Some of it's just their culture. So what kind of things they pay attention to, especially when it comes to breathing apparatuses or shapes, or maybe they have a specific style that they like or that they're more accustomed to, or things like that. So obviously, you also have different head shapes. So their head shape is different than a human's head shape. It's similar, but it's got some other key features. So is that something that we want to try to hide, or is this something we want to try to emphasize with the design? So we could pretty quickly and easily start saying, if we want to keep this sort of Mohawk-y vibe, we can kind of run with that.
No, this is more of one of these kind of things where we'll be able to have a visor or a glass piece that you will be able to see through the canopy of it. But I'm kind of looking for, with this, what that shape could be and why they would need it to be a certain shape. You need so much extra headroom here, so changing the shape of the helmet. They might have a very unique look to their helmets. This might be something that you can tell from a distance is them.
TL;DRGetting a helmet on is a hard problem, and films often skip it by having the helmet simply appear when the script needs quick action; the team still has to work out how it functions.
Putting helmets on is always a challenging thing. Even in movies, a lot of the helmets you see don't actually... Even some of the stuff in movies like Interstellar: the helmets in Interstellar are so incredibly small that they don't actually fit on any of the actors' heads, as a classic astronaut helmet. So things we've got to figure out when it comes to the functionality of it for these characters is...
Going back to the function, some of these things don't exactly make sense how to get it on. Marvel movies lately have gone to the "oh, it's just a button and the helmet builds over the head."
Yeah, it's just so easy, right? It's kind of one of those: we have this problem, and a lot of that stuff is built out of necessity for the script, actually. So when you see something like, we want to immediately get into an action scene, but they need to go fly in space or they need to do something, rather than spending the quick suit-up sequence time or whatever, it just turns into a "well, what if we just make it appear? How can we make it appear?" So those kind of conversations are pretty common, and we need this to go on very quickly. And it is just kind of an easy thing.
I think it would. It's definitely something we're playing with. A lot of the concepts that we've been showing are essentially... Whenever you start designing a race, it's like you do one first. It's hard to say. Even when you look at humans, if somebody were to draw one picture for what a human looks like, you'd only get one picture of one person. So this is sort of the snapshot of what we think one Banu would look like. It's not always about trying to define the entirety of the species. So right now, I think it would probably range in shape, size, color. We could do all different kinds of things with it that might make it more appealing or different.
TL;DRThe Banu design deliberately avoids hard 45-degree edges, taking cues from natural and anatomical forms, using soft shapes whose lines ease into each other like muscle insertion lines.
Yeah, absolutely. And when you look at organic stuff or you use a lot of reference from nature, you can see that occasionally, but especially in animals... A very common thing, especially for general artists, is to look at anatomy; human anatomy especially is where you start. We were talking before about comic book movies and stuff before the show started, and a huge inspiration, I think, for a lot of people is comic books. And when you look at and you start drawing the human figure, there's not a lot of those hard lines just in general. But there's a different type of line, which is an insertion line. So that's basically where two muscles would meet. There is a separation line, but it's very natural looking rather than a 45-degree line. So that's kind of what I'm actually playing with here: we've got some softer shapes that have lines, but they're meeting each other in a way that's more of one side is kind of easing into that angle and one side is not.
Oh, yeah. You can. I have tried to sculpt with a mouse before. It's very difficult. The best thing about the pen is it's more of a natural pen stroke. It's more akin to drawing. Whereas if you're drawing with a mouse, it's a lot like drawing with a bar of soap, which I think is really difficult. Or chalk.
TL;DRIt's possible the helmet makes it into the game, but many iterations are normally made and only one usually gets used, so they'll likely try plenty of other Banu helmet designs first.
That's the thing. If you're a subscriber, you have access to something called the Subscriber Vault. And in the Subscriber Vault, you can see dozens and dozens and dozens of concepts for ships that didn't make it to the Star Citizen universe, or versions of ships that did, but versions that we didn't use. So many, many concepts are created for any one particular design, and only one ever usually gets used. It's one of those things: when you buy one of those Art of Star Wars books or whatever, you can see two dozen different variations of what eventually became Kylo Ren. And you're just like, "Oh, wow, so many different designs. Oh, I love that one. That's the one I wanted."
It's pretty common. When you do concept art for movies, film, entertainment in general, especially on the art side, it's so common to do hundreds of iterations for one thing, and you have to accept, as part of the gig, part of what that job is, that only one's going to make it. So all your efforts and all your team's efforts are basically going to making the best possible thing. So is it possible that this helmet will go in? Yeah, it's totally possible, but we'll probably do plenty of other iterations on what a Banu helmet could look like before we really come to that resolution.
TL;DRThe female player character is on track for 3.5 with some bugs and fewer clothing options, though armor will match the male's and more clothing is planned for 3.6 and later.
Right now, it's definitely on track. One thing to note about the female player is that it's a massive feature. Obviously, we've been talking about it for a really long time. But the biggest thing about it is that there's so many different elements going into it from all different kinds of things we're doing right now. So we're having to adjust our shops, for example. So our shops are being adjusted because now you have multiple genders to choose from. So what is that experience like? Our character customizer's being overhauled because you have an additional gender. You have all the animations that are going to play, from just the basics of playing, all the gameplay stuff from shooting to flying ships to jumping; every possible animation that you have is going to need to be there for the female. So I guess what I'm getting at is there's so much in that that there will be some bugs. There will be some visual bugs. Maybe an animation isn't perfect, or some of the animations we haven't had the time to make a female version, and so we've just patched over the male version and we're using that. So there's going to be some stuff that we want to iterate on through the rest of, definitely, this year, to get it to a more final state. But I think for myself, looking at her as a feature, it's not worth a couple bugs of visual fidelity or shopping to put it off for another quarter, because you kind of get into this point of, "Oh, at the end of this quarter, this thing would be nice to have in. Oh, okay, we'll wait for that thing at the end of this quarter." So basically, for example, one of the big things is the female player is going to not have all of the clothing options that the male will have, because our tech team was hit very hard this quarter on our DNA work and our shop work and our character customizer work. So they haven't had the time to skin stuff this quarter, not as much as we would have wanted them to, right? And that basically just means they'll still have all the gameplay components and they'll be one-to-one there. But we had to make a choice of: is it nothing, or?
It's just that, like you said in the Pacheco segment in yesterday's ATV, pursuing that fantastic hair for Pacheco, if it's not ready by 3.5, we're not going to let it stop us from putting Pacheco out in 3.5.
So it's not that we're not going to do every armor one-to-one and all these clothes one-to-one. It's just we're going to do as many as we can up to the release of 3.5 and then put it out with what's ready, and then continue to iterate on it after that.
Exactly. And right now the female will have all of the armors that the male has. So as far as what we're kind of calling gameplay clothing, where the armor has more gameplay — you can store weapons, you can do things in it, you can go into space — we'll be one-to-one. So that's something that we've definitely focused on.
Well, that was one of the tenets of moving to this quarterly date-based release system: we were no longer going to wait until we had everything to put something out. We hit these quarterly releases and we push out with what's ready to push out.
I prefer tablet, actually. A lot of the artists here use Cintiqs, which is the sensitive monitors. There's other brands and stuff; Wacom is the biggest one. I like to use a tablet because, it sounds weird, but my hand gets in the way. So I don't like having...
I have never designed in VR. It seems pretty cool from what I've seen. But I have never. My face would get sweaty. I've seen a lot of really good work off of it, though. So I would like to at some point. Seems like it'd be a fun experience, for sure. Even if it doesn't work for your workflow, I think it maybe puts you in a different perspective or frame of mind. It might be a good way to change up your workflow.
It's possible. Maybe they need little hearing speakers. You can add little details in there. And that's kind of the fun stuff. I feel like their designs would be a little simpler overall, just because I think the organic nature leads to that, rather than having all kinds of crazy details.
TL;DRThe backer rewards are already attributed in hangars, and implementation is in the backlog, prioritized and scheduled, but no release date can be given beyond saying it's closer than ever.
Now, I will say before you get to it, they have already been attributed. When you go to your hangar on the RSI website, you can see them attributed, so you should have them. But what about implementing? That's your area.
Implementation-wise, we have just recently been going through all of our backlogs, and we've been talking about this a lot and kind of prioritizing everything, getting it in a good spot. So we have put them in the backlog, they are prioritized. We can't say when they're going to come out, but I can tell you that we're closer than we've ever been. So we're working on them, but I can't tell you exactly [when they'll be out].
If you missed it in that incredibly long and drawn-out answer, they're on the backlog. They are scheduled. They've got JIRAs for them. They're all set up. And when resources are available, they will get their time to shine.
Yeah, we have. I would say absolutely. We've been kind of thinking about some more recent ideas, which are a little more off the wall, actually, than what you've been thinking about. So maybe from aliens or things that you haven't encountered, we haven't talked about yet, but yes, we will definitely be doing armors based off of other races.
But yeah, we're definitely thinking about that. I think part of our customization system is we're able to do a lot of different things. We can pretty much do anything we want. There's limitations to certain sizes and shapes, but other than that, the actual content we put in can be pretty much whatever.
That beard shall never return. But that does lead us into something. In the first iteration of the Character Customizer coming through, we do have the Ricky. Talk about the Ricky for a second.
The Ricky was basically, whenever you work internal versus external, you can name things differently. So I think I had found, we were looking for hairstyles and I had found a style that was very similar to Ricky's, and I was just like, oh, I'll put it up as the Ricky. And normally when you go through something, it may just say, I don't know, some of our assets are like Marine One, and then when it goes into the game, it's got a cool name. Here it was Ricky, and they just kept it as Ricky, which is fine.
TL;DRClothing and armor will affect characters, such as item ports and possibly speed, and can already carry stats, but how far this goes is still being tested.
Yeah, they will and they can. Let's talk about the armor we have right now, light, medium, and heavy. Each one of those allows for different ports. So I was going to have Gage speak about item ports, but generally what it means is you can put on more stuff, if you wanted to talk about that for a bit.
Oh sure, and also this goes heavy into design too, which is kind of outside of our team. A lot of what we'll do is implement what design wants to do with these clothing or armors and then we kind of make that happen. So like you said with item ports, or even maybe speed variations. In this one it says speed, so if you have certain armors, obviously you're not going to run as fast, or maybe it'll be an enhanced armor, maybe you could run faster. Especially with clothing. But yeah, so absolutely. Clothing will affect you. How drastic that will be, I think, is still in the works. It's up for debate. We test it out.
We've thought about that. The challenge for it is actually, generally across our game, one of the problems, it's not really a problem, but it is a problem that we have within the characters, is fidelity. So to make hair that looks good, like I don't think the hair that we have in the character creator looks great yet, I'll be totally honest with you, but to make something that's going to look good in multiple states is really difficult. Maybe you could do something where it's gradiating on a ramp and it slowly reveals more of what the style would be. Or maybe the cards slowly stretch over time. You could do something, but it gets really difficult to make it look consistently good. So it's something we can do and it's something we might explore, but right now it's not top priority.
TL;DRThe first customizer is meant as a basic early version so the team can ship easy wins and catch problems early instead of waiting for a complete one.
I would treat it as a classic alpha, a 0.1 kind of thing. We've talked about DNA many times, and questions like that or features like that. And I think the challenge is there's a lot of work that goes into that, not just on the art side, but also on the technical side, on the optimization side. How heavy is it to run something like that? There's network issues now where somebody goes across. I don't want to talk about that too much because that's just explaining some of the issues we have to work through, but it comes down to: do we as a company, providing for the backers and fans and players, wait for all that to come out so we can roll it out as one big thing, or do we get some easy wins out of the way and say, you know what, this isn't the final that we want it to be, but it's enough that we can start fulfilling and playing, and also learning for ourselves. If we were to roll out the final iteration, there would maybe be a lot of problems we could have caught early on. So releasing those early is better.
TL;DRThe early customizer lets the team find and solve problems on a small base, such as the neck seam, and builds groundwork for items, UI, entitlements and persistence.
Definitely an advantage in terms of seeing some problems early that we solve now. Like the neck seam, we went over this a little bit in the interviews. The neck seam problem, while we could have solved it later, finding it now allowed us to then solve problems on the female as well. And then the techniques to solve that will be carried over, and now we know what to do. So going forward, when we have more assets, more aliens maybe, we know how to solve this problem.
I was just going to say, it's a lot easier to fix problems on the base level. When we release the full product and you have a large amount of stuff, we're going to be like, I don't know where to put things, I don't know what's causing this issue. But when we start off with a small package, you can start focusing on those base issues and then we just stack on top of it. So it's a smoother transition to the final product.
It's building blocks for a lot of things, everything from the items to how the items interplay, making sure that you're seeing other people's characters in the same way that you're seeing your own. We're looking at things like icons, we're looking at UI. So it's not just getting that small thing, it's a bigger set of things.
And the entitlement tech, too. We got a lot of that out of the way, which is really nice. Persistence. There's a lot of things that happen. Doing that on the small side was much better.