Reverse the Verse: January 15th, 2016

Jared Huckaby · Community Manager

We didn't pay nothing. We're notoriously frugal with our money. So we didn't pay nothing.

Ben Lesnick · Director of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships

I think Chris said in an interview just recently, we're now making it a priority going into this year, but for the current build, it's no VR support.

Ben Lesnick · Director of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships

We had it in the hangar for a while, and the specs just kept changing for the Oculus Rift. And we knew that Crytek themselves were doing VR implementation, and rather than double up on the work, we wanted to wait for them to finish their implementation and see what aspects of it we could do. And then we hired all the people who were doing it.

Ben Lesnick · Director of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships

No, I don't think we're going to do a January livestream. We did talk about one, but it feels like when we do a big event livestream, it should have something tangible to it.

Jared Huckaby · Community Manager

We've talked about that in the past. I think we're not quite there yet, but it's definitely something we've looked into doing. Eventually we'll replace our Tuesday show, which was Meet the Devs, and we know we want that to be gameplay focused. So that's almost certainly something you'll see whenever we get that Tuesday show back up.

Ben Lesnick · Director of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships

My broad opinion of whenever you do an eSport thing: when you go into it saying, this is going to be the new sport, nobody cares. So let's do a game that's as good as possible. I have a feeling that if there's an eSport that comes out of Star Citizen, it'll be something we don't predict at all.

Will Lewis · Community Manager, Reload Studios

I've always seen eSports as, it has to be grassroots to build up. Otherwise, you're just throwing stuff out there hoping that it sticks, and it just isn't the same.

Ben Lesnick · Director of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships

We will see. We're going to follow the same process. We'll get it up on the PTU as soon as we have a viable in-house build. We'd like that to be sooner than later, but we will see what happens. We're not going to tell you what to expect from 2.2 just yet. We're still putting it together.

Ben Lesnick · Director of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships

Actually, it was cool. I was looking at the schedules, everybody's calendars this morning, and everybody's in 2.2 kickoff meetings. It's less than 24 hours after 2.1 goes out. Although we are also talking about a patch for 2.1 that fixes a couple of minor issues and Vanguard stuff. We'll have more on that when it happens.

Ben Lesnick · Director of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships

Well, the whole game is being actively worked on. All the ships are being balanced and edited, and bugs with them are being fixed. If you have any issues with the Glaive, report them to the Issue Council and they'll be added for folks to look at.

Ben Lesnick · Director of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships

No, other than that it's just called small Corvette. By the way, that's a reference to something I mentioned on Reddit a couple days ago. I think somebody asked what ships were being concepted. Three are absolutely happening, which is the Esperia Prowler, the small Corvette, and the Pirate Interceptor, but no details about any of those just yet. And then we have this whole backlist of others that we want to do but aren't 100% sure yet. We want to do a smaller mining ship. We want to do a Drake Dragonfly. So plenty more ships to come. Those three are the ones that are in the pipeline now.

Jared Huckaby · Community Manager

No, it does not have a quantum drive. The Argo is a snub fighter or an ultralight spacecraft. They do not have quantum drives or jump drives. Although, if you guys are Argo fans, I was just talking to Erin yesterday. He was saying, we might be able to make it hangar ready sooner or later. So if people out there want to play around with the Argo, let us know. Get some grassroots Argo support. The Argo and the Mining Crab, they're thinking, maybe.

Jared Huckaby · Community Manager

Because I forgot. We were working on the monthly report. We will get the subscriber vault out to you later today. Sorry, subscribers. I didn't even put it on the schedule. When I do the schedule on Monday, you'll notice subscriber vault is not on the schedule, because I knew Wednesday's time would be taken.

Alexis Lesnick · Subscription Manager

I would say that our subscriber vault updates have been much more frequent than they previously were.

Ben Lesnick · Director of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships

I actually did have a nice chat with the folks in the UK yesterday about getting more art in Shotgun. And it was amazing, because it was like turning on a tap. Shotgun is our internal art collection thing where people from around the company are supposed to submit things for review. And we had this meeting yesterday and I was like, we're going to run out of stuff to put in the vault if people aren't submitting to Shotgun. And they were like, oh, we should be doing that? And like two hours later, there's like 500 new images in there.

Ben Lesnick · Director of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships

Shotgun, for people on the outside of Star Citizen, is like when you went to Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory and you opened the doors and there's the ocean of candy out there. That's what Shotgun is. Every new employee who was a backer or a fan before they started, the first two weeks when you walk past the computer, they're just in Shotgun, looking at all the cool stuff that we're making.

Jared Huckaby · Community Manager

In our November live stream, we did a whole segment on our character pipeline. Those videos are up on YouTube, so you'll probably want to check that out if you haven't. Other than that, the PU stuff is coming along. I think we'll hear more about that the next time we get to go out to Austin and interview a bunch of PU folks.

Jared Huckaby · Community Manager

I know talking with Forrest about this subject last week, he was talking a lot about hair. Hair is a really tough part of designing the characters. We've got lots of plans for figuring out hair. We want to give you lots of options. I know everybody's like, I want beards and stuff. So we want to make sure it's a system that we really like.

Jared Huckaby · Community Manager

Believe it or not, I actually spent Wednesday morning testing the fish. I hooked up an account with every variation of the fish. We have two different fish tanks, but we had three different fish that could only be gotten with the fish tanks, so I was adding them all to make sure that none of them overwrote the other ones, because it was a very important thing. I even talked to Ben, I'm like, can this fish work with this fish? And I'm happy to say that if you have all the fish, they do all show up.

Ben Lesnick · Director of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships

Not too distant future. We're actually still building, as you can probably hear around us. In fact, we're putting in flooring in the commissary area today. Once it's done, it's going to look really cool. So once our contractors are finished, which should be very, very soon, we'll show you all the cool stuff we're making.

Vincent Sinatra · QA

It's looking good so far. A lot of Vanguard talk. People are really excited.

Randy Vasquez · Associate Producer

A lot of talk about the Vanguard and its current performance. Of course, nothing is final.

Randy Vasquez · Associate Producer

Nothing is final in this game. We're still working on the Constellation, so I know there's a lot of talk about that. So that is being worked on. Hopefully it'll be fixed soon.

Jared Huckaby · Community Manager

And I know some people have reported that some HUD elements are missing from the Cutlass. That's on the list.

Jared Huckaby · Community Manager

My father is text messaging me about his Cutlass. My own father is part of the Cutlass crew, and he's like, hey, when my Cutlass spawned on the platform, it bounced and exploded. Did I do something wrong? I'm like, no, Dad. It's just a bug. We're working on it. My dad is sending me pictures of his Cutlass. He takes pictures of his TV. So no. We love the Cutlass here. In fact, the new artwork that's going up in our commissary that Jeremiah Lee has been working on has many Cutlasses. And I even remarked, I'm like, this is a lot of Cutlasses in this artwork.

Randy Vasquez · Associate Producer

We're just getting into the really big ships, so something like the Starfarer, we're still sorting out how that'll work both with the hangar and with Port Olisar. It's just one of the many pieces that we're slowly getting sorted out. We're just trying to get the medium-sized ships in the game now with the Connie and the Freelancer, so it's just iterating and building things out and finding out what actually is going to work long-term.

Jared Huckaby · Community Manager

We've got some time. The Starfarer is going to go into the hangar, then it'll be in the hangar for a while before it becomes flight ready. So we have some time to figure that stuff out. Prioritization is probably one of the most important aspects of game development, and the hardest. We all want the Banu Merchantman to be done, but it just doesn't make sense yet.

Randy Vasquez · Associate Producer

Well, and that's also the same, because I see a lot of questions about, will this variant be ready when the ship is hangar ready? And across the board, realistically, no. We're going to get a baseline of the ship set up, hangar ready, flight ready, and then we'll start getting all those variants built out, set up, and get those flyable when it's the appropriate time. We can't do everything all at once now. There's only so many people, so many days.

Jared Huckaby · Community Manager

We just had a meeting with Turbulent yesterday about that. That's underway. No ETA yet because it's a lot of data entry and stuff, but it's coming. It's in active development, after some amazing work by Mr. Sherman and his team to rejigger all of our stats and stuff for our ships.

Randy Vasquez · Associate Producer

It's been something I know a lot of you guys have been asking for for months. It's definitely something that we've needed now as we get closer and closer to bringing out the big component refits. It's just lining up to be the right time to also start working on getting all this information cleaned up for you. So something I look forward to.

Jared Huckaby · Community Manager

And what I really look forward to is that after it happens, everybody goes, that's how my ship changed? And they get angry at me. And I become the meat shield for that.

Ben Lesnick · Director of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships

No, but I will check with Turbulent next week. The main Turbulent folks, Benoit and everybody, are coming here next week to basically sit down and answer all of the questions you ask us. So we will know a lot more in a week or so. But basically our web platform is more integrated in with our project than I think I've seen anywhere else. It's more integrated than they expected initially.

Jared Huckaby · Community Manager

So like with anything else, there's only a finite number of resources and they have to prioritize the things that they work on. So it's something that's on the list, but it may not always be the most pressing thing.

Jared Huckaby · Community Manager

No progress on hangar loaners yet. Loaners are still just for flyable ships. It's just something we're going to investigate, but no promises. We're going to try really hard to do that, at least for the Starfarer, because I think the cool thing about the Starfarer is going to be exploring this giant ship, and we'd like everybody to have that feeling.

Jared Huckaby · Community Manager

Ship security will come. Right now it's a little Grand Theft Star Citizen, but that's because there's no persistence.

Randy Vasquez · Associate Producer

Well, obviously, like I said, people are flipping out over the Vanguard in its current performance. Not final, of course. It's not quite operating up to specs as we wish it. That's probably number one on the agenda for 2.1. Obviously, people love the big guns, but they want to be able to swap them out. And it's performing a little too tight when it comes to maneuverability right now. So that'll probably be toned down a little bit.

Randy Vasquez · Associate Producer

The shields and the hull issue is definitely something we're looking into. It's a little squishy at the moment. Even with that, the Vanguard is really one of our first ships that was built from the ground up with the new component refit system that's coming out soon in mind. The unfortunate side effect of that is not everything it needed for the shields to work as intended is fully set up. So once that's all set up, it should pick right back up and get closer to where it should be. It has its six shield generators installed, it's just they're not all playing nice together. But that should definitely be getting cleaned up, hopefully in the near future as more of this component stuff rolls out.

Jared Huckaby · Community Manager

So basically it exists in a different way than the other ships.

Jared Huckaby · Community Manager

A little bit, yeah. So once we convert everything over, once we get the Hornet and everything else to the new system, it'll even out some more. Once all that rolls out, there's that whole first month or so of this new component system, I'm expecting a lot of balance threads to pop up from it. There's the typical balance threads, and then every ship will have two or three different balance threads about it when all this stuff happens. So it's a giant set of sweeping changes. Well, if people want to get heard, we've got our Let's Talk About Spaceships section on the forums. We've got a whole bunch of threads set up to get specific feedback on specific ships.

Jared Huckaby · Community Manager

Issue Council.

Randy Vasquez · Associate Producer

Issue Council as well. But let us know on the boards. So give me a shout.

Randy Vasquez · Associate Producer

So, I have actually stopped working on the Cat since I switched over to production, but I'm still definitely talking with Elwin, I'm talking with Kirk, and I'm making sure that all the designs and everything are situated and pushed over.

Ben Lesnick · Director of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships

We're going to be able to start running with that once we get it to a point where it's, let's start building this for the hangar. It's planned out really well.

Randy Vasquez · Associate Producer

All the Caterpillar threads I've been just pouring through for the past couple of weeks and making sure that those are all in the design documents, so that way whoever takes it over from me, from Kirk, they're basically going to know exactly what modules need to be done, how the modules need to be set, all the metrics are set up. I've been talking with everybody from the FPS guys over to Bender, because Bender's working on some of the FPS metrics, and he's working on the animations, as well as Elwin and his team, what they need to have to build the ship out, to make sure that it is the modular Caterpillar that it needs to be. Because that ship is awesome. I love that ship.