Reverse the Verse: October Subscriber Edition

It's in the works. The Crucible is a really complicated ship.

Absolutely. The Crucible is the penultimate ship in our most recent wave of fan-voted designs. It is a repair ship. It's designed at its base to be able to repair military fighters in the field. So it's sized so that a Hornet or a Gladiator or anything of that size will fit in its rear bay, which is kind of inspired by the shuttle. You see the NASA orbiter, the back part, I'm sure there's a more technical term, but with the clamshell doors, and it can bring in a satellite. It has the same Canadarm-style grabbers and can bring a fighter in. For a larger ship, it kind of saddles up to it and repairs it in open space. It's a very complex ship. There's a lot of movement with it and a lot of game mechanics in it that we have to have right. Todd Papy's been in charge of the design process for repair in general. You guys probably saw some repair in the CitizenCon demo. It's not like that. That's kind of our shortcut repair for having a system in right now; the actual system's gonna be a bunch more complex and you'll learn all about it when the Crucible hits. No ETA, but it's almost certainly the next one. We're very happy with the design now. What else can I say about it? It's modular. The back bay section can be removed and replaced with something else. And it was an initial concept by Ryan Church, who was just fantastic. He's been with the project ever since the very start. He did the Constellation and many of our most favorite ships. And it's another cool ship from him.

No, I haven't [started on it]. I mean, I've seen the concept model as it's been getting worked on and seeing the changes based on the game design needs. So I think that Gurmukh probably already touched on this a little bit, where one of the challenges is trying to get it to fit the manufacturer that we're working with, making sure that the interior looks like Anvil. And one of the other challenges, which I think is going to be a pretty big one, is making sure that we have a clear-cut sort of delineation between ships that can fit inside of it and ships that can't, since there's a limited space in the repair bay. So that's basically it for right now. We're really just focusing on making sure that the mechanics are all set in stone before we start actually building out the art. So we have some of our game designers in-house starting to look at where things are actually going to be placed inside, what the flow is going to be like going from one location to another, things like that. And then hopefully we'll be able to grab that and then build the art on top of it.

For me, I do most of my design and modeling in Maya, and then I render in KeyShot, and then I finish it up in Photoshop.

You've become a big proponent of KeyShot lately.

Yeah, KeyShot. A couple of us have been taking part in the beta testing for KeyShot 6 and it's really cool. The thing that sold me on it is just it's really easy to use and you don't get headaches from thinking about render settings and hoping your renders turn out nice. It's almost like a real-time render, so you pretty much see what you're gonna get on your screen pretty quick, and really high quality. Super fast. We were using V-Ray previously, and even with V-Ray RT, which is great, it's amazing, but the materials are pretty much already built in there [in KeyShot], it's so intuitive, you can get something out in a day. KeyShot, yeah, it's real easy, and for me, the best part is it keeps me in my artist mode, like design mode. I don't have to worry. Drag and drop materials; I don't have to worry about trying to set up materials and figuring out the settings to make it the right kind of metal or the right kind of glass or whatever. So that's just why I enjoy using it, because it's really easy.

No, I'm not super familiar with that.

What's the system that we are using for our cloth and physics? That's basically what they're talking about.

Well, I don't think we're necessarily supposed to talk about it right now, only because we have to see. If we start talking about it, making promises, we have to see how much we can use the amount of memory, because it still is an MMO. So there's a lot of things we're testing out, but at the same time, we have to consider memory limits. So you can do a whole bunch of stuff, but we need to see what we can do using the amount of memory we have in our game. So we're doing a couple of tests to see what we can do with physics and cloth sims and blended normal maps and all that stuff. So we're looking into it. We just got to see, because essentially if you want clothing to fold as it's moving, there's three more maps that need to be loaded. That's only if you're using three blending maps, and you can use four, you can use five. When that is taken into place, that means there's less customization, but a higher quality bar. Because we want to give a lot of customization, we need to determine what really is our importance.

There will be. There are designers. He's been working on a few things for certain types. I think Jeremiah can talk more about it. You also know about Megan's concepts, like Terra fashion casual and that kind of stuff. You'll be able to understand the designer and that stuff.

Well, we have companies in our game, right?

The answer is yes, we do.

Different corporations, or like different companies. It'll be like the Gucci of Star Citizen, and you'll be able to tell by a logo or a tag.

Yeah, we've got Terra Casual, there's high fashion. We did a couple of sneak peeks about a month or two ago where we showed a bunch of different outfits in the Terra [style]. And people love those.

For example, I've been working on the Shubin for about a good month and a half. And we've come up with a style that fits just the Shubin Corporation. So now that process is applied to all corporations. So a Shubin shirt will not look identical to a Terra Casual. There'll be different design cues for each shirt. So if you see someone on the street wearing a certain look, you'll most likely be able to identify, oh, he's wearing a Microtech t-shirt or a Shubin or whatever.

I can tell you that it is going to be built out in Austin, which is a little sad for me because I really wanted to build that ship, but it's cool, I got the Reliant.

But they're doing some concept stuff in the UK right now.

Yeah, so they're doing some new concept passes on the Khartu-al exterior and interior, sort of to build out the culture kit for the Xi'an, and that's going to be used as the base for all of the Xi'an ships. The Xi'an culture and all that good stuff. And that's going to influence the Khartu-al. So it's not going to look exactly the same as the concept that you guys have seen, but it looks freaking awesome. It looks better.

On ATV last week, you saw some material tests for the Xi'an scout. It was just one of many tests that they're doing. So yeah, they're working on it.

Essentially what happened is, with these legacy characters, we weren't 100% aware of what was going to be EVA capable and what was not going to be EVA capable. That is something that has been developed and thought about and then reconcepted. So with the characters who have exposed necks, we assumed that they were going to be just in combat. So now we have a collar system that works. If your suit is EVA capable and you put on a helmet, it will lock and it will not expose your neck. So the reason for the exposed necks was because we wanted to demonstrate something and we didn't have a character ready to go to demonstrate that kind of technology. Because when we were doing the light marine and that kind of stuff, there wasn't 'this one should be EVA, this one should not be EVA'. So, yes, all characters who will be in space will not have exposed necks.

Even in concept phase, they ask us those questions. There has to be a purpose for the suit; I can't just make an astronaut suit and not have seals on it, right? So we have to do callouts on our concepts to say, this is where the seals are, this is where the helmet attaches to the suit, this is where the boot seals, this is where the glove seals. So we do take it into consideration. So that was just an early-phase thing.

So we've come an awful long way from the original Wing Commander, where you could bail out of your ship wearing a leather jacket.

Off the top of my head, the UK is going to be working on Aegis, MISC... I forget the other two.

Well, we can go through. Where's Anvil?

Anvil is going to be here.

Yeah, so Anvil is going to be US. We'll have Drake also.

We're doing RSI too, right?

We are also doing RSI, and we're also doing Origin.

I think our side is probably going to be mostly Josh Pughness and Chris Smith, because they know that stuff.

Well, yeah, but that's like the US team, right? LA and Austin are part of the US team. So we have those four, and there's a few other ones in there that haven't really been split up. Like, what's the Consolidated Outland, the Mustang company? That one hasn't been assigned to any country because we only have that one ship right now. So when something else comes along, we'll pop that in somewhere. And I think, oh, actually, UK is also going to be handling the Vanduul ships, all of them.

Hopefully a lot. A benefit of working on characters is that some of the concepts you can actually develop while you're modeling them, because we kind of have more of a liquid pipeline; things can change. So when people have ideas, you can kind of implement it further along in the process. So really, if Jeremiah has a really good idea about how he wants to do technology and that kind of stuff, we'll do our best to kind of implement that. So right now, I think a lot of the fashion is not high tech, but at the same time, you're in ArcCorp, right? So when you go to a place like Terra, where it's more expensive, we're going to start implementing that a lot more in just the regular fashion. When it comes to military outfits and pilot suits and that kind of stuff with the UEE, obviously the style that we go for is extremely high tech, but also a little bit of a low-tech, grungy, alien kind of feel, which is essentially the style of our game. So we're going to definitely blend the two a little bit more, but it really depends on what kind of planet you're coming from, what kind of system you're in. All that stuff has been pretty addressed.

For concepts, it really depends on what type of person this character is, right? So if this is just a regular miner, you just have a onesie, that can take a day, right? But if we're going on to a heavy marine, where it has all these different functions, attachment points, and also EVA capabilities, those things take a little bit more time. And just really the uniqueness of the character kind of defines how long a character would take. And plus, I do not just one character, but three variations of that character. So a little bit more time, because I can't just show the producers and the artists and also Chris just one concept and be like, 'That's what you got.' You can't do that. So I have to show different variations, and whichever meets the standards and also the creativity bar, they'll select one out of three. So it really depends. I've had characters approved in two days, and I've also had characters approved in two weeks.

I think that's the nature of the beast with being an artist. It's one of these amorphous things where you can build a checklist of everything you need to do, but you don't necessarily know, going into it, how long each thing is going to take. And sometimes I'll be working on a piece of geometry and I'll think, oh my god, this is going to take me three days, and it'll take me a day. And then other times I'll think, this is going to take an hour, and it takes six. And our producers hate us for that. But I think that's the nature of being an artist: sometimes things take a long time, because you're going through this stuff and figuring out how it looks, where it's going to go, how it's going to factor into the ship.

Ships, they take a really long time. It just depends. Usually the size of the ship definitely changes the amount of time it'll take for concept. But a single-seater, I would say roughly about a month. And then you just build from there; the bigger the ship, the longer it's going to take. And one of the things is the company that is creating that ship. For example, Aegis is one of our more defined companies within the ship companies that we have already. The Retaliator kind of sets the tone for what future Aegis ships are going to look like. So when you have something like that providing information, it will speed up the concept a lot, but if it's a company where there's a lot less pre-made ships to define it, then it's going to take even longer, just because you're still trying to figure out the look and the feel and all that for that company. So it's a hard question to answer. As well, interiors take a long time. For the Vanguard, for example, interiors for three variants was about two months, with all the art and all the modeling and all the design, which I think is pretty good. And then the exterior for that one was also about two months, just to figure out the basic shapes and stuff like that. But if another ship similar to the Vanguard by Aegis was to be done, now I have a lot of assets I could reuse. So the more we do it, the quicker it's going to get. So yeah, I hope that helps.

I think we all want to, and some of us have more time to do it than others. That's the honest answer.

Yeah, same here. When you're here till 7:30 or 8 o'clock and then it's an hour home, because it's LA traffic, and you're home by 9 and then your girlfriend's like... and you've got to deal with that.

It's also like, I start new projects all the time at home and I never finish them, so I have a hard drive filled with 50% projects. It definitely takes brain power, and usually when I go home I literally want to turn my brain off, so I watch trashy TV and lay on the couch.

Is art considered... because Gurmukh's going to be teaching a class soon.

Yeah, that's called facilitating art. It's also called work. Jeremiah teaches a class, creature design.

But I do do demos in that class, and I do draw.

I would say designing space bathrooms is kind of weird. Every ship I've worked on has a space toilet.

Tell us about the process of designing a space toilet.

Well, you've got to think about how comfortable it's going to be. You don't want to be crammed, because you're going to be doing your business.

Now, when you design space toilet paper, do you go over the roll or do you go under the roll?

I don't design space toilet paper, because on the toilets I design, you press a button and it cleans everything for you.

Does it have to stay in Star Citizen, though?

No. He didn't specify.

Well, the weirdest thing I've ever worked on is for a film that's coming soon. I can't talk about it. But the director told me that he wanted a creature whose face has to look like female genitalia. And so, yeah, I've worked on that.

That's the plan. Like if I like the torso on this space suit, I like the gloves on this space suit, I like the helmet on this space suit.

I mean, that's the dream, though, right? Being able to customize whatever, as an MMO. Because the way we're doing our characters, I could be wrong, but from what Forrest and Omar were telling me, there will literally be stages on the characters. One will be the glove, and we call them items, right? So the whole concept of components: you can swap in, swap out. So yes, you can have an RSI helmet, and then you might have a light marine boot. That's the idea. That's what we're working for.

We're trying to do the same thing with ships, too. We're trying to make as much stuff modular as possible while still being able to keep things unique. Because in the end, you don't want a bunch of Frankenstein-looking things. But you do want customization. So we're figuring out a way to make sure that you get both.

What they need to do is they need to bribe us. No, I'm just kidding. Poly counts are, I guess, kind of hard to answer. It just depends on the size of the ship.

We have a guide that we're trying to stick to, but different ships obviously require different amounts of poly count, depending on how big they are. But we do have guides that we're trying to stick to very, very hard. We are breaking them down by small, medium-sized and capital. And I think they break down to somewhere around 300,000 polys for a small ship. And that would be like a single-seater ship, like a Hornet or a Gladiator or a Gladius or something like that. A ship more the size of the Retaliator and Constellation is supposed to stick somewhere around 500. And capital-class ships, we are trying to get them in somewhere around 750 to a million polygons. But again, these are just basic guides, and every ship is unique and has totally different requirements. So you're going to see ships that just do not fit in that at all, depending on what the requirements of that ship are. But those are the things that we're trying to aim for, for performance reasons and production reasons and things like that.

And I don't know, will we allow people to put their own ships in the game? I don't think so.

Maybe we don't. I mean, the modding community can put whatever the hell they want in it, right?

It's a long way away. We don't know yet. So that's something to be figured out in the future.