Yeah I'd say first and foremost, the priorities come from Chris and Tony. Those are the guys directing the project so they pave the way for how we are supposed to prioritise our features. So they decide "Okay we have an upcoming release, what do we want to show?" And then once they decide what we want to show we'll break those features down into critical priority, high priority and moderate priority. And what that really means is that a critical feature is something that is an absolute must-have for that release; a high priority feature is a nice-to-have, it's something that's not essential but it's something that we would like to have in the release; and then a moderate is a wishlist item, so it's something if we get to it "great" if not "no sweat".So for example, for the first Social Module release we had ArcCorp, the environment itself, it was a pretty critical, must-have feature. Without ArcCorp there you wouldn't have had an environment to run around in: so it had to be there. That's a critical feature. We also had emote text descriptions, it was like a high feature. We wanted everyone to know when you did your emotes what was happening as you did them so the text would show up in the chat box. So that was a nice to have. And then moderate would be the critical, er, moderate would be the chat ...
Oh so critical! Moderate would be the chat, additional extraneous chat features like the ability to minimise windows, customise chat just a little bit and that didn't end up making it in.
Exactly, and then those features that don't make it into that release they'll either waterfall into the next release, sometimes at higher priority, sometimes not at higher priority depending on what Tony and Chris want to focus on; or they'll go into a backlog for later review.
A little peak behind the curtain too, we're trying to standardise what we are doing on the Production side, as far as using the same kind of nomenclature for features that we do for bugs, so we have critical bugs; high priority bugs; and moderate bugs. If it is a critical bug we're not going to ship a patch with it.
Just like if it is a critical feature, or how that relates to task, we're not going to ship the patch without that being done. Also there is a focus shift to try and prioritise features going forward that are needed for both Persistent Universe and Squadron 42 and Star Citizen as a whole. So we're trying to look at it holistically rather than being split up across various modules.
That's a really interesting question. The PU is first and foremost an open world style first person universe and it's a sandbox really. There will be story yes, but it's the same kind of story you have for settings, like world settings. Rather than a story arc, missions will have stories, characters you run into will have stories. But for big sweeping story arcs, you'll get those with Squadron 42. The PU will support and can live around that story and that dovetails nicely with what you've got. [referring to next question on the show]
There will be FPS in Squadron 42. The thing I want to talk about here though is; Star Marine is a simulation within the first person universe. Much like Arena Commander is a simulation within the first person universe. It's a game within a game. Star Marine is going to be a test bed for new features, new game types, new mission objectives and maps. We even plan on rolling out a way to do white box testing in the environments that you expect to use in the PU or even a part of a level for Squadron 42. Perhaps maybe we'll even roll out new enemy AI behaviour for certain monsters or other NPCs out there so we can test within that environment and get that working right and tweaked, get feedback from backers and get that into the game itself proper.The other questions will there be a story? Yes. Some modes will have a story and again it's like the setting, rather than the story. So it's like pirates are attacking the station. Fight them off. That's a story but it's not a big story. So it's not a story like you see in Squadron 42 that's where the big story arcs are going to come from.
And Star Marine is also used like Arena Commander is used like a simulation to practice your dog fighting skills. This is a simulation to practice your first person shooter skills if you don't want to jump right into the game.
Yeah. Not only that not only first person shooter skills. Your first person maneuvering skills. Say a place to learn how the character interacts with the environment.
The most challenging part of any kind of restructuring is just keeping team morale up. Nobody likes to see friends leave the company or moved to other parts of the project; They like to kind of keep the status quo so to speak so when that shifts the team morale sort of takes a hit. Part of the job of a producer is the momma bear factor that you like to call it. It's that support and encouragement that the producer can provide. When team morale is high, productivity is high and so it's really crucial to our job to make sure that happens.Communicating what the new structure is to the entire team, making sure there are no questions if and there are questions, make ourselves available for those developers who have questions about the new structure. Just being aware of the feel of the team and interacting with them whenever we need to update them on everything that's going on.
Jake and I were also adjusting to our roles here. There's a bit of a learning curve that we're in the middle of so really, ask us again once when we know what the new normal is.
No, they don't. They do, in fact, get back to work on their respective pipelines. It certainly can be a big distraction. Not that we don't love spending a lot of time with Thomas here, or writing letters for the community. It's an important thing though. So the community updates that we do, they're written as a partnership between the senior production staff, the developer leads that they work with closely, and the Community team.The senior producers are in a position to have a big picture view of the project. Which makes them uniquely suited to write this kind of report. One mantra of Production is "protect your team" and that's protect your team from distractions; protect your team from things that keep them doing their job. So a good producer will take this to heart and keep the impact of these kind of reports to a minimum. Try to keep it to no more than a few minutes per developer per week on these kind of reports.It's the collating of the report, and the gathering of the necessary materials, the writing it down and editing it that really takes the time. I've personally spent: the worst was probably a day and a half total, spread out over a few days, writing some of the bigger Star Marine reports that I was working on. But I would say that the average time for me has worked out at less than four hours a week. That's a chunk of time but if I worked a forty hour week, which would be awesome, it's less than ten percent of my time. So I would say the average time is not that great.
And it's important for a producer to know what his or her team is working on at any given point. So we have weekly scrums here, we have leads meetings, we have just the day-to-day interaction with developers. At any point I know what my team is working on at any given time. So making these reports, I know you do the Star Marine reports, and I'll chip in on the monthly report you guys see; but with any of these reports it's easy for the producer to take that information from his head and put it on paper because he already just knows what his team is working on. In some instances it's not the case and you actually have to reach out and get detailed updates for things you don't have the information on. But for the most part you should be able to pull a lot of that information from your head already. So the important thing is, like you said, to protect your team from that time and a good way to do that is just to pull it from your own head.
I should point out we're not doing the Star Marine reports any more. Our focus has shifted so that it's specifically a report on the progress of 2.0 and ultimately that will be a report on our Star Citizen releases in general. I've been partnering with Tom Johnson in Manchester on those reports now, so we're splitting the burden which makes it both easier and harder for both of us.The other thing I wanted to point out is that developers like Zane Bien working on the User Interface or Mark Abent who does the Bugsmasher, those guys obviously spend more time but I think those are important updates. The communication with our backers, with you guys, and getting that feedback from the community really keeps the team going and allows us to make course corrections where we need to. It's great and it's almost a unique situation in the industry.
Yeah, there are a lot of requests that come in from Chris and Tony for all kinds of things and speaking for Tony...Tony's general philosophy he's told me several times is that he really only has a 12 month horizon meaning that he only really cares at any given moment about what's on the horizon for the next 12 months, what's on the schedule for that time. It makes things a little easier to manage on my side since the amount of content in the game planned right now takes us well beyond 12 months from now. Things that don't fall in the next 12 months usually fall into a backlog for later review, things aren't falling through the cracks or anything, we document everything and make sure it goes into a backlog. That backlog grows, grows and grows but 12 months everytime something gets finished or completed we pull something else out. That's kinda how a backlog works.
No, never and a lot of those good ideas come from the community so thanks. As far as keeping track of the features goes...usually it's a matter of just pulling features from the backlog, producers gathering estimates and dependencies for those features from the lead. A lot of times it's a relationship between the producer and the lead talking about a feature figuring out what's required, how we break this down into individual tasks and then taking those tasks and documenting them in our task tracking software. We use JIRA here. That's kind of how that whole process works for me at least.
Also, as I mentioned earlier, our new focus will be looking at the backlog to see what features are needed for the Persistent Universe and Squadron 42 so we can focus on Star Citizen as a holistic product. If something is Persistent Universe only, it'll probably go back to the backlog for the year for the next time we review the backlog. We'll build those features for the Persistent Universe as we get closer to rolling those features out and rolling out different patches for the Persistent Universe.So basically, if Squadron 42 needs something that is also beneficial for the PU, those things will get prioritized higher than something that's only beneficial for the PU.
Our midterm plan is to flesh out an entire system so almost like a vertical slice of what a system in the PU entails. I think we'll be focusing mostly on the Stanton system for the foreseeable future getting it to a gold standard quality we're focusing on the four landing zones in Stanton; ArcCorp's Area 18, Hurston, Microtech and Crusader. So getting all those landing zones fleshed out getting it so you can actually visit those landing zones, so we'll be working with other teams across the project who are fleshing out the space portion, the spaces in-between the landing zones starting with Crusader in 2.0. Basically getting a gold standard system is going to be our near to mid term priority.
When I first joined the team over a year ago now the idea was to be designing the first five star systems. What we did not know at that point was how long did it take us to make a single star system or even a single landing zone. Over the course of the year we really fleshed out a single landing zone and we've done most of the work needed for our second landing zone and just recently added points of interest around the Stanton star system itself. This is teaching us how long it's going to take us to do it. Even though I would say we are not one hundred percent complete with the landing zone yet once we have that, it will give us an idea how much more we need to do. So we shifted our focus from instead of the first five complete star systems to the first five landing zones.So we currently have four landing zones in Stanton. Those are landing zones, not like i'm going out to a space station to make a quick repair and getting back on. That's not a landing zone that's more like a mission. We're adding those as well. This tell us what we need to do. Then from here we'll move on to the next one which is Nyx, the Levski landing zone. A much less populated system. That's going to need a lot of activity in it as well, cause you don't want a single star system with one landing zone and that's it, how are those going to work out? This will tell us what a medium sized system takes to build, what a very small size system takes to build. Then we can look at our processes and see how we need to tweak those processes and see how we can go forward making a lot of content.
It will give us actual metrics which is something we don't have for some of the areas of our project. So once we get those metrics we can actually calculate ok this takes this long. If we want twenty systems by this time we know it will take this long to make. That will give us information like do we need to ramp up more resources or outsource a little bit moreJH: And how we can make changes to the system to make it better or faster or more procedural or what have you.
This is kind of already in the pipelines and pre-production phase but I know Mark Skelton is super excited to get his hands on the additional landing zones for Stanton.... So Hurston, Microtech and Crusader. We've got one landing zone out there and we've got another one almost finished and Nyx and so moving onto these next three there's lots of opportunities to create new things and new aesthetics that we haven't seen yet in Star Citizen. Microtech is kind of a cold snowy planet and crusader is kind of a vespen, kind of cloud city.
Cloud city. Hurston's a refinery type atmosphere. I know as an art director that's a lot of things to look forward to. We're already in pre-production phases there and as we enter white box phase we'll get some of those white boxes back which is basically just the designer taking these 3D objects and building out a space, rudimentary kind of space. We'll get that back and then Mark Skelton will put our concept artists to work and do paintovers so it's actually what is this space actually going to look like and that's really exciting for him I know.I myself am excited to see the first iteration of the character customization because I'm one of those guys who spends hours just customizing my character and making them just perfect before I even start the game so I'm excited about that.
I don't even want to talk about how much time I spent trying to make my Fallout 4 character look like Pam Poovy last night... It's a little embarrassing. What's also embarrassing is I failed, I didn't really get it...
Awww man that's a bummerJH: I just want to mention that this may seem out of character for me because I'm one of the leads of kind of the first person gameplay but let me just put this out there. I'm most excited for the opportunity to work on game systems that don't involve combat. The way you interact with mining or the way you can be as Todd Pappy said:" A space trucker". Where you don't need to shoot anybody at all and to kind of make it around the universe and earn a living like, that's interesting to me.When I see people play some of the other games, especially the MMO's and try to do it as a complete pacifist and the lengths that they have to go to kind of earn that as an achievement for themselves... we're making a sandbox and that just really geeks me out the fact that we're making a sandbox for people to play in. You don't have to kill anybody if you don't want to. I'm really look forward to seeing how that shakes outJR: Not a lot of games reward the pacifist lifestyle so it's kind of nice.
Persistence in the traditional sense of the word is not folded into 1.3 which is live or 2.0 in any kind of meaningful player face anyway. Though we are working as we speak on the back end required to support player persistence. That being said our partners at Behaviour and Turbulent are working on some really clever things that allow us to be able to customise our character and have that state stick when you're going from one map type to another map type. We're a ways off from having traditional persistence and by that I mean an inventory system that allows you to pick up an item, drop an item, sell an item, trade an item with a friend have that thing and have it persist between play sessions like if you logout of the session and log back in. We're going to fake it, right now and then we're going to have real persistence coming in. I'm going with soonâ"¢Jake Ross: Last thing i'm going to add to that. The persistence as with everything will be put out. We have iterations, we'll have the first iteration go out to you guys and then as we release 2.1, 2.2, we'll put in more functionality surrounding persistence. We'll have hangar storage somewhere in there, being able to buy something and send it back to your hangar. Potentially even as you have clothing in Casaba outlet picking clothing and being able to persist that across places as you will. It's an iterative process as it is with everything. Be patient and you'll get it.
TL;DRCharacter customization will allow layered clothing, face, hair, color, jewelry and adjustable body weight within limits, built on body and face scans, though much of it is still being implemented and not yet shown.
The answer to that is yes. So the last few months we've really been focusing on characters and character customization. We've listened to you guys and you guys wanted more flexibility with the characters and so did CR. So we kind of set down this path of how do we achieve what you guys want to see. We've been working pretty close with the UK studio, as you know, Squadron 42 guys. They have been setting up a pipeline for how character customization is going to work. As a matter of fact, we just had not too long ago a character summit in the UK to talk about that, which went really, really well. A lot of the things that we're going to do are things like layering now, so you can have various shirts with jackets, with pants tucked in, untucked in boots, untuck your boots, things like that. So a lot more flexibility than we had originally planned, which is good. I mean, it forced us to think through the process and figure out the best way to do this. We've also done things like switched out our base male for a complete body scan. Now what this does is obviously the resolution and the fidelity goes way up when you do that. We have an actual physical scan that we can adjust and build around. So we get a lot more real world body metrics that way, which is great. Also, Chris had been looking at obviously Ryse for a little while and he wanted something a little higher as far as the fidelity of the face rig and to be able to have emotion in the face. And so we were looking around for a little bit and we started talking to 3Lateral, which is, they're actually one of the companies that was responsible for Ryse. They were really interested in the project and wanted to come on and help us. And it's fantastic because they already had a lot of technology that they had learned from Ryse because they were using the same CryEngine base as we were. So started working with 3Lateral and got some fantastic fidelity out of their head rigs. Just the fidelity in the face and the way that the face is structured now and works is incredible. And soon you guys will be seeing a lot more of that. Per the stretch goal, we got a fantastic face scanning and body scanning rig which has been set up at the UK studio. Right now it's got between 80 and 90 cameras, I believe, but I think we're going to expand that actually for fidelity reasons. I think Chris, you just got your head scanned not too long ago. Although he won't give it to me.
No, actually I was trying to find, unfortunately they've all gone home or are drinking at the pub right now in the UK. But no, it's pretty impressive. Down the road, we'll sort of show you, but the concept is that all the character heads are, we're going to scan the actors that we use in Squadron 42. We're going to scan a selection of character heads for the persistent universe, both male and female, and then we're going to allow you to blend between these so you can change the size of your nose, the jaw, or ears, and color of eyes, and color of hair, and all that kind of stuff. And it's at an extremely high fidelity. And so we don't really have the stuff to show you the final stuff. I think there's sort of a range of motion test that maybe was sneaked on Around the Verse. But that's still down the road because there's a whole level of rigging that's about two weeks off in terms of the fidelity where we're simulating the muscle, the secondary muscles that you would have on the arms and stuff. So there's a base rig and a skeleton now which is kind of what you're seeing. The more subtle stuff is the way the muscles would move and flow and that will probably be completed in the next two weeks. We're also working with Imaginarium in the UK, and Imaginarium is the company Andy Serkis started to do performance capture, and they do a lot of R&D into how to capture the performance on the face side. So we're partnering with them and investing in R&D with them and 3Lateral, who Mark already talked about. There's another company called Cubic Motion that's involved in that pipeline and workflow. But the ultimate idea would be to have an incredibly emotive and fluid facial animation and also body animation. So you guys haven't seen the results of it yet. The stiff character walking around the hangar is definitely not anywhere close to the final result. But probably I would say when we're showing the social module and the FPS stuff, we'll have some of the first iterations of it. Although the stuff that we're doing is going to take beyond just what we're going to be showing you guys in March, in April. But it's all pretty exciting. I wish we had some images to show you of this today, but we don't. We just like to talk and tease you about it.
As we were getting ready for this show, we were looking at various things that we wanted to show or not wanted to show. And for the most part, we decided to show a lot. However, we just hooked up this new mocap to the new rig. And like Chris was saying, we're going to do the musculature. And without the musculature, it looks like this kind of hideous rubber man. And nobody wants to see that.
Well, I think they've seen a little bit because it was on Around the Verse. But basically, the pipeline for the next generation character literally is in the process of being finalized. And once the pipeline's finished, there's a lot of things that are happening that will also come together. And then you'll start to see the results of it in the next few months, where we'll actually be able to show you, OK, here's the layering of the cloth. Here's a jacket. Here's a pair of pants. Here's a T-shirt. And how it layers, how it would all move.
All the pipeline has been worked out for that. It's just a matter of implementing it all. Going through some of these other questions: can I layer my clothes? Yes. Can I select my face, my hair, my color? Interesting thing about hair, we've been looking into alternatives for the way that we do hair. Now, traditionally, you've seen in the past what we call fins, which are pieces of geometry that make up a head of hair. That's really old school at the moment. We want to go beyond that and do something better. We've been looking into a couple of ideas. There's this process called TressFX that we've been kind of looking into, which is more of a spline-based hair. You get a lot more resolution out of it. It's still kind of in its infancy. We're looking into it, but I'm sure it'll get better as we go. But just things like that. Upping the resolution, upping the fidelity, we're always pushing for that. I know Chris is always pushing for that because he wants the absolute most emotive and realistic looking human that we can possibly do. So we've been putting time and effort into all aspects of the character customization to allow for that. Some other things: yes, the color of your face, you'll be able to adjust. Can I wear jewelry? Absolutely. I think we're going to absolutely do that. Thin and fat. So here's an interesting question. We've been going through this. You will be able to adjust your character thin and fat. Now, there'll be a maximum and minimum, obviously, because we've been talking about some of the...
Yeah, I mean, we don't want [inaudible]. You also can't be too small. So that's why, it's kind of like today, if you're in the Air Force, there's a range that you're meant to be between to fit into the cockpit. Otherwise, we're going to have to have way too much variation in all the ships.
But there will be a thin and a heavy and adjustable between them. We're definitely setting it up where that's going to be possible. So, yes, I think all of these are absolutely on the horizon, and we are building the base pipeline to allow for all of these things to happen.
Chris is the only one who has had his face scanned because of that. In order to get your face scanned, you have to shave. So you're probably not going to see this in the game.
We have been talking about beards. Again, I go back to the TressFX thing. That is a possibility for beards and hairstyles. But again, we've been looking into it. It's on the horizon. It's something that will happen eventually. It's just a matter of figuring out the best way to do it.
TL;DRThe game starts in your hangar, which will gain a sim pod, an elevator to the city, and eventually an automated loading system to swap in ships beyond five pads.
The game begins at the hangar. Basically, we're probably about two versions away on the Persistent Universe release schedule from allowing you to actually select your starting planet. Where you'll actually spawn is obviously within your own hangar. Your hangar, as you already know, serves as a kind of inventory repository. Right now, that's predominantly in the form of your ships. It's in the form of your flair objects. One thing that we'll be adding to your hangar in the very near term with the social module will be what we're calling a sim pod. I think we've actually got an image of that. Yeah, so basically this is going to become your new gateway into Arena Commander and the upcoming first person shooter module that you should see in the roughly March timeframe. We're eventually going to add a lot more customizability to the hangar that's going to include everything from a room system to where you'll be able to add targeting rooms, overclocking rooms, entertainment rooms, a variety of things. One of the things that Chris is very big on is allowing players to basically obtain trophies, pictures from the different areas that you see within the game. There's obviously a tremendous amount of effort going into building out some of the visuals and the locales that you're going to be exposed to within the game. And so one of the very appealing things is just the ability to take snapshots, obtain a trophy from the top of Terra Prime that says, I was here, and you can actually store that on a little display table within your hangar. We're going to add elevators into all of the hangars and the elevators are going to become your transition point to the primary city. So what you'll wind up seeing in the upcoming social module will be an elevator that's been added to your hangar and you can take that and basically select the main landing zone level, and all of a sudden when the door opens, you'll have transitioned over into the full-blown ArcCorp city. You'll be able to wander around, but we'll get into that in a little bit more detail later in this discussion. One thing that we just announced earlier today is the addition of some different skins for your buggy.
Before you get on to that, I just want to mention something about the sim pod itself. So you guys notice the date there on that image. That's a concept that just came in this week. And we are modeling this right now. This will be in pretty soon. One of the reasons why we're adding this sim pod is we want to get away from some of that very gamey user interface of hitting the escape key to have to get into Arena Commander. So we want to actually have something you walk up to and have to interact with to make it feel more alive, really, is what it is.
It feels more like a futuristic arcade game that you're stepping into and experiencing some sort of virtual reality as opposed to what we were basically building into the ship before.
Actually, before we jump on to the buggies, there's one other large feature. It's still a ways off, but obviously a lot of you know we had to put in kind of a stopgap measure because the number of ships that you can fit into your hangar is limited to five right now. And we had played with a few different things where we're going to expand your hangar horizontally, where we're going to expand it to different floors vertically, and then that winds up becoming very impractical. You want to go get a particular ship, you've got to take your own... So one of the things we'll wind up adding in the relatively near term will be the concept of an automated loading hangar, such that you may still only be able to have five ships visible at any one time. But as long as you've got one of these auto-loading hangars, you can go to a little display panel and select which ship you want on which pad and bring it up right then just via a whole mechanical process. Skelton could probably add a little bit of detail in regards to that.
Yeah, if you guys have seen, we were using kind of the Japanese parking structure. Basically it's kind of a big Ferris wheel under the surface and what it does is it basically goes down and dials in which ship you want and then comes back up and then you have your ship on the pad. Obviously, if you want to get to a ship quick, that's going to be a really fast and easy way to do it. That way you don't have to have a million ships that you're taking your buggy to back and forth to see. So the primary ships that you want to show your friends and stuff, you can have five pads worth of them. So we've been talking about this for a while, and I think it makes a lot of sense.
TL;DRLanding-zone shops include clothing, ship sales, secondhand parts, personal weapons and a commodity and mission exchange, bought via mobiGlas with delivery to the hangar, mostly shown as work in progress.
So there's a lot. I think we've actually got a few images to show for some of these. But one of the first shops that you guys will probably wind up getting familiar with is the clothing shop. And this will be pretty common throughout most of the popular landing zones within the environment. We don't actually have any shop art for that. So we were just going to show some concept art for some of the clothing.
So here's some of the initial concepts where we are thinking through some of the layering system. You see some people have base shirts with jackets on top and various things. Obviously with the NPCs and stuff, they need to be environment specific, so these specific ones I think were for Terra, I believe, initially. But obviously we're going to mix and match. You guys are going to be able to wear pretty much what you want. Yeah, the cargo pants. See, those are up there in the left corner. That's my style, the maintenance guy. But basically, thinking through the characters, we have expanded our flexibility as far as what you guys want, as far as depth of use, and obviously everything that you see should be character customizable too. So you see a fashion on the street, you like it, you can go to the store and buy it if you like. I hope so. It should be. But that is a Chris Roberts call.
So yeah, Astro Armada is kind of an upscale, kind of a Ferrari dealership. I mean, we're still kind of working on this. You guys are seeing WIP for sure.
Yeah, it's got a bunch more stuff to be done, right? Lighting, atmospherics. This is just [inaudible] update progress on these locations. These are basically all the locations that are going to be in the planetside module that we'll be showing at the...
We're aiming to actually have all of the initial half-dozen shops. I say eventually, we're aiming to probably have 9, 10, 11 variations of shops, different things and stuff, by the end of this year. But obviously, over time, that list is just going to expand. And so a lot of what you'll see here in terms of shops are at the 50, 60% completion stage. Dumper's Depot is obviously where you buy and sell a lot of secondhand scrap materials and stuff like that, used parts, et cetera. You can get things that are not necessarily in pristine condition or the latest and greatest, but you can get a little bit better prices than you could get at one of the full-blown retail stores.
Yeah. And so Cubby Blast, this is the personal weapons store. This is actually one that we're doing a lot of work on the user interface right now. And that's another thing that we're hoping to deliver with the social module in late March, give or take, which is the full ability to navigate through the inventory selections for the stores. You won't yet likely be able to purchase anything, but you'll be able to get a very good sense of how the interface for browsing and inspecting and finding out basic informational statistics on the weapons works.
Yeah, well, the way the purchasing is going to work in most of the stores is you're going to go in with your mobiGlas and you'll look at all the physical stuff and it will have prices and you'll say, I want to buy it. You could say, I want to buy one or two or three or whatever you want to do. You do the transaction over your mobiGlas and then in most cases, the item will appear back in your hangar or in your ship or something. So you don't have to wheel a cart of weapons out of Cubby Blast. It's like they deliver them to you after you've bought it.
And that's actually true for a lot of things. I mean, if you're already wearing as many layers of clothing as you can and you buy additional clothing and you don't want to swap out what you currently have, then the clothing would be delivered to your hangar. The same thing for personal weapons. You want to buy several different rifles. You want to buy a large chunk of ammunition, parts for your ship. In general, kind of like what I mentioned earlier, your hangar is going to become more and more this large repository for all of your stuff.
So on the art side of a lot of these stores, what I'm trying to attack is to give a lot of these stores, obviously, personality when you walk in. We've got a wide variety of stores, everything from corporate chains to kind of mom and pop, scary gun store owner, redneck guy.
I think Cubby Blast is not a chain, right? Yeah, Cubby Blast is not a chain. So there are the chains that you'll see on a lot of planets and then there'll be unique stores that'll be on the planet. So Cubby Blast is one, I think there's some other ones like clothes stores and stuff like that. But the idea with what's happening on ArcCorp is it's going to be the first planetside prototype that shows you the variety of stores that you can likely expect, and interactions like the bar or getting healed up in the hospital. And then from there, it's more our production. But that gets the functionality for everything that we want to do planetside stubbed in, and then we build it from there, is the approach.
The reason why we put the hospital right after Cubby Blast is specifically because the hospital is basically where you're going to respawn, assuming you die out in space. It's going to find the nearest...
Yeah, this is basically the shop where you'll wind up being able to pick up a lot of missions, you'll be able to find out a lot of information in regards to commodity prices. Basically, this actually doesn't do justice. Come the release of the social module, this is actually one of the more attractive shops I think you're going to see, not just because of what's internal to it, but because you can actually see ships landing, cargo being unloaded outside. You can see all of the outside traffic through this...
Basically, right, this is the combination of the commodity exchange and the mission clearinghouse. You would go in here to get a job. Okay, here's a job to haul cargo from ArcCorp to wherever or something. You could also go there to sell and buy goods for you to trade around. So that's the commodity broker of Star Citizen. And it's also going to look different depending on where you are. That's the big flashy corporate version. And again, like Tony says, this is all very early work in progress. There's a lot of detail. It's still not there. The lighting, a whole bunch of other stuff. The process is all the base rooms and all the rest are getting stubbed in, and then hopefully in two months' time, you'll see something a lot more impressive.