Developers answer fan questions on the unmelt tool, ship pipeline order and status pages, and multi-crew ships (Constellation, Retaliator, Starfarer, Caterpillar). They also cover the Freelancer interior, joystick pre-orders, UEE patch sets, and Squadron 42's release relative to Star Citizen.
Yes. Again, it's one of those things that... we have 68 ships with all variants included right now. And with the different packages and stuff, it's a lot of work to do an automated system to go back and go through everybody's account history and be able to have that automated so that you can go through it. So, yeah, it's coming.
The Endeavor does not appear in Squadron 42 at the moment. It may appear in Episode 2 or Episode 3. We're not referring to Episode 2, so never mind. It is not being worked on at the moment. It's in the queue. So you guys saw the rollout for the multi-crew. We used the Constellation and the Retaliator as essentially our test case multi-crew ships. And then from there, we'll build the rest of the smaller multi-crew ships. The Starfarer and the Caterpillar are similar test cases for bigger capital ships. And they are both in active development right now. Once they're done, we'll move on to stuff like the science ship, the Orion, and so on. Endeavor. Bigger ships.
TL;DRThe joystick can be pre-ordered for the first time during the holiday livestream, which will also offer UEE patch sets, Jump Point Volume 2 pre-orders and a handful of larger capital ships.
Tune into the livestream next week. In fact, there's a good chance to plug the livestream. There's a livestream, not like this livestream, a good one. We'll be doing our holiday livestream Wednesday, December 16th. Normally we do the livestream at the end of the week. We figured people were going to be seeing something else towards the end of the week. We didn't want to interrupt that. So Wednesday, December 16th, we'll be doing a three-hour livestream with Chris and Sandy and all the cool kids. We'll be showing off all sorts of bits and bobs, and you'll have an opportunity to pre-order the joystick for the first time, I believe.
That's a good time for me to also plug our physical merchandise. We'll have UEE patch sets available for sale starting Wednesday, I believe. And we're going to start taking pre-orders for Jump Point Volume 2. And that'll be on Wednesday. So we'll have more information about that happening on Wednesday. But I know a lot of people have been asking for that. So it's happening.
Another thing people have been asking about is some of the larger capital ships that we did not offer in the previous sale. That includes the Javelin, the Idris, and so on. We will have a limited number of them available in December during the livestream. We'll post the details before it happens, but it will be a handful, to keep the same balance as we had before with a larger audience. So if you've been waiting for a chance to get one of those, there will be a couple available. Tune in. We'll have details before the livestream so people know exactly when.
Not later today. We're still trying to figure out exactly what to do. Because Turbulent... it's always a battle. We're like, oh, we want to do it in the livestream and reveal things and have people go and get them, and they're like, but the livestream always brings the site to a crawl. So it's a balance.
In all fairness, during the last livestream, when they were trying to add all of the cross-chassis options, or the upgrade options, it took a very long time because of all of the site traffic.
So that's absolutely a long-term goal. One of the big challenges that we have right now is, and I think I've said this a few times, we're still getting the actual action map of what are all the actions that you may need a keybind for sorted. We've got just the basic control configuration right now, and it's definitely not the most ideal, but long term we absolutely are going to make sure that's a much more vital thing. But it'll be more once we have that whole set of what may need a keybind really solved, with a lot more of the complicated systems all integrated.
Yes. So we've done these patch sets before. It's the UEE patch set. I believe it's Army, Navy, Advocacy, Marines, and just the UEE. It's five total, and they're all UEE. So, yes, I know a lot of people have been asking for them for cosplay purposes, which is awesome. And I also saw a thread where somebody was trying to get their own made, and it was going to cost crazy amounts of money. So you don't need to do that. We'll have them for sale.
You're referring to the loaner system. Loaners are generally for flying around in space. The loaners don't appear in the hangar. So right now, they're focusing on building the Vanguard base model. And then when they're done with that, and pretty much when they're done with most of the bases, I think that's the new idea, right, to go through and make all the bases?
Yeah, bases first. And then the variants are no longer handled by the ship pipeline. They're handled through the component pipeline, because we are at such a point where a variant is built on the base with different components.
Because we have to be always working on these things in tandem, where it can't just be a designer, it can't just be an artist, it has to be all of us working together. And if we're jumping to everything all at once, then we just get derailed. So that bit of focus at a time always matters.
TL;DROnly interior Freelancer artwork has been shown so far, with no exterior images yet, and the interior draws on the Starfarer's design language as MISC ships are becoming a unified family.
Yeah, the last two weeks, if you watched ATV, you'll notice some brand new Freelancer artwork from the interior redesign. We don't have any images of the exterior. They're working on it. They just haven't provided us with any images of the exterior yet. But the interior is looking fantastic. You saw a couple different angles of various interior shots in the last two weeks. It takes a lot from the Starfarer, it takes a lot from the Starfarer cues. They're really nailing down the brand design language. It's really cool to see how the ships are becoming kind of unified and formed.
Yeah, MISC is definitely the stylistic testbed, even a lot more than some of the Aegis ships that we've already got in game. When we get the Freelancer, the Starfarer, the Reliant all in the game and in your hangar, if you walk across all three of those ships you'll immediately be able to tell, yeah, these all came from the same manufacturer. So it's going to feel really good when that's all set.
As far as the ship status updates, guys, I'm working on a new ship status page. You're going to learn more about the pipeline, as Ben said, coming up in the holiday livestream. And then I'm running around between the different ship departments and I'm trying to get updated statuses of where each ship is in relation to the new pipeline. So basically, you'll get a ship status update when I have it. So, working on it.
That's exactly why we created the ship subforums, guys. It's because we recognize this deficiency. We wanted to do something. We weren't able to do it as effectively as we wanted to. That's why we're doing the ship subforums now. So hopefully you will see a marked improvement. There are many designers who read the forums top to bottom. Was that even a designer? Wasn't it an artist?
But everyone has a different process for this sort of thing. The feedback does come back to them sometimes. We collect it and give it to them sometimes.
For things like the Freelancer, just alternating controls, long term, yeah. I think we talked about it Wednesday on the subscriber livestream, where we've got a whole plan for different seat permissions, allowing who can access what functionality of a ship. So things like that are in the long-run plan. In the near term, though, unlikely. You'll have the main pilot seat that controls the ship for when they first are going in and getting flight ready. But as with everything in this game, it's layering stuff on. So once we have that, then we can build out permissions. Once permissions work right, then we can start making some much more complicated and ornate gameplay out of that. So long term, yes. Short term, no.
Well, they'll absolutely be released in separate places. I mean, Star Citizen, you can play part of Star Citizen now, play a bunch more of it tonight, and Squadron 42 will be independent of that. Squadron 42 will be out before Star Citizen is live, final, finished forever. So yes, that question is yes.
It's not a perfect analogy, but Squadron 42 is kind of like Warcraft 3 and Star Citizen's World of Warcraft. It's the single player, it's the campaign.
Oddly enough, if both games had fully come out, I think that was Curt Schilling's whole project, Kingdoms of Amalur and Copernicus, the MMO, where it's like, here's the single-player game to set up this grand, amazing universe you're going to inhabit in an MMO, and then the MMO: hey, here's the repercussions of what happened in that other game.
For the timetable on the Nyx release, you should watch Tony's interview in ATV yesterday. You'll have a better idea of whenabouts to expect Nyx. Which is later.