ: Yeah it wasn’t even always about Star Citizen. Just seeing the guys backgrounds and what it is they do. Getting to know each other was really good

BC: Yeah it was cool, it was fun. One guy I forgot, I actually don’t remember his name but he gave me a version of the infamous 24 hour stream lamp!

He decided to show up with this lamp and he hands, he’s like “Do you want the lamp?”. And i’m like “I can’t take your lamp no way!” And he’s like “No I have a couple of them I think you should have it!”. So we now in Frankfurt have a copy of it! One thing I we could jump on and we’ve talked about in the past. Germany and the UK are close together in time zones, we work really close together.

TJ: Yeah it’s nice to have a European partner now, like when you wait for the American studios have got like someone else to help out and get in the trenches with some issues. I think obviously there’s some overlaps with some of our teams being in the same timezone helps. Likewise with, one studio’s lead in a way. Like Francesco on the AI team and we’ve got a counterpart: Rich on our end

BC: Absolutely. And we see that all over, like Caleb for effects. He’s our only Effects Artist here in Frankfurt. I think we may have some more lined up. But he’s reporting into the UK that’s where he’s tasked and his stuff is reviewed and so on. It took us a little while but we’re getting the synergy right.

TJ: Yeah definitely feels like we’re getting into better of a man to know with the team structure.

BC: Absolutely. And even like, with Tom here right now he’s only here for a few days but hopped on a plane hour and 20 minute, hour and a half flight whatever it is. And now he can sit down he’s working with Alex, our Senior Producer here. Where they are looking at the schedules and tearing apart what the remaining bits are they need to to get it all put together.

TJ: Yeah there’s the actual collation of the data is the one thing. Then there’s also the end process unified and standardising how we actually display this stuff. So there’s some things you take for granted that aren’t that simple that we can’t just expect everyone else to do right off the bat. So sometimes it takes a bit of discussion and consensus.

BC: I would honestly say I think that’s one thing we continue to do and probably will continue to do for a while, maybe forever is always finding the ways to improve communication, improve the processes in place to make sure the communication’s they’re straight, the schedules are clear and concise, the penalties are clearly laid out. With a project this big, there’s tonnes of detail in there, people like Tom really need to sort out to make sure we can pull off what we want within the time that we want.

TJ: Yeah, there’s a lot of moving pieces there, and they are such a talented team you don’t want to let them down by, lack of communication you really want to make them setup to succeed. That comes through good organisation, structure and makes everyone’s lives a lot easier. It’s great to have such a nice working relationship now with you guys

BC: It’s your first time out here too

TJ: Yeah first time in Frankfurt. Slightly early flight at four o’clock in the morning I was getting up. Propped up by the caffeine today! It was great to meet everyone in person as well.

BC: Absolutely and that’s one thing too I find interesting when I meet the other guys in person. I feel like i’ve already met them in person. Because we are in these meetings all the time, these video conferences and so on. So once you actually meet them face to face you’re like “Oh wait we’ve never met!”

TJ: Yeah it’s nice to sort of meet them

BC: Yeah and later this week too or actually coming in later tonight we have Chris is coming out, Erin’s coming out, we’re going over more things on the procedural tech. Which I know I keep hinting on. We’re going to look at the schedules that Tom and Alex have put together. We’re also having a couple of the Designers from your team come out

TJ: Yes

BC: Luke and Carl. They are just coming for face to face time with our Design Team ‘cause our Design Team’s getting bigger over here between Level Design and System Design. So again they can sit down have face to face, talk over mechanics, talk over stuff they are tuning, look at their plans and what else they have to do. Cool. Anything else from you?

TJ: No just good to be here, and keen to get all of that nailed down with Alex this week. So should be good.

BC: Cool thanks again for watching, playing, backing all that stuff and we’ll see you next week.

Back In The Studio

SG: Thanks guys. Next up Jared highlights another community content creator in this week’s Wonderful World of Star Citizen. Let’s meet BoredGamer and find out about the work he’s being doing on Star Citizen tutorials.

The Wonderful World Of Star Citizen

BoredGamer (BG): Today I want to talk about Windows 10 and how it compares to Windows 7 and 8 for stability, gaming performance and Star Citizen. But Star Citizen can be quite a complex and daunting undertaking, especially for new players, this starter tutorial should help guide you from creating an account, to grabbing your first ship, to buying weapons and piloting in some dogfights. As well as highlighting some of the experiences available in the Baby Persistent Universe.

Jared Huckaby (JH): Welcome everybody once again to the Wonderful World of Star Citizen, I’m your host, Community Manager Jared Huckaby, and this week we’re sitting down with Sat Citizen YouTuber, Mr BoredGamer. Bored, how are you doing man?

BG: I’m very good thanks, I’m all dressed up in my Operation Pitchfork gear.

JH: I saw that.

BG: So, thanks very much for having me.

JH: It’s no problem. Now, do I call you Bored, do I call you Mr.Gamer, what do I call you?

BG: So yeah, either Bored, BoredGamer or Monkey. That’s basically what I’m known as mostly in the community.

JH: Alright thanks Tim, so I’m sitting here with Tim and we’re talking…

BG: [laughs]

JH: Is he laughing, I can’t actually see him. I hope he’s laughing. OK alright, so, BoredGamer is a Star Citizen youtuber, he’s got a channel dedicated to Star Citizen videos, that he’s had for some time, he does tutorials, all kinds of stuff. Let’s let him tell us about it. Bored, Tim, Mr.Gamer, Monkey, tell us about who you are and what your channel does.

BG: So yeah, I’m Tim or BoredGamer, so apparently now, lets just run with Tim, basically I try to run a channel focused on Star Citizen and VR and technology all with their slight taste for at least Star Citizen in some way, with quite short, kind of, timeframes is the idea. So people about to get guides, tutorials, gameplay videos and learn something while watching my videos. In the shortest space of time possible is the idea. So we’ll be exploring mods, hardware, how to do stuff in the Star Citizen world, whether that’s the latest news that’s come out or the latest patch and what you can do in that latest patch. Anything like that really, we’ll do some form of Star Citizen video on it.

JH: Gotcha. So, your channel existed before Star Citizen, What did you used to do?

BG: So originally I started with Let’s Plays and that sort of stuff, it evolved into more informative content from Diablo 3, like How-To guides, and that’s where I really found my niche. I went I’m quite good at giving information in a short period of time, so I started doing Diablo 3, Titanfall and games like that, then I got really into VR and eventually I picked up on this game, Star Citizen, from Chris Roberts and I loved Wing Commander when I was very young. And, I got myself an Aurora and upgraded it to an Avenger and here we are. Star Citizen dedicated now.

JH: Now, you’ve got quite a few Star Citizen videos now, and there’s one that even has over 100,000 views.

BH: Yes. Yes. So, ehm, that’s ta.. [interrupted]

JH: Tell us about that video.

BH: That’s talking more about ships and roles in the ‘Verse, going over quite an in-depth look of exactly what the dream for Star Citizen is and what we should be able to do in the future with Bounty Hunting, with Piracy, with Mining, all those kind of mechanics, and what ships are appropriate at what tiers. So I’ve come up with my own ideas as well, which is explained in there, because there’s only so much information we can go on by. Especially, this video is a little bit older now, it’s almost a year old. So please take it with a pinch of salt if anything’s slightly out of date.

JH: Right, now, you’re pretty much, you’re almost a full time YouTuber, is that a thing? A full time YouTuber?

BG: I am indeed a full time YouTuber.

JH: What did you do before you started making your living on YouTube videos?

BG: Yeah, so, originally, a good few years ago, I started with running cyber cafes and doing bespoke computers, more recently I went into running restaurants, and being a chef, and I left that because it was incredibly stressful. And started up the YouTubes, and now it’s become basically a dream job for me.

JH: Gotcha, now there are a lot of Star Citizen YouTube channels out there, what separates your channel from everybody elses?

BG: So, I’m a little bit of a scamp in my videos, so you’ll get ones where I’m being as informative as possible in as short period of time as possible, we’ve got the news, we’ve got the guides and tutorials. But also, when I do gameplay, and when I do stuff, where I can do a bit of roleplay, so some mechanics I’ll try and explain from the point of view of the character, got some videos up like that where I pretend I’m a pirate for example with a group of people, or a bounty hunter or whatever, I try and play it my more my gameplay style, which is quite erratic, and very talkative, and I try and get what I want in those videos, in quite a naughty scampy fashion.

JH: Alright, do you have a favourite video of yours? Like if someone wanted to check out BoredGamer, is there one video they should check out first?

BG: I really like my tutorial videos to be honest, just a simple, quick Controls guide one, possibly I did one about Stowaways on-board ships, where I lose my ship and a lot of other ships get killed by the guy that stole my ship. That’s probably one of the more fun gameplay ones.

JH: OK, and some basic Star Citizen background, what’s your favourite ship in Star Citizen to fly?

BG: So it’s kind of two at the moment, that exist in the game at the moment, I have a lot of love for price to performance ships, so the Avenger Titan, I absolutely love. That ship is really cost-effective, it allows you to do so much in the Verse. But I also have a lot of love for the 325a because I learned to fly in it and even against a very good pilots, I can still be relatively competitive in it.

JH: OK, alright, and you’ve played Star Citizen, you’ve played ArcCorp, Arena Commander, Crusader, whatnot, what’s your favorite thing to do in the game now?

BG: Pretty much anything socially with multiple people, whether that’s multi-crewing a ship or PvP or making our own missions up and flying around the Verse and going then to Kareah and all that sort of stuff. Anything in a large party of people, I’m so about the socialization and the multiplayer, and this game has so much on so many levels that interacts on so many levels with it and yeah, I’m super hyped everything in the future, But at the moment, just the party system at the moment is exciting me so much.

JH: Fair enough. And what’s one thing your looking forward to most in the future of Star Citizen?

BG: Oh, I mean, there’s so much, I mean, procedurally generated planets, the economy, there’s too many. I’m an economy player by heart though, so it has to be implementation of the economy, trade, mining, that sort of stuff is so exciting for me.

JH: You told me in our pre-interview you’d be happy sitting down and watching your UEC run in.

BG: Yeah, so, I love the idea of being able to mastermind situations, if you could, I love digital currency in my virtual bank account, literally watching that tick in, is kind of like a silly dream to me, if I can do that sitting in a bath, or chatting to people, or watching something in my second screen and playing the game simultaneously, then I think that’s an amazing thing. If I can get NPCs or other players to do that for me, that’s just great. Living the dream.

JH: So, now, if there’s, before we let you go, is there one message you want to share with the Star Citizen community?

BG: So at the moment, Star Citizen is all about more people playing the game and getting more people into the community, I want Star Citizen to be as friendly as possible between community creators and the fans and the viewers alike. And the more people that want to work with each other, the more people who want to get into content creation, the more people that just wanna report on bugs on the game, it all helps us have an amazing game altogether, and people’s feedback to me, anything they want to give me for feedback, it’s really appreciated, it genuinely, it genuinely really helps me. So thank you guys for letting me do what I love which is Star Citizen and this YouTube channel. Thanks so much.

JH: What a stupid answer, I hate you. [walks away]

BG: [laughs and claps]

JH: I was kidding. I was kidding.

BG: [still laughing]

JH: Alright Tim, well thank you for taking the time to sit down and talk with us here on the Wonderful World of Star Citizen. You can check out BoredGamer’s YouTube channel at BoredGamerUK, it’s on YouTube, if that wasn’t obvious at this point. That’s all we got man. Thanks for stopping by. Back to Ben and Sandi.

BG: It’s been an experience.

JH: Say back to you Ben and Sandi.

BG: [laughs]

JH: [shakes head]

ATV Rewind: Last Year At SXSW

[Montage showing the Cloud Imperium Games booth, ArkCorp footage, dancing and more]

ATV Behind the Scenes: Behaviour

JH: Hey everybody and welcome back to Around the Verse Behind the Scenes. Today we’re doing Sub Corner where we take a look at some of the flair that our subscribers get each and every month. Joining us for the show today are two of our friends from Behaviour. Behaviour is one of our development partners up north in Canada. Guys, thanks for joining us on the show. Why don’t you tell folks who you are?

Jesse Kalb (JK): Hi, I’m Jesse Kalb.

Simon Pichette (SP): Hi, I’m Simon Pichette.

JH: I’m sorry your name was?

SP: Simon Pichette.

JH: Simon hi, how you guys doing?

JK: Very good. You?

SP: Very good, very good. And you?

JH: I am doing great, thanks for being on the show. Now before we get into talking about what this month’s subscriber flair is, why don’t you tell folks a little bit about what you do in general for Behaviour

SP: Me, I’m a 2D artist. I’m doing the modelling and texturing.

JK: And I’m a level designer: I add all the flair into the hangars.

JH: Alright cool. Now we’ve done a lot of flair in the past: we’ve done little ship models, we’ve done the Puglisi Collection with space rocks and space debris and stuff. We’re getting ready to introduce a new set of subscriber flair this month with our space plant collection. Now the space plant collection was actually a suggestion from the fans: we had had a stretch goal item where we did the Xi’an plant, and when we asked what other kinds of flair they’d like additional plants was a very popular choice. We’re happy to take that into account and we’re starting our new space plant collection. What can you guys tell us about the collection over all?

SP: All the plants will be pretty different: from different origins. I think that’s going to be very cool.

JH: Very cool.

JK: And a lot of them … some of them will move. Some of them might not. Some of them will be animated. So there’s a lot of things that we’re going to see in the future.

JH: Animated plants?

JK: Right.

JH: Like …

JK: Some of them will grow. Some of them might move with certain types of music.

JH: Really.

JK: Yes.

JH: Alright. Have you ever seen that movie Little Shop of Horrors with the big plant that grows and eats people?

JK: Yeah. I really hate that movie. I skip that part.

JH: What’s the first plant that coming into the game right now? Is it the Xi’an plant?

SP: The space flower and the Xi’an plant.

JH: Okay so two …

SP: Yeah.

JH: … the stretch goal plant and then the first of the subscriber flair.

JK: Yeah.

SP: Yeah, yeah.

JH: What can you tell us about the Xi’an plant?

SP: It’s a beautiful plant. It’s like a bonsai plant with a little bit whimsical atmosphere. Alien stuff.

JH: Alright.

SP: With the little glows in the leaves. That’s a beautiful plant. Yeah.

JH: And what about the space flower?

SP: Very contrast colour. It glows too. And yeah, that’s a beautiful plant too. Smaller than the Xi’an one.

JH: Okay. And what are your roles in developing these plants?

SP: I’m doing the modelling and the textures.

JK: And then after the art’s done I’ll take it into the editor and I’ll place them in all the hangars and then I’ll add the spawners so that when you have the actual proper item code it will spawn in your hangar.

JH: Gotcha. And there’s a lot of work behind the scenes with item codes and web codes and stuff like that right?

JK: Yeah. Well we have to make sure everything is done properly so they don’t get it to early or subscribers don’t not get them at all. After we make sure … I usually test it in release after just to make sure everything’s okay.

JH: Okay. And how long does it take to create one of these from start to finish?

SP: Five days approximately.

JH: Alright.

SP: Yeah.

JK: After that’s done, it takes me about a day just to get into all the hangars. Make sure they all spawn properly. Make sure the lightings okay. Pretty much that’s it.

JH: Gotcha. Now why are some of these not as easy as others? We’ve done a lot of hangar flair but my understanding is some flair is a little more difficult to do than others.

JK: Well for these there’s a lot of items that we had to put into a prefab. So there’s a lot of lights, there’s a lot of textures. And then we also added the AR point of interest. So when you’re in first person and you look at the plants there’ll be some info that you’ll see.

JH: Oh, cool.

JK: So we had to add that and we had to make sure it works properly. And they also rotate. So there’s a lot of things going on.

JH: So the plants: they rotate, some of them grow, some of them dance with music.

JK: Not these but yes in the future. Possibly.

JH: Alright. So it’s not just as simple as building a plant and sticking it in the hangar then? Now we already mentioned some differences in the plants: some grow, some maybe dance or what not. These plants all come from different planets, different star systems. What are some of the ideas you’ve had for different planets … different planets, jeez … for different plants, how do they differ from each other, what’s some of the craziest ideas you’ve had?

SP: Oh, some plants will have lot of VFXs, some less VFXs. From dry ground. Different origins. The mood will be different too. The colour: more contrast, less colour. That’s … yeah!

JK: And from the design side we also came up with a lot of ideas and we also brainstormed a lot of ideas. And asked the community what they would want to see the most. So we definitely have a lot of crazy things that we’re thinking of. And some of them we actually just couldn’t do because it just wouldn’t work in the engine or in the game so we had to scale back on some of those. But we still have a lot of crazy things coming up.

JH: Gotcha. So these two plants are just where we’re starting and things will go from here with the next, what, six plants?

SP: Seven?

JK: Five.

SP: Yeah.

JH: Five.

JK: Five plus two.

JH: Five plus two, okay.

SP: Seven in total.

JH: Okay. I’m not math. Nobody has ever looked at me and said I’m math. Well thanks for taking the time to sit down with us and chat for a bit. It’s always cool when we get to feature Behaviour on our show. You guys are an amazing partner and we love working with you guys. So thank you so much for the work that you do. For those of you watching the first of your subscriber flair space plants will appear in your hangar tomorrow. These plants are for subscribers only. If you are not a subscriber for any reason you can of course subscribe: we have multiple plans and you can get your plant, you know, get your plant. Get a plant. Plants are cool! I’m making yours look pretty. Get a plant. Get a plant! Subscribe. You’ll get a plant. Alexis is just shaking her head now for me.

[someone throws something yellow at Jared who throws it back]

Hey he caught it. Alright guys that’s it … we’re … it’s time to end the segment. See you later everybody. Back to you Ben and Sandi.

JK: Thanks. Bye.

SP: Thank you. Bye.

Back In The Studio

BL: The guys in Behaviour are amazing partners and we’ll be sharing more of their work in the coming weeks.

SG: But wait there’s more! We have one additional segment that we are trying out. Here’s something we’re calling the Loremaker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The Loremaker’s Guide To the Galaxy

Cherie Heiberg (CH): Hello, I’m Cherie Heiberg, the archivist at Cloud Imperium Games. And I’m here with the first episode of the Loremaker’s Guide to the Galaxy which is a new segment about the lore and science behind each system and planet in our game. So now that we’re here, let’s get started.

Our first system and one of my personal favourites is the Horus system.

[fast moving sounds?]

Which is a M-Type main sequence star, also known as a Red Dwarf with three planets, two asteroid belts and four jump points – two going to Xi’an space, and two going to UEE space. Now, Horus was discovered, whoops, there we go, Horus was discovered in 2528 by a young explorer named Marie Santay, she ran away from home at a very young age, stealing a ship from her parents, called the Horus, which she later named the ship after. She explored for some time, it’s rumoured that she discovered the system when she was around 14 years old and spend the intervening years charting everything there. Like these two planets, the asteroid belts, and this outer planet right here.

When she first discovered the system, two of the jump points were as yet undiscovered, those were the two that were going to Xi’an space, so as far as she knew at the time when she reported the system as being discovered to the UPE, it would be just a new system in regular UPE space without any political importance whatsoever. Which was, of course, was completely thrown out of whack in 2542 when she herself discovered the jump point to Rihlah. Which, where do we have that?

Right here, this goes to a closeby Xi’an system. We may as well just jump to it so we can see it. With this giant star and all these planets. And of course that made it immediately, militarily important, as this was during the cold war, during the Messar Era when the Xi’An and the humans were very calmly at each other’s throats.

The resulting kerfuffle from that discovery led the UPE to declare Horus a totally military quarantined system. So the few settlers who were on the first planet, they just didn’t really care, they said “fine, we won’t fly around, we’ll just stay here on our planet.” but Marie Santay was very upset because this system was her baby – so she refused to evacuate and just took her ship into the outer reaches of the system and continued to explore – which led to a incident with the military which a navy explorer, no, a navy ship found her in the system and reported an unidentified ship and reported that to the UPE which resulted in this military skirmish, no, no casualties or anything but the incident was so obnoxious that they really wanted to pressure her to leave the system and that’s when they started to do that in earnest. So duly pressured in around 2545, Marie Santay vanished without a trace, she believed the system had more secrets to discover and she vowed that she would never share them with anybody. So who knows whether she did discover a new secret, the mystery of Marie Santay is something that draws tourists to the system, like people who are interested in unsolved mysteries, just like we are today.

Marie Santay was right about one thing though, that there was another jump point, to Xi’An space, Kayfa, which is right there. Looking all valuable to the military, strategically valuable. Anyway, after the cold war ended, the system that was once considered a really boring place for military ships to, y’know, fly around and make sure no Xi’An ships were invading became, all of a sudden, a really economically valuable system because it had these two jump points that were going to straight to Xi’An space. Great for commercial interests. And so Serling, this first planet here, which is only settleable along the Solar Terminator there.

Let’s talk about the Star itself, Horus. This is a M-Type main sequence star, which is popularly known as a red dwarf, you may have seen of a show called Red Dwarf. These stars are interesting, they are some of the most common in the galaxy, they are the longest lived by far, I believe we’ve never actually seen one die – which is an insane thing, they are billions and billions and billions of years old, we’ve seen lots of other types of stars die, but never a Red Dwarf.

When they first start out, they are often very unstable and have lots of flares, which is the situation in Pyro, just to have a little incidental piece of knowledge there. And the flares will go out like really, really far and they’ll scorch planets and they’ll make systems just totally uninhabitable and really hostile to any kind of person who wants to make a living there or explore there. But the star in Horus has long since settled it’s adolescent period I guess! The flare star period tends to last around 1.2 billion years and then they settle down into something really steady and really good for the possible development of life. They’re cool, they tend to be about half the temperature of stars like our sun, which are G-type main sequence stars: yellow dwarfs.

We really, really wanted more systems that had this type of star, since this star is so common. And we had tended to lean towards GNF type stars in the other systems. So this was one of the earlier ones that we came up with that had this type of habitability model. The first planet in the system is Sterling and I’m sure a lot of you named for Rod Sterling, the host of The Twilight Zone because it is only habitable along the twilight band of the planet! This was added to the game because we had recently discussed with a local scientist and read a little bit about these particular type of planets, that circle very, very close to M-type stars and there are in fact a tidally locked planet.

The animation so far doesn’t reflect that, but it will in the future that’s one of the goals for making the Starmap more visually accurate to reflect the lore that we have in the game. Sterling itself it’s locked around the equator and so one side of the star, one side of the planet is just permanently facing the star. It’s warm and it’s got lots of driving winds, and it’s full of, there’s a lot of storms especially on the point that’s closest to the star. There’s storms constantly. And then on the other side of the planet is permanent night zone. It’s a polar ice cap. There’s really not anything that lives there. The abundant oceans on Sterling. Again this is something we will correct in the future visually. We’ll make the habitable zone possible without the abundant oceans, it might just be this really weird planet that’s baked on one side and ice on one side and nothing would happen. But luckily for life we have this one little strip of planet where people can live.

The people who live on Sterling they tend to commute from the night to the day side to simulate the night and day cycle that Sterling totally lacks. They’ll work on the day side and sleep on the night side this is just along the solar terminator by the way this isn’t going to be these people won’t be stuck in storms forever on one side and ice forever on one side. It’s generally more temperate in the Prime Meridian than anywhere else on the planet. A lot of people who are natives of Sterling who have been there for many, many generations don’t really care too much about going back and forth between the day and night cycle, they’re used to living in this permanent sunset, which is pretty cool. Personally, I think.

There is a study going at the University of Atten which is located on Sterling. That’s kind of assessing the effects of what this cycle does to people. How it affects their mood, how it affects their productivity, how it affects their quality of life. Because the habitable zone of Sterling is so narrow, it’s got a pretty low population and businesses that want to get a foothold in this system so that they can trade with the Xi’an more easily have kind of a tough time muscling their way in.

Which brings us to the second planet in the system. Horus II has no name because it has no settlement. It is currently a desert planet, there’s no water that we know of on it. But it is a viable terraforming candidate. This is just at the edge of the green zone and because of this a lot of the businesses that want a foothold in Horus are really pushing the government to try to get this terraformed so that they can settle in and open trade relations with the Xi’an. It’s a little bit more massive than a lot of small planets which would give it a better chance at being terraformed since it’s right at the edge of the green band.

Now, zooming out we can see the first asteroid belt. Both asteroid belts in the system are pretty sparse which is honestly really common for a lot of asteroid belts. There are probably going to be some mining opportunities there in the future certainly mining opportunities that you can exploit to further trade relations with the Xi’an for examples since they are right there.

The system does see a good bit of Xi’an traffic sometimes. Whoops! I went all the way out again! Alright, our last planet in this system is Horus III right over here. This planet is special it’s a Super Jupiter. Super Jupiters are gas giants that are more massive than Jupiter, that is the definition of them! But this gas giant is about four times as massive as Jupiter, it is one of the most massive Super Jupiters that is in our game. Which can be very interesting in gameplay.

Wheeee, it kind of sits on the outskirts of the system being large, being in charge, being desolate ‘cause there is no life there but it could be a place to refuel, that kind of deal. So anyway that’s about it for Horus. I hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes look at one of my favourite systems because of the cool science behind it. It’s got a rare tidally locked habitable planet, it’s got four jump points and it’s got a rare Super Jupiter. So got some neat science going on, good culture. Horus yay! Anyway thanks for tuning in, I had a really good time talking about this system and I hope to see you guys again. Thanks as always for being awesome people, for subscribing and for making all this possible.

Back In The Studio

BL: You might say that’s really the Cherie on the top of this episode.

SG: Not going there, I’m just not. And we can’t leave without an MVP.

MVP

SG: The envelope please, do we have an envelope,

BL: [Horrible drumming noises]

SG: Yay, well done to Alexis for spelling MVP correctly. And the winner is Kaneto.DNO, yay!

For his video Radar Globe 2.0. In this video Kaneto showcases features already available in the current radar globe and includes suggestions of his own on how to improve it going forward.

BL: I have it on good authority that our own UI expert Zane Bien has seen this video. He says that’s good stuff and would like us to remind everyone that we are always looking for talented UI designers so check the Cloud Imperium Games job page, but thank you Kanato you are this week’s MVP.

SG: Kaneto, Kaneto, apologies if we’re pronouncing this incorrectly.

Art Sneak Peek

SG: And of course it wouldn’t be Around the ‘Verse without this weeks Art Sneak Peek. Ben what is it ?

BL: It’s this!

[Dramatic gesture showing nothing]

AR Prototype: Dynamic Labels (LookDev WIP)

Outro

BL: Be sure to tune in to Reverse The Verse tomorrow at 11:00 am Pacific on Twitch where we’ll be discussing that and all sorts of other Star Citizen-ful facts.

SG: Thank you as always to all of our subscribers for making this show possible. We will see you next week on Around The Verse.

Post Credits

[Big Benny’s Noodles music plays … annoyingly]

He need your help

https://forums.robertsspaceindustries.com/discussion/320598/big-bennys-needs-your-help

Star Citizen On Social Media

SG: Did you know that many of Star Citizen’s developers are on social media. If you would like to follow Star Citizen on Facebook you can find us here:

[https://www.facebook.com/robertsspaceindustries]

BL: Or on Twitter, here:

[Twitter: @robertsspacedind]

SG: And even Instagram, here:

[Instagram: @robertsspacedind]

BL: And for a full list of developers personal accounts they’re willing to share with the community check out this link:

[https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/14924-star-citizen-on-social-media]

You can find out what I bought at Amazon this week.

SG: Star Wars stuff.

BL: Yeah, it was probably Star Wars stuff.