This post is a transcript of 10 for the Developers: Episode 03, material that is the intellectual property of Cloud Imperium Games (CIG) and it’s subsidiaries. INN is a Star Citizen fan site 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!



10 for the Developers: Episode 03 – Summary

0:45 Q:What goes into concepting alien races? A: A lot of thought goes into the environment and how life would have evolved on its planet. On a tech side an alien has to go through design to see how it would walk, talk, move etc in game. This process can mean a back and forth until pinning down the final work and proceeding. 4:26 Q: What did you learn from the Constellation remodel and how fast will future ships take? A: We learned a lot from the Constellation and how we build ships in general like modularity rather than big mesh skins. With that information it’s being applied to other ships like variants which will take significantly less time, but that isn’t always the case. Like anything iterations will be constant, but we limit to what we change. (9:23)Q: How long will the Constellation variants take now that the base model is in game, Also does this apply to the Freelancer rework? A: Similar to the previous question, but different as it’s the Freelancer, Yes absolutely. The Freelancer has quite a history and because of what we learned from mistakes and other ships which allows us to speed up the process. Style guides play a huge part as well in speed because of consistency and making it easier to develop a ship or rework others within the same manufacture. (12:34) Q: How hard is it to move older ships on to the new damage tech system? A: It was hard work to implement the system but now the work done on that allows ships to use a basic frame set over and over again for each ship. (15:15) Q: What aspect of specific character creation are you involved in like “Crime characters”, as well as what does it take to get an NPC to us, finally how similar is the character pipeline to a ship pipeline? A: So first off, characters in Star Citizens are built by accessories, not models which allows us a huge variety of choice as well as allows designers to chose what they want rather than dedicating Character Artists to them. The character pipeline is very similiar to the ship pipeline, most pipelines are like that within the various development aspects of Star Citizen. (20:55) Q: Is the pipeline and implementation of characters less important different? Will these characters will look lower quality? A: Tier 1 is the highest quality setting this infers a level of fidelity that works on a scale from there. The characters will still look good as they have a selection of 120 heads scanned to customize around. (22:58) Q:Are there clothing manufacturers similar to how there are ship manufacturers? A: Yes! There are style guides for Earth, Terra and major locations and within those are different sub categories again splitting it from blue collar, white collar to rebellious and more. (25:44) Q: How in depth will the character creator be? A: It’s currently in the RnD phase to see how far it can be taken but early steps have been made with hair and eyes and will be rolled out soon™ (27:49) Q: What happened to the Retaliator commercial? A: Development changes over time. Commercials were a way to show off content to you guys, but now we have these shows, live streams, etc and our priorities changed. Also because our resources are heavily focused on Squadron 42, the talent we need for those commercials is unavailable right now, we love the commercials, but we don’t have the resources for them. (30:11) Q: How is the progress on alien races? A:Progress is being made in the background. Vanduul are nearing completion but Humans are the main focus for the time being before moving on to the other races.

10 for the Developers: Episode 03 – Full Transcript

Intro

Eric Kieron Davis: Hey everybody and welcome back to another 10 for the developers. I’m Eric Kieron Davis, the Senior Producer in LA with

Forest Stephen: Forest Stephen

EKD: the CG Supervisor

FS: CG Supervisor, well you said your middle name so that kind of threw me off

EKD: You don’t need to do that, but you can if you want. Alright, before we get started we want to tahnk you guys our subscribers for making this possible, we couldn’t have this amazing extra content without your help. All the videos you see, the videos were doing here, this is all from you guys, thank you very much from the bottom of our hearts and lets dig in.

FS: Okay, Excellent.

EKD: Yeah, why don’t you get started.

(0:45) Superflytwo asks: We kinda know what the Vanduul look like… but what about the others? What goes into concepting an alien race?

FS: That’s a great question and a super fun question

EKD: It is it is. Alien races right? Forest what’s different? We got Jeremiah Lee here right? One of our Concept Artists who is doing a lot characters, a lot of human characters. What’s the difference what goes into making an alien race besides concepting?

FS: Well, you have your humans and then you already know what your skin tone is going to be like you have a certain range in your height, you know your anatomy is going to be and how the character moves. There’s a lot of things that go into an alien race however. How humanoid is it? Does it have four legs? Does it have two legs? How are the legs shaped? How does it move? So I think a lot of the times you get your inspiration from real life creatures and real life animals and then you start merging them together to make new species.

Then you also have to think about what kind of environments do they live in? What kind of worlds do they live in? That way you start understanding how their skin tone works because their skin tone probably evolve differently based on their environments right? So in a more icy environments you’re probably going to have more hair and stuff like that. In a hotter environment you’re probably going to have less hair right? Then the colours of the skin tone and then how do you want the skin tone to react when light hits it? Do you want it to be more like deep underwater jelly fish where it can absorb light and then be somewhat transparent where you kind of see the inner workings of what’s happening. Or is it going to be rough and tough and feel more like you can’t penetrate this skin. So a lot of those questions are asked when you start introducing alien races. So it’s super fun

EKD: It is! And I would say on the production side it doesn’t really change much. You and I have been developing or working hard on this, really establishing design, sit down and put their designs together before we even start concepting. Those guys, there’s a lot of great things that they can come up with as conceptors. Brilliant, very creative but the Designers tend to know

and the Writers know where this, how this fits in the universe.

So in the Ten For The Writers i’m sure they talked about this and the Designers. But then you get all of that content that Forest was just talking about before you even get into making the image. There will I think be some back and forth like: “Oh that doesn’t really make sense”. Or “I want to dig into that more.” Or “I have some ideas” And that’s totally cool that’s where the back and forth goes.

FS: And you’re always going to find a limitation in the tech right?

EKD: Totally, yeah

FS: Potentially have to write new shaders to react to determine how the skin reacts, the lighting and stuff like that. So it does impact the schedule a little bit depending.It’s all about a balance. You want to push it as far as the Writers and the Designers wanted to go but still keep it in the boundaries of how much time you actually have and how limited your resources are.

EKD: And even animation. I feel like, if it’s just pure concepting you just come up with an idea. People do this all the time for personal work but in this environment then once you get this concept you would take it to the Animation Director and say “What are my limitations here. In the system as well as what you need” And that may even go back to be tweaked based on that

FS: Are we going to need to make a brand new rig? How are we going to Motion Capture this? That’s the other thing that get’s really interesting like we did with the Vanduul right? Is the Motion Capture. How do you have humanoids move and you know, talk? It’s pretty serious. So you got to be kind of creative and you got almost build these sets, like these suits and stuff that they could potentially wear to see where like, the collar, and how do they move? It’s a tricky thing. It’s one of the funnest things right? It really allows you to be creative about the process.

EKD: There’s just so much that goes into making a concept for an alien race. It’s not just make this guy it’s like “Here are all the implications”. Alright next question

FS: And hopefully we’ll have languages or something

EKD: Hopefully we’ll have languages. Maybe.

(4:26) Dazc asks: With the recent remodel of the Constellation taking 8-9 months, can you discuss any process improvements that were made during that time and how long would a similar ship take now? Will any further iterations be made? I.E Bottom turret, bar in the middle of the view screen. Hint hint. Also how long would you imagine the process to build out the Constellation variants take?

EKD: That’s a good question. I think we learned a lot on the Constellation so this is I think this is V3 of the Constellation right? But we’ve talked about many other ship pipeline discussions. Every time you do this, you learn more about it, you get better at it, you build more to kitbash and build those faster, so I think this last one was great Josh coons and Chris Smith were leading the way on the Constellation and it looks gorgeous.

EKD: We did a lot of work for it out here. Daniel Kaminsky did all that weeks and weeks of UV’s that we needed, he did a great job and it made a really cool looking ship. I think we learned even more on this round that is going into the pipeline document that’s massive and I think it may even be shared out at this point as it’s a huge process. Then will iterations be made? We’re making a game, this is creative world of course iterations will be made right? We’re going to limit those iterations so we can keep making other content, but yeah you always want to go back and improve things and make things better right?

FS: Right because I mean when we started and I was around when there were making the original constellation. The first time you build something, I mean that’s almost your prototype, it’s the first time you figure out how everything works. Then you kind of go and start improving it and figuring out well this doesn’t work, well this works well and you start figuring out what your quality bar is and then you start getting all these assets and start figuring out in the game engine what your limitations are or how far you can actually push it.

FS: Then that’s how you can really start defining your actual pipeline and defining okay, this is the quality that we can actually do, this is the amount of timeframe that we actually need to do this in and how can we improve the process to make sure that it fits a production schedule. So the remodel of the constellation to me is the first time it was actually done once we figured out how we wanted to build ships.

EKD: Yeah and I think the other part is the tech changes. The first prototype, that first one, tech was a certain way and may things may have not changed too much because the foundations there, but you improve. The same thing happens on the tech side as the art side. So when the tech changes then the art needs to change how that works and it’s a constant back and forth

FS: and to answer the question, bottom turret, more in the middle of the screen. We learned a lot of things flying those ships. We learned it’s really easy to make a cool looking cockpit, but then all of a sudden you don’t have that field of view that you want. One thing that we realized right after those first set of ships is people want to be able to see space in their cockpit and the bigger the cockpit glass area, the better and that’s one thing that was unanimous amongst fans. We were able to start removing things from the middle of the screen and started giving yourself a better view.

EKD: To speak forwardly from the Constellation when we were doing the concept for the Crucible. We talked about it because it had that bar across the middle and were like “Hey we’ve already done this,” You know, let’s find a better way…

FS: And the character sits down you’re like, bar is right in his view

EKD: Yeah, it’s right in my eyes and the thing is Tony Zurovec called that out and we all were like you’re right and it’s just those constant reminders of improving.

FS: And then how long, process to build out Constellation variants. So one thing about our variant is and building the ships is we realized we wanted to keep things very modular and reuse things and so instead of building one giant mesh, we built lots of little meshes that we piece together and and then we have these kits that we can pull from. So if you have a weapon rack it’s not just a custom rack in a ship, it’s a separate asset that was made and then it’s placed into the ship so our ships were starting to build them much more modular, a lot of which we found was a huge advantage.

FS: When we do constellation variants we ask ourselves okay, “How much of this ship is actually custom and what part of the ship is actually custom and what parts are already available”. SO because it’s made by the same manufacture we’ll be able to use kits that we’ve already made for these variants so it won’t be 8-9 months to build a variant right? Because we’re going to have the majority of it built and now that it’s modular we’ll be able to be like, “Alright here’s the head of the ship or here’s the cockpit of the ship, lets swap that out.” Which we’ve already seen with some of our ships we’ve been doing and have these different areas or variant will be different modular pieces that we’ve swapping in and out so the times are much faster.

EKD: Totally, as far as exact time frames, we necessarily can’t tell you for each ship what the time frame for each of those, but it does dramatically get lower on variants, especially if there’s less changes obviously right, less changes the faster we can get it done. They generally..

FS: If they’re custom

EKD: The more custom, the more we have to do to it. So generally faster, but not always the case so yeah with the Phoenix and with those we definitely want to get those out as fast as we can and I think we learned on the connie and we can take that onto the next variants, fo sho.

FS: Okay, I’ll do number 3.

(9:23) MetalDrumCore asks: With the new Constellation Andromeda model in game how long do you think it will take to remodel the Aquila, Phoenix, and Taurus? This question could also apply to any ship line such as the Freelancer that are getting reworks.

EKD: The reason we throws this one in there is that it is similar to the other but this talks a little bit about the Freelancer, that’s what I wanted to talk about a little bit on this one. This ship has quite a past, right, we’ve learned a lot from that Freelancer from when it was here and then the UK was working on it. I wanted this one kind of for Forest because he has a lot of history with the Freelancer to talk about. So, how does that change now with what we’ve learned from the Constellation on something like the Freelancer.

FS: Right.

EKD: It’s one thing to say a variant of the same ship, it’s another thing to say a completely different ship that’s big. What are the things you know.

FS: The Freelancer was interesting because it had a new set of design requirements which was specifically in cargo and so as we’re building these ships, they started getting fleshed out and all of the sudden the cargo system comes online. It’s like, ‘wait, a minute how does this ship actually work with the cargo’ and so there was a major overhaul that needed to be done with the Freelancer and not just from the visual side but from actually getting the gameplay mechanics and requirements down. So the UK took it over and I don’t know if we showed it yet but they did an awesome job.

EKD: I believe we showed it on the livestream. It looks really cool.

FS: It looks absolutely fantastic. So, now does it not only look a lot better but they made it actually work with our specifications on the design side….

EKD: Yup.

FS: Which is great…

EKD: As design improves their processes, art improves their processes..

FS: Right.

EKD: Again they’re hand in hand….they’re all hand in hand but design has a pretty big laundry list of things they’re working on so we’re constantly on the production side slating it in, figuring out which one goes where. It’s a never ending task of putting all those things together so as Forest mentioned that thought was really interesting he say that, as cargo came online, right? Cause it wasn’t really established when they started making it but once it came online we had to go back and we had to change some things out. So, you would think, ‘wait, let’s do it in order, that’s obviously not in order’. That’s very true but there are certain situations where we just gotta start making these things….

FS: Right.

EKD: It’s cheaper to make the changes later than it is to wait to get things online sometimes.

FS: Because we always gotta keep moving forward.

EKD: You got it. We definitely always try to do things in line, Forest and I were just talking about this a few days ago, it’s very very important to do things in the right order and sometimes we forget and do it wrong, but we’re learning and I think things like the freelancer are starting to benefit from things we learned

FS: Absolutely and it’s great too because we start having more style guides come online and art direction starts factoring the way these ships work. When you create your ship the first time you’re still trying to figure out what exactly is this going to look like and then when we revisit these ships it gives us a great opportunity to be like,”Okay, well this is the way the interior should fill, these are the way the beams should look, these are the way the screws should look, these are the way the floor panels look and so when you start getting into these ships it starts looking consistent and if it’s a MISC, Freelancer or whatever. It is fun to go back and make sure that they’re right because from the art side it also benefits because things start looking consistent and that’s what you really want all around.

EKD: That’s right. That’s one of the things I’m excited about in this game you mentioned is bolts and panels and you know things that you would never be able to put that level of detail into a game and we’re doing it, I’m super excited. Everytime I walk around a ship I see that stuff and it’s just like, “I’m home baby”.

FS: It’s great.

(12:34) Superflytwo asks: How hard is it to implement the new damage tech into old ships like the Hornet/Super Hornet?

EKD: This is a question I added for you. The new damage tech. This is obviously a big item because it was.. Much like the ship’s evolution damage has evolved as well right? Our expectations for it, our ability to do it, our tech behind it has all evolved.

FS: Yeah and I think we can take a step back and that is why upgrade the damage tech right? Again it’s a balance of time, functionality and quality. Your basic project management steps that actually define that triangle. So one thing that we found very early with the damage stuff it was very labour intensive and the results were very expensive in game.

So that was a big challenge and we have amazing graphics programmers like Allie and Oaken and other people that just can create tech that is more shader driven, that limits the amount of manual labour that Artists need to do. So they can concentrate on making them look good while the system drives them and we have consistent frame rates because it is so code driven by the people that are controlling the frame rates and that are requesting what the frame rates are for us to deliver quality wise.

So the damage tech required us to: write a new shader that allowed you to, as we’ve probably all seen, penetrate the ship so you kind of exposing the inside which i’ve learned are called: gubbins

EKD: Gubbins. The gubbins.

FS: The gubbins is exposing the inside. Instead of building a ridiculous amount of debris pieces that come off we worked concept right on working an inner frame rate. Framework of the ship so when it exposes it, you can see what the inside of the ship looks like before it penetrates all the way through into the actual interior.

Which is kind of neat and it allows us to build kits that are these frames. So as we build new ships and we put this gubbins inside the other ships, we have a gubbins library that we can pull from. So we don’t build a custom frame for every ship, we build these pieces and then we re-use them constantly. So the previous system required every aspect of the ship to be custom damage modelled. Now it’s shader driven so it renders through the mesh and then we have geo inside of it that’s reusable constantly. That’s fantastic.

EKD: It’s great. So it’s incredible hard! No I mean it’s hard to implement it but it’s so very technical. You’ve got some very talented people you’re working with.

FS: Then we have new effects and everything else!

(15:15) Perry_Hope asks: I have a question about characters. We saw in the last AtV an interview with Community Manager Disco Lando and our Persistent Universe Director Tony Zurovec about Nyx. Also we saw the cool Mr. Rob Reiniger talk about that. My question now is: Are you guys also involved with creating some characters(crime people) we heard? If yes, which one? And what is all involved to get an NPC to us the backers? Is it like the ship pipeline with concept, backstory, greybox, whitebox, etc? How long do you guys need for one character? Sorry. Sneaked in a few questions. See you, greetings from Germany. Perry Hope.

EKD: Snuck in a few question

FS: he’s apologizes for sneaking in a few questions which is fine because we grew up in Reno.

EKD: And I pulled out this question specifically, Forest and I were talking about it because Forest is focusing a lot of characters right now and the development and creation of characters and we may not be able to answer specifically about what’s going on in Nyx or those ingredients, but we can talk just in general about characters and I think this is a great. He asked basically what is the pipeline step and one thing I was going to speak to after that is how long a character takes and you know 8 weeks ago or not 8 weeks ago, 4 months ago in our tech, we couldn’t have answered that question, but now we can and it’s going to keep going faster. What are the steps for a character?

FS: So the the way that we do characters and I’ve kind of mentioned this a couple times, but now it’s really set in stone, were actually implementing that which is great. We build characters very different than most games. We don’t build full characters, we build clothing accessories and then we have our scanned heads and then our base bodies. When we build a character, we don’t need a character artist to go in and build a character from scratch.

FS: We can have designers go in a plug in different types of clothing and then that creates your NPC. So the NPC’s use the same system that the players use to customize themselves right? We build wardrobes and we have these manufacturers for all this stuff. We also have this dynamic wear system for clothing to make it feel newer or older so when it comes to creating characters crime people right? You want to create some hooligans or something, it really depends. You take the clothing that you want to stereotype I guess as what would be crime, but really what it’s about is..

EKD: Crime in that universe, what was dictated by our Writers and Designers.

FS: Yeah, but you’re really gonna have, it’s more going to be in the areas where we place these characters and maybe we have certain character and we place them in darker alleyways and maybe we wear there clothes a little more so they’re not so pristine. That is what gives you the illusion that these characters could be potentially be committing crimes. It gives our designers the ability to create these characters without needing our character artists to actually do it.

EKD: It’s a very unique ideas of saying if I put these five pieces on a character, it means they’re from this class system, they’re from this planet, they’re this place in their life. There’s all these cool things that go into it instead of saying I’m going to make the crime person, here that’s the only one you can use. It’s like If I go up or down, maybe the crimes a little less and more which I even talked about on the StarMap so it kinda all blending into the same idea.

FS: And you can have crime that you know, people that look nicer and you can have people that are quite wealthy

EKD: Blue collar crime, white collar crime.

FS: And you can have people that are quite wealthy in the game that decide to look like your average joe and you don’t really know which is kind of cool because it’s kinda like real life right? And then what is all involved in getting the NPC’s back to us. So creating all the clothing, creating the system in the game that allows you to pick the different clothes and then that allows us to have the designer be able to pick the different clothes for the NPC’s that are in the game.

FS: So it’s one system, we do it once and then everybody has what they need and then how long do you need for one character? Again it’s really based off the article of clothing, it’s not about one character. Each clothing accessory we learned takes about a week and a half, something like that. So for a shirt or for a pair of pants maybe a week and then multiple that by how many combination you want or however many we want to do

EKD: And each those pieces have a certain amount set amount of deliveries and those deliveries have different review specifications and depends on if we’re doing it in house or if we’re working with an outsourcer, there’s a lot of different factors that go into play with that. As quick as we can, that’s the goal, we’re trying to make things quickly so he can get more variations and have more options.

FS: And then you know is it like the ship pipeline concept, backstory, greybox, whitebox. Yeah it’s very much like that. All of our pipelines really run a similiar, they really run in parallel with each other. You have the concept for the clothes. First actually you’ll read it in order, first you have your backstory so the lore and the writers kind of decide what all the types of clothing you’ll have in the game and then we have concept artists draw the actual clothing to fit the lore. Then we have the whitebox stage which we kind of block it out and get it in there. Then we have our greybox stage which is actually we make it look nicer, we start making sure the tech works with everything and then we do our polish stage which is our final pass.

EKD: This is a good question I felt for Forest because he, when I started we were developing..

FS: We just got done with that

EKD: We just done developing it, it’s a very interesting, the fidelity to get certain levels of characters you really gotta hit all these pieces because they all they have different reasons. I want to get his version of this character because I want to get the designers to start using it and actually feeling the flow of the game. Then I keep going and make it really cool and there’s just all different elements in play.

(20:55) EarthFyre asks: How is the art pipeline different for the minor NPC characters compared to the more important ones, and will the NPC characters that we see in the bazaars and around town be getting real individual attention, or be more stock characters?

EKD: I really wanted to bring this one up immediately after that question because, even Forest just mentioned the skin, heads. I want you to talk about this then stuff for sure. But we’ve talked about having tiers for our heads. So your Gary Oldman’s and your people that are our main cast. That’s what we call them our main cast.

EKD: Each of them get a certain level of attention depending on how important they are to the story or how much you’re going to interact with them. So yeah absolutely. I don’t think we are necessarily, stock character the word’s for it they’re all getting a certain different amount of love, amount of attention and it’s all really just based on what makes your experience better. Yeah. You got anything else you want to add to that?

FS: No. I think you’ve pretty much answered that. We have our tier 0’s which are our less expensive heads, and highest quality heads and our main actors.

EKD: I guess, to extend this one. Sorry I didn’t want to interrupt. If there was a tier 0 how many more elements go into that head? Is it like 12 more layers compared to the tier..?

FS: The tiers kind of reference that. We have higher polycounts, we have more bones and stuff like that in the face. So a little higher fidelity. Though those are mostly reserved for the cutscenes. Then we have our tier 1 which is the next level. The quality drops down a little bit. Though even our lowest quality is quite high.

FS: So all the characters even what we consider a stock character is high. There’s not really such a thing as a stock character per se because we have scanned 120 heads or whatever. So they’re all quite high quality and then we need to figure out different ways to take your 120 heads and customise them in different ways. So we did a pretty good job of creating one that would require stock characters and still having them very custom and very unique and high quality and stuff like that.

(22:58) Wolvencry asks: We know ships and weapons have style guides, but can we expect style guides for clothing manufacturers as well? Will they have the same depth of backstory/marketing as the ship/weapon manufacturers? Any idea on how many different clothing brands you’re hoping to have for release? P.S This game’s artwork is definitely setting the bar high for future games. To all the artists working on this: Keep up the amazing work!

FS: I agree all the Artists working on this are doing an absolutely amazing job across the board. The characters, the ships we have the most amazing artists. Absolutely incredible. So I can answer that question. I can absolutely answer that question. We do have style guides for clothing manufacturers that is absolutely a thing. Did you put that in? Are you Wolvencry?

EKD: NO! I just knew this was a great question. I mean it’s applicable it’s exactly what we’re working on right now.

FS: It’s a great question. So our writers went through and they did create clothing manufacturers. So that’s something that allowed us to we have nineteen planetary stereotypical locations. Earth, Terra, and so on and so forth.

FS: Within that we have the sub-categories which is like the blue collar, the white collar and the kind of the more rebellious ones. Then we have Frontier and we have other stuff and categories. Under that we have specific clothing line manufacturers now.So it works exactly like the ships.

EKD: The Writers all established a whole backstory, explained what they were, it helped inspire the look of them.

FS: Where they come from and so you’re going to be able to play the game and find manufacturers that you enjoy because we have style guides that are associated with each manufacturer of clothing lines and you’re going to find like in real life there’s certain clothing lines that you like and you’re going to want to collect all the clothing.

FS: There’s going to be different stores across the galaxy that fit the lore of why those stores would be there. So it’s kind of a fun mini game in fact. Wear these clothes and go explore and find new clothes It’ll be exciting. “Oh I just found a new shirt from that manufacturer I like” Stuff like that. It is pretty fun. We have 36 manufacturers, right now for clothing.

EKD: I’m sure it’ll grow cause it’s a whole galaxy out there. The thing is we’ve got to discover the other planets to figure out what the other manufacturers are. So we’ll get more as they come online.

FS: Yeah exactly. We want you to discover these manufacturers involved. We don’t want to give them all to you right off first. And we just got all our new logos made for all the manufacturers. So we’ll have signs. It’s fun, it’s good stuff.

(25:44) Goukou asks: @edavid_cig, how many different character customization options do you envision? Both for the characters physical appearance (hair, eyes, face, body shape…) and the clothing options as well. Will there be more, less or about the same options for male or female characters?

EKD: So we’ve kind of touched on this a little bit on the other sections but this is something that we’re actually thinking about. Quite a bit actually. Customisation is a big part of a good Persistant Universe. I don’t think really as we get more things online and we get more clothing styles going, I don’t know if there’s been a determination for more or less based on gender.

FS: It’s just going to be the same. All about equal. Equality. The same amount of female clothes

EKD: Well then how about aliens? Any of that equality?

FS: That’s another fine question. Sure of course I mean

EKD: All equal. The thing about all that stuff you know exactly eye shape and all those things based on characters you’re going to get and things like that

FS: That’s something that’s still in the RnD phase is how to customise characters in regards to the actual hair, eyes, face, body shape. Currently what we’re doing is we do have multiple hair styles that you’re going to be able to start swapping through. We have a shader that actually allows you to change the eye colour dynamically.

FS: So instead of us having a texture maps and it’s a lot of labour for the eye colour. Currently we made nine different eye colours that are all shader driven. That you can cycle through even though it’s not coming online in the very near future it will be. Then it also allows us to create even more with that. Too much effort other than making sure that we officially are on it

EKD: Totally. Forest says our RnD lead phase that means we’re not only developing ourselves but feedback we always want feedback. What do you like? What do you want to see? What do you appreciate? Send it our way we love that stuff. Cool alright next question.

(27:49) Solis_Obscuri asks: Whatever happened to the Retaliator commercial? I remember that was supposed to be finished months ago, but we still haven’t seen anything?

EKD: Good question, No. So you guys saw some commercials early on, even saw back in the kickstarter campaign it was showing off some of our stuff. The goal of those was to bring to light exactly what we’re working on and what we’ve got what we’re doing, but we’ve kind of shifted the way we do that now right? We do these, we show you in the livestreams, we’ve got all kinds of ways to show you the content we’re working on.

EKD: The Retaliator as it came to make more sense to go into the multi-crew release that would be when we would show it off. So we don’t necessarily need a commercial for that. That’s a big part of production is we’re’ always evaluating what the needs of the business are, what the needs of what we’re delivering are, what marketing is requesting from us. We’re still developing a lot of the stuff so I know they’re always working on, Sandi is working with their team and with development and they’re always kind of going back and forth about what makes sense and what would help you guys see the content we’re working on.

EKD: So things change all the time and specifically like commercials which I was working on when I first got here. It was kind of getting the scope of what we really wanted to show and what resource we need for it because we want to keep it minimal, we want to show you the cool stuff with keeping minimal resources. So that one, it did not happen. But it’s because we showed the Retaliator to you in another way

FS: And I think that the thing is also our commercials are pretty awesome right? I mean I love them and they take really talented people to make those commercials and a lot of the time we were able to use those commercials to also make the art required for like Squadron 42 and stuff like that so right now we’re so heavily invested in Squadron 42 as far as our resources concerned and we’re like nose deep, grinding on that thing that a lot of our talent, especially our Cinematic Team who are absolutely awesome, they are currently concentrating on cinematics for Squadron 42. It’s also a resource thing, it’s not like you hit a switch or just like here’s some money, go make it happen, it actually requires certain talents of people.

EKD: Totally, Totally, good question. That was a good pull, that was from awhile ago.

(30:11) elbro_dark asks: How it goes with non-humans in the game? Haven’t heard something about Vanduul, animals or another species for awhile.

EKD: We open our time with aliens, we might as well close with it. This is a fantastic question. It’s something we’re always working on alongside the characters. This is what we just talked about before. How are they going Forest?

FS: They’re going great. It’s awesome. The Vanduul we’re in like the final phases. Right now we have the way it moves mostly figured out, we have the way it looks pretty much figured out. Right now we’re working on the actual skin and the way that, like we mentioned earlier, how that reacts to the light, what it actually looks like, what kind of texture we’re giving it and all the lore’s figured out for the characters, the Vanduul and their different classes.

FS: Meanwhile we’re also building up all the other species as well. You don’t hear about it as much because it’s under wraps because we like showing you things in the very near future and stuff like that. We’re concentrating on the getting the humans right before we really, we have our, we still have them going on but we’re really concentrating our efforts on let’s get all the PU characters in, let’s get all the clothing and the tech figured out and then we have then once we have that figured out we can start bringing the alien races in. Again comes back to the linear aspect we want to do things in order when we can ‘cause it’s cost efficient really!

EKD: Absolutely. And Forest loves it as well. We both love it.

Outro

FS: We did it!

EKD: I think we did it! Alright well thanks everybody so much again for the questions and again we couldn’t do this without you subscribers you make all this content possible. I had a great time.

FS: Me too.

EKD: I always love being up here with Forest. Cool again I’m Eric

FS: Forest