Alyssa Delhotal

No commercials in the immediate future. The next commercial we were hoping to do was the Retaliator. We wrote a script out for it and stuff. It's just that the guys who do that are busy working on Squadron 42.

All of our commercials have been pushed back until next year. We're looking at doing some trailers, but no commercials.

The commercials were always just a testbed. They were for the cinematics team to get their feet wet in CryEngine and work out their tools and their production processes so that they could work on Squadron 42. And now that they're actually working on Squadron 42, they're doing that instead of making commercials. So we know they're awesome. They're great for highlight reels and stuff. We know people like using them to remix their own trailers, which is a thing the community likes to do. I've never fully understood, but more power to you. We want to get back to them. It's just right now.

That's a good question. I think it's all about play style preference and what you actually plan on doing in the verse. If you buy a Warden and use its pretty versatile ship and then decide to upgrade it later to have a more specific gameplay function, then that's completely up to you. Myself, I really like the Sentinel. I think the idea of the Sentinel is awesome because you can just go out and just, I don't know, I just think it's really cool. I'm sorry, I lost steam there, right in the middle.

Generally speaking, this doesn't apply to everything. But generally, the base model is, it's kind of like doctors. The base model is your general practitioner. It's the version of the ship that you go to for the biggest variety of purposes. And then the variants are the more specialized. The Sentinel is your ear, nose, and throat doctor, and the Harbinger is your podiatrist. It's an analogy. It's not a 1-1 thing. The Warden is going to be your best all-around option, and the Harbinger and the Sentinel are for more specific purposes.

I mean, to dumb it down even further, if you're playing in FPS, it's basically the difference of using a sniper rifle versus a shotgun. It depends on how you feel like playing and what you want your role to be.

So this is a preview of our Community Hub. When it launches, you'll see there'll be a menu option under Community. You will find the hub. And then we have a couple areas. Our first area is the Citizen Spotlight. Now, it starts off with staff picks, so the best ones get submitted, we'll do staff picks, and the first page will be populated here. Of course, you can see what everybody submits by clicking View All, and as you can see, we've already started to populate it with a couple things here. It's not open to many people right now. So you'll see what's hot. And of course, people have the option to upvote stuff. So you'll see what's hot, what's most popular, what's moving fast overall, what the highest upvotes are, things that are particularly brand new, and of course, staff picks.

So we're starting rolling this out on Tuesday, right? And are we doing it the same way we did?

Yeah. What we're doing is for the PTU rollout, we had a PTU first wave and a PTU second wave, and everybody still has those badges attributed to their accounts, so we're just going to use that. So on Tuesday, the folks who were in the first wave of PTU invites will have the first wave of Community Hub invites and they'll come in and start populating it with stuff and trying to break it for us. And we'll work with them and Turbulent and make sure we address anything that might have been overlooked.

That way we can make sure that this is in its best working order for you guys once we release it completely into the wild and there will be a minimal amount of issues so it's all sexy and you guys are happy.

And under Citizen Spotlight brings us to our next page, which is our Twitch streamers. You can register your Twitch channel, and when you go live streaming Star Citizen, you will populate here. So you'll be able to watch from the website. And eventually we'll have our RSI chat integrated. It won't be integrated in the first drop. We ran into some technical issues, but we're working on it. So you'll watch streamers there. There is a section for podcasts. So if you do a podcast, you can register a podcast and they'll be collected here. Kind of like that weekly Comm-Link that we put out, the schedule with our podcasts, you'll be able to find them here. And then Deep Space Radar is sort of our version of Reddit. It's where if you find a link to an article about Star Citizen or somebody's website about Star Citizen, INN stuff, whatever, you can post them here. Same thing with the Citizen Spotlight. One of the bugs we're trying to fix is the thumbnail integration at the moment. And then you can upvote and stuff like that. So basically it works just like the Citizen Spotlight. And then you'll be able to find MVPs. So like this week's MVP was Elton Gradash with the custom Star Citizen icons. And you can click on that and go directly to his forum thread. We've got our social integration here, so you can see our Twitter and Facebook. And Citizen Spotlight is good for videos and for image galleries. You can upload the images straight to our website, host them just like you could on Imgur, and there's no image compression. So it's really good for that. So you can put up your screenshot galleries and stuff like that. So that is the hub.

Lots of questions about ships and I have one big overarching answer for a lot of things right now. So our production guys, both the UK and here, are currently reworking our ship schedule to make it way more awesome. And while they're doing that, there's not a whole lot that we can say about any ship in particular because they're making it so we get stuff bigger, better, faster, stronger.

Well, one of the nice things also with even some of this combined stuff is we've got now a lot more standard sizes for exactly, okay, what is a capital ship power plant? So when we're blocking these ships out, we can do less guesswork in our white box and really build out these right sizes, build out these right specs from the ground up.

Basically, standard disclaimer for every RTV, if you're asking us when a ship is going to come out, that's not really something we can answer.

When it's done, 20XX. Soon, TM.

It's never going to be a question you're going to get an answer to on RTV.

So we're certainly looking at all sorts of voice control stuff. My conversations with Chris have been that it has to be something that makes sense. I remember adding Game Commander, not our Game Commander, but the Game Commander software, the old Microsoft device. And it had a profile for Wing Commander, and you could tell it, autopilot, fire missile. That's not a fun space. You don't tell your airplane what to do. So as long as it makes sense.

And one thing also that's kind of odd, at least to me from a design standpoint on things, especially like VoiceAttack, is realistically there's no difference between VoiceAttack and AutoHotkey. So it also becomes a question of really how much do you guys want the game to be macroed out? Because if I can do five programmed commands as a single VoiceAttack prompt, I can do those five commands as a G-key macro or some other device macro, and does everyone want the game to become automated like that? Do you want to take any choice and skill out on that side of it versus having that reactive in-the-moment stuff? And like Ben said, that's just about making sure however it's implemented makes sense and feels right for the game as a whole.

Yeah, that exact reason is why you can't make strings of spellcast macros in World of Warcraft anymore, because it took away all of the skill required and people were just exploiting the crap out of it in PvP.

So I've always thought, one of the things that takes you out of Wing Commander is the communication process, ordering your wingman around, C and pick, oh, attack target, C, withdraw. That's what I would replace with voice stuff, the wingman controls, but ordinary cockpit controls, not so much.

It's like one command, one action. That totally makes sense. Those are good options to have when it does make sense. One command, 12 actions, it's like, well, that's garbage.