Lead Vehicle Artist, Los Angeles
They should recognize Jin. And Daniel. And then me. And that's the entire LA ship art team.
I just finished coming off of the Hurricane. Prior to that, Daniel, who's actually still kind of working on it, he finished up doing the Cyclone. Obviously the Mustang. We've also done the Caterpillar. I reworked the Aurora. And we've also touched a bunch of the other ships. So Daniel and I, when we first started working here, we had done a lot of work on the original Mustang as well. We've helped out with the Constellation, helped out with the Gladiator. It just kind of jumped all over the place.
It was close, if it wasn't the very first. Was it the first? You know what? I think it might have been the first. Specifically, the original Mustang Beta was the first ship that was handed to me as a, "Hey, figure this thing out." But what was interesting about that ship was that we actually built all four variants of that ship simultaneously. So Chris Smith and Josh Coons in Austin were also working on it. And Chris Smith built the original first pass on it. And then when I started working here, I was assigned the Beta and we all sort of grabbed a different variant and started building those simultaneously. That happened fairly quickly, actually.
TL;DRElwin doesn't remember choosing and thinks the Beta was simply assigned to him, joining right before a Gamescom demo and learning the editor and a new modeling program under high stress.
I can't remember. I mean, that was years ago at this point, so I can't remember whether that was... I think it was just given to me. It was just like, "Hey, here's the one you're working on." And I'm like, "Oh, okay, cool. Man, this is a ton of work. It's got a whole interior."
And it's the only one with an interior. We've got these five variants and only one of them has an interior, and they give the one with the interior to the new guy. Part of me wonders if I go back to Chris Smith and Josh Coons if they're not going to tell me there was a little bit of initiation there.
I don't think so. I'm not sure that they were the ones who actually chose. I think it was just production just laid it out. It's like, "Oh, here's an available artist, you kind of do it." But really, it was cool to be working simultaneously with them because we kept getting on calls back and forth trying to solve some problems. And so we sort of just helped each other out trying to get that stuff done. The trial by fire for me specifically was I came in right before Gamescom of that year. And working on that demo, that Constellation demo, was crazy. That was a lot of work. And that was me sort of just jumping in, trying to learn the editor without having any real experience with it. Jumping into a new modeling program, which I never really worked on. So it was a lot. It was a high-stress time.
TL;DRThe biggest challenge was fitting enough interior space in a small ship for the character to reach the bed, toilet and pilot seat, hard enough that they decided to change it seriously.
Well, so one of the biggest issues at the time was trying to allocate enough space on the interior of the ship so that the character could actually move around properly and access the bed and the toilet, and then also somehow figure out a way of getting over to the pilot seat. That was tough because the ship was fairly small and it still is fairly small, right? So any ship of this size, which is, I would consider, sort of like a... I think mid-size is giving it too much credit. It's more sort of like mid-small. It's what you would expect a fighter to be, right? So 22 meters or something like that. To have a full interior is always very difficult for us to work with because you just don't have the space, right? So you want to give all this gameplay and you want to flesh out all this detail, but it's within the space of a closet. And so that's really the hardest part. That was the biggest challenge, making sure that there was enough space to sort of move around on the inside of it. And that was super tough. Tough enough that we've decided that we had to seriously change that.
TL;DRJared says the name was just funny, and explains that one-to-one interiors and exteriors, tight spaces and still-developing metrics made the original concepts a constant battle, with fidelity not meant to get in the way of play.
I just thought it was funny. One of the challenges in those days, that's less so now, is that ships in science fiction, ships in any fiction, in video games, were not generally designed one-to-one, full interiors, full exteriors. I mean, you look at classic ships like the Millennium Falcon. Gorgeous ship. It's the favorite of many people. But if you look at the interior versus the exterior, it doesn't quite line up the way it's supposed to. Just take the exit ramp. From the exterior, the ramp connects into the center of the ship. You walk up and you should be in the center of the ship. But when the camera cuts inside, you are coming in through the exterior of the corridor. There have been many interviews with folks who have tried to draw all those creative cutaways, manuals, just pulling their hair out, trying to make the Millennium Falcon make sense and having to fudge a lot of things. And you can get away with that in movies and TV shows. Famously, just about every shuttlecraft in Star Trek, especially the runabouts. You see this little tiny thing and you get inside and it's this huge room. For our game, because of the fidelity that we're pursuing, all of our stuff has to be one-to-one. The interiors have to fit into the exteriors. And one of the big challenges of our concepts in those first couple of years was really wrapping our heads around that, because we were still developing metrics. We were still figuring out how much space a player character needs to get around and do things. Because there are a lot of influences in Star Citizen. One of them, I don't think it's any secret, is World War II. There's a lot of World War II influences, and you want those experiences that you see in battleships and in submarines with tight corridors and people running back and forth and having to squeeze in and go past people. But in video games, because player locomotion is almost always just straightforward, it's hard to have those tight spaces. So it's always a constant battle.
Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where we want to add as much fidelity as possible, but we also don't want the fidelity to get in the way of interacting with the game, right? Because at the end of the day, we want people to play the game. And so the fidelity needs to come in sort of additively. It shouldn't get in the way of your experience. And the original Mustang did that.
TL;DRThe Mustang was reworked for usability: variants were hard for designers to work with, climbing in and out was bad, and the changed player capsule and metrics made a streamlined version worthwhile.
Sure. I mean, really for the Mustang specifically, it came down to pure usability. That was the core reason for it. And also because the original way that we set up the variants for the Mustang was kind of maddening for the design team to actually work with. And so we needed to rework that already so that it was more usable for us to develop on. In addition, it was just not a great experience to climb into the Mustang, right? You would get shot into space regularly, right? You would be lucky to stay in the ship if you wanted to get out of the ship because you couldn't climb out properly. It was just kind of a mess in terms of interaction, right? Interacting with that ship wasn't fun. And so because our design had evolved and we had more metrics set in stone at this point, and we've also changed the size of the player capsule, which meant that collisions were even more difficult to deal with over time, we wanted to streamline the experience of using the Mustang. And it just gave us an opportunity to sort of take all of the things that we thought worked about the Mustang's design and sort of push those, and then leave behind the things that didn't work.
TL;DRThey wanted a starter ship to stay landable after losing some health, since the exposed wings meant little margin for error and losing guns and landing gear usually meant bailing out.
Yeah, and you know what, there are plenty of ships that share that, and it's not terrible to have on a ship, but it was something that we just decided that on one of these starter ships we kind of wanted to make sure that you could lose some health on the ship and still actually land it, still use it. Because on this ship specifically, you would lose almost everything, right? You'd lose your guns, you would lose your landing gear. At that point you just bail out, right? Just get a new ship.
You make a good point about it being a starter ship. So you don't want to overburden the player with too many of those challenges in what's supposed to be their very first ship.
Right. And the other thing too about the ship is the wings are a massive part of the profile of the ship, right? So if you're going to get shot, you're probably going to get shot on the wing and you're probably going to lose that first. And so there was just such little margin for error as a pilot flying the ship that it was nice to just be able to change it up a little bit so that if you do screw up, you're not losing total functionality.
So the original one had some, but one of the things that we knew players really liked about the original ship was sort of the struts. They like being able to see the game outside of the dashboard, and the original Mustang had that quite a bit, and so we worked to attempt to remove all of that as much as possible.
TL;DRCargo is not half in, half out but housed inside the flush space and visible, with a capacity of either four or six, and the deployment animation isn't in this build yet.
So it actually isn't. So this line here where it's flat up against the ship, if you follow my cursor, all of the cargo is going to be inside of this space. So it will be flush up against the surface, but you'll be able to see the cargo boxes that you're carrying. So if you're carrying gas tanks or something like that, you'll be able to actually see, by just looking at the ship, what's in there. So it'll just all be housed in here. I believe it holds four SCU. No, actually, it might be six. It's either four or six. It holds quite a bit. We'll get an update on that, guys. So in this build here, we don't actually have it set up so that you can pop it out, so you can't see how it comes down. But we'll get you guys an update where basically you can see the cargo bay come down and you can sort of see how it deploys its cargo. And it just lays it out on the ground while it has grips on the sides which sort of pop open.
TL;DRThe ship was reconcepted to merge Consolidated Outland's flat-surface aesthetic from the Pioneer with the original's aggressive forward-pointing wings, giving a simpler, stronger shape that Elwin thinks looks fastest in flight.
Sure, so a lot of the design changes that we made to the aesthetics of the ship come down to the fact that the Pioneer sort of set in stone an aesthetic for Consolidated Outland, right? And a lot of the things that they did on that company, basically, it established that they use a lot of flat, big surfaces, right? So you don't have a lot of lines that change direction. You have a lot of flat surfaces with concentrated areas of detail in small chunks to help to shape the ship. And we wanted to merge that. And it's hard to do that on a ship this small because it's sort of a fighter. And we wanted to keep some of the aggressive feel that the original Mustang had, with the wings sort of pointing forward. It had this really aggressive feel. And so Michael did, I think, an amazing job really taking the new aesthetic of CNOU and applying that to the shapes of the original Mustang, giving it a really aggressive stance while also simplifying some of the surfaces. The original Mustang had the leading line on the wing change direction like three times. This one, it just does it twice. It's a much stronger shape. It's a more direct shape. It feels faster. In fact, it's my opinion that of all the ships, when this is in flight, it looks the fastest of all of them.
It's definitely not in this build, because we nuked the old one to replace it with this one.
We are working in what's called a game dev build. This is the actual game development build that our developers around the world are working in. The old Mustang in this build doesn't exist, is what we were getting at. So we can't actually bring it in.
Yeah, that's right. It just looks really cool. And it also allows us to, if you have this inside of a hangar, you can lay a bunch of them next to each other, right? So save space. And it also gives us an opportunity to sort of transform the ship when it goes from landed mode into flight mode, which is always super cool.
Well, the original one was always able to carry cargo. It was just set up differently, right? So now it's more like the Aurora, in the sense that it carries it from above and then drops it. Whereas the original one had sort of a... I'm not sure what to call it. It had a platform upon which you place the cargo, and then that moved up like an elevator. So actually, let me go straight to it. When we first started working on the rework, this was originally going to be a ramp sort of setup, but it didn't give us enough space to do as much cargo as we actually wanted. So we ended up just switching to more of an Aurora cargo system so that we could actually just carry more cargo. It was more efficient.
TL;DRPOM is a flat texture applied like a decal that fakes 3D detail, saving time and performance, and it lets reworked ships avoid heavy modeled geometry like the old Freelancer rivets.
Okay, yeah, so it's very simple. It's a very simple concept. It basically functions exactly like a decal. You apply it to the surface of the geometry, and it'll make it look like you have geometry on there, because it's sort of displacing the texture and making it look like it's cut out. So you can see this nut here. It sort of looks like it's cut out of the surface. And as I move around it, let me slow down the camera, as I move around it, you get a sense of it being actually 3D, sort of cut into the surface. That's all fake. That's just a flat texture. It's a card, essentially. It's no different than this decal right here of text.
And you've seen POMs in action on things like the Starfarer. Anything that's got grating where you can see underneath the grating and you see all the wires and the cabling. That stuff's not really there.
So it's very cool because it allows us to add tons of detail without actually building that detail. So one, it saves us time. Two, it's also a lot easier for the computer to run, because you're not running all this extra geometry. So I jumped on to help out polishing the decals, so I worked on reworking that and rebalancing it. These sort of cut-out things. But the other thing that I did work on was this piping. So there's this under detail that has a lot of pipes and wiring and all that stuff. I jumped on to sort of help out on that. So from this view, you might not be able to tell, but none of this is real. That's a flat texture. And it's reacting to the light properly because we've done some work to sort of fake it a bit. But yeah, all of that detail in there, that's flat, completely flat.
And that's one of the big improvements of our vehicle pipeline over the last couple of years. One of the many reasons we have to rework ships. We've often told the story of the old Freelancer line, which had all those rivets. Instead of using POM for the rivets, they actually modeled the rivet, and then copied the rivet, and copied the rivet, to the point where the Freelancer had a larger resource footprint than the Idris.
Yeah, that made no sense. And to be fair, that was the original, original one. And so the new one, way better. Way, way, way better. And it uses all these same techniques, right? We were able to update the Mustang using a lot of these techniques, which we didn't really have when we originally started working on it.
TL;DROther variants fill the space behind the cockpit with engine detail to show there's no habitation room, whereas the Beta has a door to a living space where you no longer need to crouch.
Oh, yeah. Actually, I guess I should point that out. You'll notice that on the Alpha, we've got some engine detail sort of filling up the back space. And the reason why we did that is we didn't want players to get confused about which ship you'd be able to actually go into a habitation room for, right? So on every ship other than the Beta, you're going to have this little engine detail back there filling in the space so that you can clearly tell there is no habitation room back there. So there's nothing for you to do behind the cockpit seat. Whereas on the Beta, we do have a door which leads into a little living space. Let me actually turn off the lighting so that it doesn't leak out. There we go.
Now one of the big things that we're going to say is you don't have to crouch.
Well, you don't have to crouch. I mean, I'm afraid to jump in, we'll stay in this mode for now. So it's still a tight space, right? So when your character's standing up here, he's basically going to be up to the ceiling, but he won't have to crouch when he's walking around the inside. And we've cleaned up a lot of the navigation on the inside, where it's very straightforward. You can walk from the door all the way to the back and get into the bathroom.
TL;DRThe interior borrows the Pioneer's Consolidated Outland look, with orange, grays, blacks, raw metal and angled supports, though the tiny space limited angled walls so it's mostly on the bed frame.
Yes, you do. So the Pioneer established some very key colors for CNOU on the interior, and that's where you're going to notice where we have the orange going on here with a lot of the grays and blacks. They have some raw metals which make up quite a bit of the interior of the ship. In addition to that, they also have supports that come in at angles. A lot of their interior spaces, their walls tend to not be 90-degree angles. We couldn't quite accomplish that 100% here on the Mustang because, as you can see, it's a tiny space, right? So we had to work with what we had, and we wanted to point to that design by adding it here to the frame of the bed, because that space wasn't going to be walkable anyway. So it gave us an opportunity to add some of that in there.
TL;DRThe new bed is easy to get in and out of and no longer ejects you into space, though collision is still being finalized to stop a crouching character ending up on the mattress.
Well, it's much better in here, right? So now you can get in easily, come out. It doesn't shoot you out into space. We're still finalizing how the collision is going to work in here, because one of the things we've discovered is that because of the way our player capsules work, I believe that it might be related to that, if you don't set up your proxy properly, you can walk into the bed and then your character will duck and then literally walk into the bed. So you'll have a crouching character standing on top of the mattress inside that space. And so we don't like that at all, because what tends to happen is when we exit, it'll sometimes pop us in that position and then our heads will go through the ceiling. So we're still working on finalizing that to make sure that that doesn't happen. But nothing in this space is really going to get in your way from doing what you want to do. We cleared it up. The original Mustang had a little loveseat couch thing in the back, which you had to squeeze by part of the table to sit down on. It was fun to work on, but it wasn't fun to play.
TL;DRElwin made playful decals on the ship that didn't make narrative sense for the manufacturer, the lore team objected, and he had to replace them.
See, this is why I want Jin here. Is it just Jin? Yeah. So we like to do... man, okay, so I got in trouble for this a little bit.
I already know what the story is. Go ahead. The Caterpillar?
Yeah. So when we're working on these ships, sometimes it takes so long. We just like to have fun with the decals sometimes, because on these decal sheets, we have an entire alphabet so we can write out whatever we want. And I wrote some stuff that I thought was just kind of fun and lighthearted, but it didn't make any sense narratively for Drake to put this on their labels, and I had to go back and replace them.
Yeah, so you ran afoul of the lore team on that one.
Yeah, I know, I know. It's like, that doesn't make sense. I mean, that's on me. I just kind of went rogue, and I was like, I'm going to make all these crazy decals, and it's going to tell you what to do when it decompresses, and no bueno.
TL;DRThe Delta wall text is an unfinished work-in-progress error that will need to change, as the ship has over 100 tasks and small things like reversed decals are easily forgotten.
Well, see, this is why this is a work in progress. Yeah, that will have to change, obviously. So one of the bugs that I continuously get, and it's super frustrating because it shouldn't be a bug since we're working on it, but we have so many tasks on the ship that we have to do. I think for what I'm working on right now, for me to finish it, it's like over 100 individual tasks. And all of those take varying amounts of effort to put into it. So to try and keep the entirety of what you need to do on a ship in your mind at all times is impossible. So things like this happen all the time. And some of the bugs that I'm working through now, which keep coming back, are Hurricane bugs where I have decals reversed or things. It's just things that sound stupid and minor. There's just so many things to keep in mind when we're working on this stuff that that stupid tiny thing is the thing we forget all the time.