TL;DRChris Smith says the Mantis isn't really a departure, just a sleeker ship by a different designer that shares RSI design language, and he wouldn't be surprised to see echoes of its style in other ships.
Well, I wouldn't say it's necessarily a departure. We really don't have that many RSI ships in the game. We have the Aurora, we have the Bengal, and what's the third one?
Yeah, a really good guy. I like his stuff a lot. And I think it's kind of like a car manufacturer that builds different cars. They don't all look the same, but they do share certain features. So if you look within the Mantis, you will see similarities, or RSI language, so to say. The inside columns of the ship, for example, are very much like the ones on the Constellation. The front window even kind of echoes that language style. So I wouldn't say it's a departure, it's just a different ship in the series.
Yeah, I think it was pretty successful. The overall design language is very strong. It's well thought out. And I wouldn't be surprised if we see some echoes of the style in some of the medium to small ships, maybe even some of the bigger ones.
Well, that wasn't designed into the ship. And I think over the years we've had some people complain about struts and stuff. So I think this came about because a lot of the new designs were trying not to obscure the view so much, which wasn't considered with maybe some of the early concepts. I heard people were actually calling for more struts on this thing.
Well, we can give them a variant. That's what we do. But I think it was actually very successful, because it does have some struts and it conveys some strength there, but a lot of it is just glass. And it still has that feel of RSI, even without a million struts like the Connie.
TL;DRCounterplay is still to be developed, but current options include dogleg routes, and possible future ideas include longer-range pings hinting at interdiction areas, size-matched devices, power-boost escapes, and resistant components; none are promised.
This is tier zero and we've just implemented it, so the counterplay will be something that we develop as we get more feedback and have time to iterate on this. But for now, again, the Mantis is not the greatest ship to take on another ship head to head. So there's that. Unfortunately, we don't have the ability to quantum travel outside of the normal lanes, so you can't choose to create your own path, but you can certainly choose to make a dogleg path to your destination to avoid possible QED volumes if you think there's going to be one on that path.
To go off of what Kirk was saying: vehicle features specifically has plans in the near future to upgrade ping to use more of those backend services to uncover more information further out. Right now, ping just finds stuff that's actually spawned. We want to adjust it to find interesting things that may not exist yet or could happen in an area. So we also want to ping much further and allow you to scan potentially much further distances. I'm not saying it will happen, but something we would probably explore is: you do a large ping, and you discover there's maybe an interdiction happening in that area. Maybe not give you the exact coordinates, but say that area has some kind of interdiction play, you should be wary.
Give you a clue as to where these things could be. And then there are other things we can explore. This is currently our only QED ship. Should we make more? We can certainly balance it so that maybe you need a capital-ship-sized QED device in order to pull other capital ships out. There might be some counterplay with that, like maybe you do have to have the same size ship to do that. Maybe the smaller ships can pass through these using some kind of quantum physics, tunneling. Or maybe we can team up multiple smaller QED ships at the same time to create a really powerful quantum enforcement bubble that can pull a capital ship out of quantum travel.
And we do warn players that they're about to be interdicted a few seconds beforehand. It would be cool if we had a mechanic where you could boost power to some system to potentially burst through it. There are a lot of options we've talked about exploring in the future.
And of course, we've also mentioned in the past that the size, quality and grade of components themselves will begin to play a factor. You may be able to outfit a ship that's more resistant to the effects of a quantum enforcement device. So as more and more of the component system comes online, there'll be a number of ways to work around this.
You guys know the app Waze? When you travel, there's a word-of-mouth thing where someone has been interdicted, and they can leave a mark and message everyone, so it's a known thing: oh, there's an interdictor down this way, so be careful to avoid it.
I think you're probably absolutely right about that, Chris. As more of the Stanton system and more of Star Citizen comes online and this becomes a bigger thing, you will see orgs that act as service organizations for this kind of thing, reporting that quantum enforcement has been reported in this sector, along this route. And there will be an entire new cottage industry created for players to provide services to other players.
TL;DRChris Smith can't say for sure, but would likely keep a minimal number of struts and balance the sleeker Mantis look, which suits smaller ships better than big military or industrial ones.
It's hard to tell. As we said in the beginning, this is a different ship from RSI. This one is a little bit sleeker than the ones before, I would say. I would say we would probably still do a minimal amount of struts, like we did with this one. I'm not saying we're getting rid of them, but strike a balance. I think on the early iterations of RSI ships they could be excessive in some cases. It's hard to tell; maybe some of the tech design that we incorporated in this one, just some of the small details and stuff. It's a little bit more round, but again, I don't know if I would want this look on a Bengal carrier. I like the Bengal carrier. It's a big military ship, so you wouldn't want this sort of sleek design.
It probably wouldn't work for the Orion either. There's the RSI Orion and the RSI Polaris, which are still to come. A lot of that shape language wouldn't work for a more industrial ship like that.
Agreed. I think it really just depends on the ship itself. And for most of the smaller ships, I could see us going a little bit more in the direction of the Mantis, perhaps.
Well, mainly I've worked on the Hornet, that was the first one. Then the 300i, I worked on the Constellation, the Mustang, M50, a lot of the smaller ones. But yeah, Constellation is probably the biggest one.
Soon. Very soon. I can tell you the F8 is sort of going to happen first, I think. But pretty much right after that, I'm going to jump onto the 300 series. I can't wait for it myself.
That one's been a long time now. It's been about two and a half years, or two years. I don't know. Seems a long time, but it's been a while for that one. And the one I recently did, the Hornet, the Mark I Hornet, was recently just kind of polished up and brought up to standards. That was a long time coming as well.
TL;DRUpdating the existing Hornet line was quicker than the Mark II, which was redesigned from scratch, because it mainly meant cleaning up the mesh and UVs and bringing materials, normals and damage up to current standards.
The main thing is it doesn't take quite as long. So the F7A, the new one, the Mark II, was from scratch, sort of redesigned as I went. It was redesigned from scratch. And this one was merely taking the ship itself and making the mesh, cleaning up the mesh, cleaning up the UVs, adding smart normals, the POM detail, the new material buildup, and the way we sort of break up the materials now. It's set up for custom paints and stuff like that. And of course, the new damage system and everything. So the Mark I Hornet, while it's still flyable, was still using a lot of old tech. And so that had to just be updated, more or less. While the new one, again, you had to redesign it from scratch. So this one, I basically took the existing one and just modeled it, updated it on top of it. So it was a little bit quicker. It goes quicker.
Oh, yes. Well, again, so we're sharing all these. The mesh is being shared throughout all the different variants, and it's a material slot mainly, and some added meshes on top, like the radar on that version. And the F7C-M is the same, but it's gonna take a little bit more, because we have the double cockpit, the dual-seat cockpit, and then some of the other features are modeled more and stretched out more. So that one is not quite a direct transfer like the other ones, because I updated the F7C, which was our base model, and that just propagated to the other ones almost automatically, just because I updated that mesh with the new one. But the F7C-M was using a completely different one. So I have to go in there separately and just update it, which will happen eventually.
Like I said earlier, we did the Wildfire version recently, which was part of the lore and the story, a Wildfire version. And so we came out with that first. And that sort of is a start. It's sort of the beginning, to show you, hey, yes, eventually we'll be able to do other versions, just like we did this one with the custom decal and custom colors and stuff like that. So, yes.
TL;DRThe artists aren't planning that far ahead and are focused on getting current ships out, though regularly updating a ship line after launch is now a possibility they might consider.
Yeah, there's still a lot of ships that we have to make that are still just the base ships that we have to release. And the Mark II was sort of born out of the thought of... First we did the Constellation redo, because it was just unflyable on the ship. So we had to redo that, which was a free upgrade. And so the Mark II Hornet was the first time we sort of thought of it that way. Like, hey, the Hornet needs a redo. And I was sort of like, hey, I think the Hornet looked sort of old school and a little bit out of date compared with some of the other ships. When we did the Mark II, we were like, well, let's keep the Mark II. The Mark II was, I think, more or less maybe going to replace the old one at first, but then we thought, let's keep the old one, because a lot of people like the old one and the old style and everything. And since it is flyable, we'll just update it and bring it up to standard. So then we just kind of thought of that, like, hey, let's make the Mark II be a new ship, with updated lines and everything. It was sort of born out of that. And we haven't really thought of, hey, we're going to... I mean, since we have thought of that, now, when the game comes out and we keep updating, that's definitely a possibility now, right? We can just take a line and every year, or every other year, however it works, we update the line. And at that point, we'll probably think about design and stuff like that. It's kind of nice, because you can kind of base it off the old one. You can bring out something totally new or you can update the lines. So there's a lot of options.
Yes, for sure. The new model is definitely a lot more efficient. That's part of the reason why we remodeled it and cleaned it up. The old process of the work, the way we were doing things before smart normals essentially, it's because we're using, it's called triple loops. When you try to get a smooth edge, we're essentially using an extra loop on every chamfer, and so that's all been eliminated. So it's definitely fewer polys, and the material is more efficient.
Well, it's something that's yet to be implemented by design. But yes, we've set the materials up to have a wear and tear state. So as you're going out there and you're battling, you're flying, and you take damage, even damage, I think. But we also have a dirt slider in the material.
You can just slide it down and it makes the thing all grungy. Stuff's coming from the edges and it makes it look like you've been out there for quite a while, collecting dust. But I think that's definitely a feature that's going to come online very soon.
Well, what's next is the 300i redo. The F8 Lightning will be on my plate, and we'll be sticking with Anvil for a little bit. And one little thing in between, which I'm not sure I can even announce yet, but...
Well, yeah, working on the Hornet was always going to be great because it's one of the most iconic ships in the Star Citizen universe. It was featured in the first video. And since then, we've had it in the game for a long time. And the first time I got to work on it, this was like three years ago now, I think, when I did the first pass. And I didn't really have time to do what I wanted to do. And this time, I finally got the chance to do it, basically. The first time was sort of just remodeling parts and retexturing. And then I had to quickly move on to, I think it was the 300i or something. Yeah, it was great because this is one of the best ships in the game, I think.
Josh and I started working together on the Constellation. That was sort of the first one. Usually I would kind of just do the ships on my own. But with the Constellation, it was so big, and we wanted to do a good job and we had a certain time limit.
TL;DRChris Smith says the ship pipeline has improved a lot since the early pre-production years, is now solid and fast, and allows asset reuse to build ships faster.
Well, from the first ship, it's changed quite a bit. It took a while. The first couple of years were a lot of almost pre-production and trying out things. Now we're kind of reworking the ships because we have changed it and improved it so much, also with the help of some of the guys in England. Nathan, he knows a lot about CryEngine, and those guys. They helped out a lot and we built out the pipeline and now it's pretty solid. It's good, it's fast, and now we're able to reuse some of the textures or assets to build ships faster.
I think a lot of people have noticed that and even called it out. It seems like there's a flight-ready ship, a hangar-ready ship coming out practically every patch. And I think that mentality of honing a process over time and structuring that pipeline really goes even further than just ships. It seems like a lot of the content picks up momentum, and then we start seeing large amounts of content get pushed out.
Yeah, it pushed through the whole development, like the characters and the environment and all that. It just gets better and more efficient as you go, and everybody just kind of gets worked in and then it just kind of flows. And for the ships, we definitely need it because there's a lot of ships to be done.
TL;DRChris Smith says concepting is a favorite part and he had a great deal of freedom on the Hornet, working from the old model and iterating with feedback from Chris and other artists.
So the concepting phase is actually one of my favorite parts, for sure. A lot of times in Star Citizen, I really haven't started or concepted a ship from the beginning. This Hornet one is pretty much the closest one, probably. Because I was able to take the ship, which the old one was basically a concept for me, to make the new one. So as far as the creative freedom goes, I pretty much had all the freedom I wanted. And then basically what I'll do is I'll start modeling and then present it to Chris and some of the other artists here. And then we have feedback sessions. But as far as creative freedom goes, a great deal. I just kind of go with it. Chris, since I've been around for a while, kind of trusts me to a certain point, and then I show it to him and it goes from there. It's a back and forth.