Star Citizen: Subscriber's Town Hall w/ UK Props Team

So basically the props team, we make everything you see in the environments that aren't bolted to the walls and don't fly around or talk. We make everything from litter to bins, or trash for any Americans out there. We make chairs, ship components.

So as Cory says, we're very much a content creation team. So we're much like the environment team or the character team or the ship art team, and our responsibility is quite broad. So we'll make anything from phones and pads all the way up to room-size generators, to the ship components, and it can be anything in between. We make a lot of the stock for the shops that you might interact with. We don't make the character clothing, but we would make the world assets of that clothing that's seen in game and used. We fill it up in Marvelous Designer, which is actually quite fun. It's like doing your laundry at home. I think the way to think of it is if you were to take something like this office, we wouldn't make the floors, walls or ceilings, but we'd make anything else that's, as Cory says, not bolted down, doesn't fly, doesn't talk.

Those are basically the criteria for what we make. And special effects and stuff is not really our jam either.

Things like your little cactus that you have on your table.

Yeah, precisely. That's a prime example. Though we do have a foliage team in Frankfurt as well, and they help out with the planet-side foliage assets, but we do dabble in the veg market a bit.

Yeah, I think it's quite wide, I'd say.

Avionics. So off the top of my head, we're doing power plants, quantum drives, avionics or computers. We're doing shield generators, jump stabilizers. There's a whole range of ship items that we're making. We're not necessarily responsible for what types of items we make. That's more of a design-led side of things. That very much comes from the gameplay and what kind of gameplay they're trying to make. But we work closely with the designers and the tech design team to supply the art that they're requesting. The way it would normally work is that they would say, we're after a shield generator item so that we can customize it, we can damage it, tweak the sub items within that ship item. And so they'll come to us with requests and then we deliver them the actual physical asset that you'd see in engine.

So a real deal 3D asset that has to not only fit into a spot on a ship, but they'll be able to remove it, put it back in, stuff like that.

Yeah, absolutely. So I guess I missed out one important step, that was the concept step. So normally it goes from design over to the props team. We'll work with the concept artists to agree on the forms and the function and how it should work. And then it goes over to concept and they come up with making it look really cool, look really nice.

So the concepts we get for the ship components are great. I really, really love working from the concepts we get from them.

And in terms of the scale and the size, obviously our ships range from single seaters up to, well, massive. And so there is a massive range in items. I think our smallest ship... For the Dragonflies as well. Don't forget, we do ship items, so the vehicle scale. So the smallest ones are, I think they're something like 25 centimetres or 30 centimetres, something like that. You can almost pick it up with one hand, and then they go right up to the large, which is the size of this room. And each of them has to have an interaction with the player. So, like you say, if it's big enough to be picked up, then it can be picked up. If not, then you'll be swapping these things out. And then they've got sub items that you can then plug into them so you can tune some of the performance and the stats on it, but again, that very much gets to the realm of design. We just make things look pretty.

Well, they're quite simple in terms of their premise. It's just essentially a box, and it's got a set of drawers which have the actual computers, the processors, and the guts on them.

I think a lot of our reference for those was taken from server blades.

Like hot-swapping kind of components.

Yeah, and even today's server blades are getting pretty sci-fi, or they're pushing boundaries of the aesthetics of them. And so that's where a lot of the inspiration came from, from that side of things. I mean, probably my favorite so far have been the quantum drives, because I think they look really, really cool. And the concepts are really cool. And I think the implementation, the artists that work on them have done a really good job of... the thing with concepts is concepts are all about making it look the part. We normally supply them fairly tight metrics to work to as well. I have to say that our concept team do a really good job of sticking to those rules that we've set out, because they are so important when it comes to putting these in each different ship. It's our job to take that concept and go, okay, well, this is what we want it to look like, but we also need it to function so that the character can actually fit their hand within these things, and make sure that there's consistency across all the different ship items. I think for the small ship items, we've covered five different types of item and there's between 20 and 25 per type, so that's just for the first five. Many, many more types, and that's just for smalls, and then we've got vehicle, mediums, larges, capitals and onwards. It's really important that we build consistency into them so that they work from a game point of view, really.

There's also the stylistic consistency as well between the different ship manufacturers, and that's one thing that Concept do really well, is convey the language of each manufacturer in the components, and they have proper branding basically. The outside of them is consistent with the brands.

So basically when you see a particular type of ship prop, you'll be able to see, that's a Wen/Cassel product, propulsion.

Yeah, totally. I think, was it you watching the Godi? That was really funny. So the Godi manufacturer, they've got a really strong brand identity. They were really good. Cory can talk about it. They're the good fun ones, in my opinion.

I worked on quite a few of the shield generators. They were probably my favorite thing to work on, because there was quite a lot of interesting curves and shapes to them. Considering they all have basically the same form factor between the manufacturers, they look so different. At first glance, you wouldn't really know that they all functionally have the same properties. Also, creating the variants was quite fun. We're given, with the concept, the color scheme for that manufacturer and for the different grades. So I should probably explain that as well. Each ship component comes with a set of grades, usually three or four. And those grades, you've got low grade ones, generally made out of cheaper materials, to the more pristine, using excessively nice materials and really high gloss finishes and so on. And you get the color scheme and you have to say to yourself, okay, how can I make it look consistent with this color scheme, but make it look cheaper? And then how can I make it look fancy?

Yeah, and I think that's something that's quite important, because there's a huge amount of lore in our game, and with these brands, going to that level of detail so that you can tell... because these are physical items in the game, you want to be able to, when you see them, instantly recognize, like you say, the lower quality asset versus the high performing asset. So I think it's a really nice and rewarding thing to be able to do, so that you can see that if you are increasing your ship's performance or your item's performance, we try and do our best to reflect that in the art as well.

Depending on the complexity of the prop, we follow a few different pipelines, if you like. For something like a shield generator that's got quite a lot of gameplay as part of it, it's very much there for a purpose. We wouldn't really start working on any of this stuff until we've got a full design doc and we've had a good conversation with design and really understand what it does. Not just what it should look like and where it should go, but what the functionality of it is. Because like I say, that plays a big part for us in its metrics. And if you need the internals to be accessible, then we need to be able to do that. So from that point, it would be a conversation with the concept team, and we would have a sit-down with them and a kick-off with them, especially if it was the first shield generator we were making. Then we'd probably have a meeting about it and get all the questions out there, so that we try and answer as much of it upfront before we start the work. And then from that point, we get a signed-off concept from the art director and from the concept team, and it comes over to us. I do the boring scheduling side of things and then put it on someone's plate, and then it would go over to an artist like Cory.

So once it's been briefed out and we know it's not going to change, we know how it's going to function, things to consider such as physical constraints: it's got to fit into this kind of size hole, the doors are going to have to open in this way. We flesh it out and build a template for it, and we try and unify positions of certain things. For instance, the shield generators, they have these end caps that change based on the grades. Basically, it's like a GPU, I suppose. You can swap it out of your computer. We standardize the size and parameters for these, and we make sure that that's all good to go. And then we actually get on with actually making it.

So we go through a set of phases. We start off with our white box, and that's really important to get something in engine as quickly as possible. So sometimes it is literally a box and sometimes it has a bit more functionality built into it. So if there's player interaction, we need to pass it over to the animation team to make sure it works with them, or if it has design implications, so if it was a cover item or something like that, we need to make sure that we're getting everything nailed before we invest too much art time in it. Normally creating a white box is a really quick task. We just get something in, get it named right, in the right location and in engine. And that means that all the other teams can then start using it and they're not blocked by us and how long it takes to actually make the asset. We'll then go through a gray box phase, which is the primary modeling phase of it. And then materials and finishings. And then if it requires some animation, there'll be a call whether or not we'll take it or hand it over to the animation team. Some of the more simple assets we'll deal with, and some of the more complex stuff we hand off.

As we said earlier, we make quite a broad range of assets. Some of them are super simple. We can do them autonomously and just bang it out, basically. It's like, I need to make some cans. You can just get on with it.

Yeah, I mean, our time investment ranges from some props can take a few hours or half a day, to some props can take three or four weeks. So, like I say, it depends on the complexity of the asset. And then once we've got the LOD 0, so everything's in, it looks pretty and everything like that, we then do our game-ready pass, which would be creating all the LODs, making sure that physics proxies are all correct and don't break things, and that side of it. And just our final nods and sanity checks to make sure that we're not breaking anything.

There's a lot I really like. Recently we got the Artex GSS locker downstairs, which is pretty awesome, and that was quite a fun asset to make itself. It was probably one of the first assets I did that required animation, and it really got me into the animation system a bit, setting it up, and I had quite a lot of fun making that.

So you actually made the GSS Artex?

Yeah, I made the model for it. It was concepted by York. He's no longer with us. I mean, he's no longer at the company. He's still somewhere. But he concepted it, I did the model for it. And I saw it on Reddit, the physical version that was made by John, and I was like, oh, holy, wow, that's really cool. So that was pretty awesome. I guess artistically, my favorite is probably one of the shield generators. It's not the Godi one. It's the other one with all the cool shapes. I'm trying to remember now. It's been a while since I worked on it. Also, slightly morbid, the body bags were really fun to make.

In Star Marine? That was in 2.6.1 when they were added?

Yeah, 2.6.1.

Yeah, I remember going past Cory's desk and being like, let's see what you're up to. And he's like, yeah, I've been asked to do different effects as to whether or not you shoot the body or the bag. If you shoot it here, the blood comes out. If you shoot it here, it's just the normal hit thing. That's cool. That's fine. We can do that.

We use a tool called Marvelous Designer, which is basically a cloth simulation program used in the garment and textiles industry to prototype clothes. The character team use it, I believe, quite extensively. I've used it for things like bedding before. It's been quite fun having my little dude in the bed asleep, and I get the simulated cloth and I tuck him in, and then we use that in game. It's quite funny.

I don't get to really see stuff from start to finish very much. It's quite rare that I really get hands-on in that side of things, but my favourite time is normally release times. I think that's the time that you see everything come together and all the teams really pushing to dress the scenes. I think some of the Star Marine stuff, I think we really nailed it for that. Visually it was good fun being able to get in there and do a really good storytelling pass on it and work with the writers. Getting information on the lore and the backstory and all that sort of stuff is really, really helpful for us, because it really leads to how we build the assets. Because there's probably something else I should clarify, because it comes up quite a lot, is that as a prop team, we make the assets, we don't necessarily dress the scenes. So it means that we work closely with the environment team and with the design team, and there's a lot of 'it's really cool if we had this,' 'that's a great idea, let's bash one of them out and get that done.' I think for me, it's more the work atmosphere and the coming together with all the different departments that I really enjoy.

So 3.0, like I said, a big focus for us has been the surface outposts. Again, they're something that I've really enjoyed, because we're getting to theme them, and when you get to go in there and do a whole theme set, I think it's really rewarding seeing that big picture come together. So, again, from that point of view, it's been quite a heavy investment of our time, building a lot of these dressing sets. So we tend to break the props down into: you start off with your empty room, and you go in there, and the first pass will be...

Like furnishings, large furnishings.

Yeah, so the set piece props. So it will be the machinery or the desks and the chairs or the beds, and all that habitation and hydroponic set.

The stuff that gives the room the purpose.

And then the more time we spend on stuff, the more granular we get with it. I think the way that the environment team and designers use our assets is also really interesting, because you might go in there and we might make a science set, and then you turn around and it's being used in a criminal den. That's cool. We weren't expecting you to use that. I think we've invested quite a lot of time in our theming and hopefully our storytelling. Again, design will come to us and be like, we're thinking about this particular mission, or we want to go into this room and it's where you can go and collect cargo from. So we want these storage lockers and we want these sorts of different cargoes and things like that. And so it's been, again, a varied mix of things.

All sorts of bits. A big push for surface outpost stuff, though. I know we had a lot of guys on it at one point, and we still do. We're doing the finishing touches on surface outpost props, but we've had guys working on the mining, storage, hydroponics, habitation. I recently got to make the sanitary cubicle, which I actually really enjoyed making, because it's a very small room with a toilet in it. But it was good fun.

And I think, again, with the surface outposts, we've done some of the hydroponics. So it's been the plant life and the different vegetation that's in there as well. And also we've been working on some of the exterior assets. So some of the larger scale props that you would see based around the exterior of these outposts, to help them bed into the environment and make them feel like they've got purpose and they're there being used. They've followed a slightly different workflow because they've used more of the environment art tech. Just because of their scale, it made sense to work the way they work rather than the way we work on the props team. I think the other thing we've been doing is working quite closely with Alex on the procedural tech. Some of the stuff that he's been suggesting and then delivering has been really, really impressive. It's really good to see that stuff coming online and pushing forward with that stuff as well.

Smallest, I guess, would be...

Probably a Dragonfly component, maybe? The subcomponents for them are pretty dinky.

Yeah, the subcomponents. On one of the Star Marine maps, we had some little baggies that were tiny. Some little medication bottles and things like that. They were pretty small. Stuff like pens. Pens are pretty small. So they're the really small scale, and then large scale...

Who's got the record now? Because Joel had the record for the comms tower, which was probably about 15 meters tall. No, I think David's... Yeah, he took it from Joel. Joel had the record for tallest prop.

It's been dethroned by David, which is an exterior outpost asset. It's a weather station that sits in the surrounding area. And then we've got shipping containers that go up to, I think it's 10 meters by two and a half by two and a half. We do work in metric all the time, by the way. Sorry. I think that's probably the biggest we've gone so far. Oh, actually, we have got that mining machine.

The gigantic mining thing.

Yeah, that's pretty exciting.

Well, there's already standard sizes in the props. We use various metrics: standard cargo units for cargo, and we use cover metrics for everything else. So we try and build consistency in terms of how assets can be used as cover, like full-size cover, standing behind, half-size cover, crouching behind, and so on.

Because we cover such a wide range of things, it really does depend on the individual asset. We've got to be very, very careful when we create assets. So you think, oh, yeah, I'm going to make a cup, and it'll take me a few hours, it's great. But then you've got to consider, well, okay, we've got animation for this cup, and then you've got a pint glass or a shot glass, and so we have set sizes for a lot of our different types of props. So this would be a cylindrical pick-up-able prop, and we'd want to work within the min and max grip sizes. One thing we did run into slightly in the past is that we were really, really strict with it. And then you get them in the character's hand in game, and what you think is two centimeters difference, it won't make a difference, and then you see it and you're like, ah, that's ridiculous.

Like a standard 330 milliliter can. If you're trying to adhere to metrics, sometimes it's a bit like, you look like you could club someone with that. It's massive. It's not can-sized anymore.

We have a set of metrics. It's not that everything's going to fit within a 25 centimeter box. It very much depends on what it is. As Cory mentioned, things like cargo and pick-up-ables, it's really important that we are consistent with our sizes. It doesn't mean that if you're building a laptop it has to be 50 centimeters by 25. We have flexibility, but where the contact points are is what's really, really important. As Cory says, we are making a universe with a huge amount of variation in it, but cover metrics is really, really important, especially for Star Marine. That's why our cargo and cover sizes are the same, so that anywhere that you can place crates and boxes and things like that, we want them to be used as cover and have gameplay use. Smaller items than that, for pick-up-able crates and things like that, where we can and where they don't make things look silly, we will work to a division of that 1.25 metres, so that we know that if we stack three on top of each other, it can be used as set dressing, but it also is another cover point. As the game has progressed, the more and more important this stuff becomes. Absolutely, if you're flying around the universe, you will find boxes that aren't 50 centimeters tall. But where we know that it's going to impact the gameplay, we absolutely work to a metric system. In terms of modularity, there's only one way to really make a cup.

You can't really make a modular cup.

It's where it makes sense. So if we're doing the counter units, like the shopping counters and things like that, we will make them modular, in that we'll make straights and corners and curves and things like that, and they can snap together and work as a modular set, just so that it makes it much easier from a building point of view. And also, generally in the real world, things tend to be built in a way that they do work together, like our desk here is built up of smaller sections that all go together. So we do where it makes sense, but I think the environment team work to a 60-40 split, and the ship team are around that. We're nowhere near that level of modularity, just because most of our stuff has unique shapes and unique forms.

Plus we have technology such as LayerBlend to optimize having lots of different materials and stuff together. Which, I just opened a can of worms there, explaining LayerBlend now.

So LayerBlend is the material system that we use. It's the same material system that the character team use, and weapons. And what it allows us to do is, if we're making this model ship, for example... can you see that? Let's go here. I don't want to break it. So if we're making this ship, for example, rather than having it completely uniquely unwrapped, so all of this detail is on one texture... the problem with that is that we're limited by the texture size. And because we want to make things look really, really good, we want it to stand up when you get close to it. If we're limited by our texture size, that can hold back the quality.

You wouldn't want every single surface to have a 2K texture on it when, if it's a flat surface, we use a lot of basically really small tileables with LayerBlend, and they're pre-cached.

So the way the LayerBlend library works is that we have a library of surfaces and materials in there. So we'll have bare metals and plastics and rubbers and cloth and all that sort of stuff. Recently wood. And what that allows us to do is, using masks and material IDs, we can break up this model and say, okay, so we've got these two different finishes on the metals here, and normally they'd cost us two draw calls if we were using two material IDs, or a big chunky texture with all the information on it. But what LayerBlend does is it condenses that all into one draw call. So it's a really, really powerful way of having lots of different... like if you look at this here, you've got a few different metals, you've got glass, you've got plastics, there's all sorts. You might end up with 10 or 12 different material types or surface types. And by utilizing the LayerBlend system, it allows us to combine all that into one draw call.

It all gets munched down. It's using only 256 by 256 textures instead of a...

And then where we get our variation... so that's the base level library. It uses these small tileable textures, and then we get our variation by using different masks that blend those textures together. So we use something called a WDA map, which is wear, dirt and AO, and that allows us to control when we start to age these assets, because we make everything new. And then we have sliders in engine that allow us to age it. And eventually that stuff will be, if something's in an abandoned environment...

Driven by volumes. So you'd have a volume of space and you'd say, I want everything in this space to be worn by this amount.

So we could do the surface outpost and say this surface outpost hasn't been touched in 10 years, so everything's completely worn and knackered. And we use higher res shared masks that allow us to control where that wear and that blending between the materials come in. The other really nice thing about the LayerBlend system, especially for the character team, and we utilize it if we're doing things like rucksacks and bags and even toys sometimes, is if we've got sub-polygon... I appreciate this might not be that interesting to some people, but if we've got sub-polygon surface changes, so we want to pull out these logos, then we can use, again, a higher res texture to tell the shader where we want the different surfaces to be. It's a big mask texture, basically. Once you invest the time in the library and getting these nice textures, it's a really, really flexible system, because it allows us to, like I say, make a really wide range of assets, and the scale of assets as well, because you can make a pen rather than that pen either being a unique texture or a lot of different materials. If we want to pick it up and look at it, we want it to stand up and look good. So it allows us to make high detail on small props, but then still on our larger scale assets, still make really good, convincing...

A lot of variation on large flat surfaces as well, which you wouldn't think is that easy to achieve with 256 textures. But with the masking system, we can get it to work.

Where we blend the materials together is really powerful.

Yes, absolutely. For Star Marine, we implemented our first go at it. It's something we're going to build on and iterate on over time. We've made quite a lot of back-end improvements, or I say we, the clever technical people that are in the company have made quite a lot of technical improvements. We've moved over to the Item 2.0 system now, and that's now responsible for all of our damage states. We're looking at that stuff at the moment for 3.0 and what we can achieve in time for that. But effectively, CR always gives us the direction that if we've got a bottle here and it looks like you can shoot it, you can shoot it. That's what we're aiming for. That's what we're trying to achieve. So everything might not have damage states at the moment, but moving forward, that will be the case. And it will have gameplay implications as well, because if you go into a storage area and it's got some gas canisters that you can pick up, and you can move them and you can put them where you want, and you can move your crates and build some cover, and you can shoot these things and they explode... it allows for, I guess, players to create their own gameplay scenarios. But like I say, it's something that I'm really, really passionate about, getting that player interaction. For me, that's one of the really exciting things about working on the project, the fact that you can dress environments to be really, really pretty, but we're trying to push beyond that. And like I say, we'll start off small. It will be the cargo boxes that you can move, the things you can pick up with your hands. We'll start there, and then as we learn more and we progress more, we'll start to build up and iterate and iterate on that stuff. You can go in and you can pick up your bottles and you can look at them and you can throw them, and you can pick up data pads and they'll have some information on there... shooting screens and shooting lights out.

It's important at the moment, I suppose, for us to do a lot of R&D into the best way of doing destruction before actually going through our entire prop library and actually making the destruction work for them. So I guess we're doing R&D at the moment for the destruction system and getting that working with Item 2.0 as well.

And I think it allows us to, like Cory says... we had, I think, the watermelon that was using a unique tech solution for us. We've not done that sort of stuff before. I think the other important thing to get across is the props team started out with just me, and then it grew over the past year and a half-ish. There's nine of us now. We're still growing. So a lot of this stuff is super exciting for us as well. So we can't wait to get on.

The R&D is something we're constantly doing on the side, as well as producing content.

There's a few on my list. I'm not going to talk about them. There is a couple. There's a few on my list that are nostalgic, from movies and things like that, that are on my to-do list and are on the official backlog. But they'll be subtle.

We have a couple in game now from when our partners at Behaviour used to make a lot of the props. There's a few post-it notes with codes, and a big mystery forever has been what was the background of those codes. And we now know that it's the birthdays of some of the children of one of the developers at Behaviour.

I've snuck a few important dates into assets, in screens of code. You're just going to have to look, really. You're going to have to look at every single random string of numbers and letters and try and figure it out.

I know we've done a couple on the props team. I don't know if Cory's done them specifically.

It's mostly alien fruit that I've seen people working on.

We've done a few small scale alien assets. And again, to be honest, it's working with the writers, it's working with the concept team. Because this stuff's really, really important, that's where we invest our concept time and the lore. If we're making stuff that isn't necessarily as important to the story, we just crack on and get it done and get it in. But things that are really important, we will invest the concept time in it. I have seen some recent concept stuff that is coming down the line. I'm not sure about alien races and how much we can say.

There's definitely, in the future, I suspect, going to be a lot of alien props that need making. Aliens have things that don't talk or are bolted down and don't fly. It will eventually fall to us, I think.

I actually had this conversation a couple of weeks ago, again, talking to the writers. We had a good catch-up when they were over in the UK a few weeks ago. I'm desperate to get them in. I just think they're cool. I'm looking forward to it. It'll be a fun thing to make. I think I'd like to get bobbleheads in. Every so often we'll chat, like, we could get some bobbleheads in.

We talk about bits and bobs for flair items and stuff that we're like, that would be really nice. At the moment we're focused on 3.0 stuff and beyond, but we have time here and there for little bits and bobs like that that we want to work on.

And I think also we get a lot of requests from members of the art team and the art directors, and they always want to put the personality into the game, and they always want to sell the story. You've got a security desk and it's like, yeah, but who was this guy that worked at this security desk? I mean, Ian comes over to me a lot and he's like, oh yeah, we're really looking for the personality.

Telling a story through giving stuff history, giving places history as well as items history.

It's the items that people bring with them. On my desk, I've got a little reminder from when I went on a trip to Japan, and you've got little drawings that your kids have made you, and just little bits and pieces. I think they aren't always the highest priority, in terms of... you walk into a room and if you haven't got the main infrastructure, then you've got no idea what that room's function is, but they're the details that...

Give it a history, give it a sense of being lived in and having a past.

And it makes it go from this really sterile functional area...

Like when I saw the dressing passes that they've done for the outposts, I was super excited just to see all these props you've worked on. You work on them individually and you're like, okay, this is a desk, right? And then you see what the environment team, coupled with all the hard work everyone's done together... and you see a story being told with your assets in there. And that's super exciting.

And then you get the lighting and the VFX guys come in, and again, it's amazing how much, when you add all these layers on top of each other, it goes from being this item that you're working on and you're focused on, and you drop it into a level and you look at it and you're like, yeah, that's really cool, I like it. And then it goes from being that to being part of a story in this really beautiful area.

So the flair is, again, something that I think is quite a rewarding thing to do, because you know it's things that people are excited about.

You know it's going to the people that support you as well, which is really awesome.

And they're getting it every month, so you know it's being used. It's like being Santa every month, really. And the flair items is something that... so originally, I think it was Behaviour that were responsible for it. And then when we built the internal team, we got to the point where we're like, do you know what? We can handle this stuff. These flair items, correct me if I'm wrong, go back to the very start of the project. It's something that we like to do, and definitely it gives us a chance to just do something pretty cool. They're normally things that aren't necessarily tied into the story of Squadron, or they're not tied into a mission or anything like that. They're just things that are a little bit different, and they're also things that quite often people are like, can I use this to dress here? It's a subscriber thing. Don't touch it. It has that exclusivity on it as well. Cory made the Christmas tree.

That was fun. I didn't make the tree, to be fair. The tree itself was pulled from... it was an environment asset.

It was one of the cactuses from the CitizenCon demo.

That's right. And I basically just dressed it like a Christmas tree, which was quite fun. It was fun setting up the sparkly lights and the little ships flying around it.

I think, again, this is stuff that we've got quite a big backlog of, that we want to get on top of. And now the team's growing to the point where we can dedicate time to this stuff. It's something that we want to get in there and get in game. We've been promising it for a while. We want to get this stuff delivered. And also, if you think, a lot of these flairs were made very, very early on, and it's definitely stuff that we want to go back on and give some love. Bring them up, start using our newer processes, our workflow that we use now, because we can visually make things look a lot prettier, and we can also improve on the performance as well, which I think, as important as it is making a really, really good looking game, it's also equally, if not more, important that we make a really well performing game. So we do definitely need to dedicate our time to go back and bring up some of these.

You know those model stations, the holo stations? The reason I bring this up is because we've been downscaling stuff like ships and stations, and we're getting a pipeline in for that as well, which is important going forwards with the ship models.

They've been announced and awarded to people already, and they're in the game, and people can have them in their hangars now.

You look at some of these stations and these ships that are hundreds of thousands, if not more. When you've got a station that you can land some of our bigger ships in game on, they're massive. As much as I'd love to say, yeah, we just grab it and it's done, it doesn't quite work like that. So it is a time investment. But again, it is nice to build that coherency, seeing what we can give the players to dress their hangars with. It's a conversation that I remember having with Dave Haddock, because sometimes we come up with ideas like, oh yeah, we've got these models, they'd be great as flairs. He's like, yeah, they're nice, but they don't really give much to the player. And you're like, oh, okay, all right, fine. And then he'll come up with something and you're like, oh yeah, why didn't we think of that? It is a time investment, but it is nice to be able to do it.