Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - Touring the Phoenix
The developers tour the redesigned Constellation Phoenix interior: luxury lounge, bar, hot tub, piano with a roll feature, frosted glass and master bedroom. They also cover the 80 SCU cargo bay, competition power plants, the remote turret and VTOL fans slated for later, plus Taurus's smuggler hold.
Art is never finished, it's only published, as one of my great teachers taught me. It's very close to final. There's some tweaks here and there. We're going to run the bug gauntlet here pretty soon. That does give me a little bit of time to add a couple extra features here and there that, if I ran out of time on certain things, I need to polish up. That's the time when I get it in.
So the ship, in initial planning, was called as going to be the most amount of work to do as a variant. The neck, nose and tail sections are essentially a reuse from the previous base version and previous variants, but the body on the Phoenix had to be, inside and out, completely redone.
So the Phoenix material itself is propagated through the entire ship, so everything on the interior and exterior is tailored towards the Phoenix palette.
So that just kind of came out after a while. I got a ship called the Phoenix, and then I learned the ship Constellation Phoenix. There actually is a constellation Phoenix. So I did a little bit of research. The little orange lights up there you see is actually the constellation Phoenix. And then I wanted to do kind of like a front car hood emblem type thing for this ship, since it's a little bit more high-dollar, polished. So I did a little concept for the logo, and then it just started finding its way into everything. So that's like a projector shooting the image onto the wall, which has some effects to it.
TL;DRJosh Coons chose a darker, richer, more expensive-looking wood for the Phoenix to avoid the common cheap light-brown flooring, based on his research into what makes wood costly.
That wood, I had a word for it. It's called apartment home rental wood. Well, if you Google wood floor, that's the first one, the most common one that's going to come up. And common is not good for a luxury ship. We want something a little different, something that would be expensive to install. And I wanted to get away from that base, light-brown color. I literally just bought flooring for my own home, and that color is the cheapest wood on the planet.
Yes. So I've been doing a lot of research actually in real life about wood and the cost of it, the finishes on it, and what adds to value. The more rustic and hand-touched it is, the way more expensive. So actually reclaimed, recycled shiplap wood is really, really expensive. And then you get into the actual wood type, and if it's a rare hardwood, it's super, super expensive.
Yeah. Actually, on the forums I had people sending me links and wood types that were really rare, usually because they're endangered species of tree. And some of them just didn't look good if they were cut. But yeah, I got a lot of suggestions online. As some of our viewers know, I'm on the forums quite a bit. I like to see what everybody's saying.
So I initially took a stab at doing the bedding and stuff, and when it came down to scheduling, I couldn't get back into it. I had to load up ZBrush, and I needed organic sculpting. So we got a lot of help from the props team when it came to some other stuff, to pick up some of the other areas so I could concentrate just on the ship itself. So the props team contributed the linens and the bedspreads and a couple of other things that we shall see. No idea on the thread count, though. If someone wants to go in there and actually count the threads, that would actually be kind of fun.
Yes. Air Force One, luxury airliners, yachts. Luxury trains were referenced a lot. Most have a side split going down the side, like the European train style, if you've seen Harry Potter, that kind of thing. I pushed that as much as I could. There are some things that kind of push the design: you see this column over here, on the inside this is actually the housing for the hydraulic struts for the lowering of the cargo. So the four pillars in this room have to be there, and then the design went around that. So this would be your lounging area for space flight. You want to cruise around and just check out space, this is where you'd be. We've got more of a communal type seating arrangement here. Props team also with some nice fabric texture contributions here on this chair.
Yes. And that brought up a lot of unique questions about style differences, because RSI has its style, and its style really isn't luxury. It's not a luxury style.
Outside of the Phoenix, yes. So I kind of considered it like you take a lower-end car company and then they would do maybe the Eddie Bauer edition or whatever. And I approached it kind of like that.
It is absolutely a dishwasher. I think the original Phoenix actually had a dishwasher in it, and I think it just stuck in my head. I was like, it has a dishwasher.
TL;DRThe piano is a setup item swapped with the conference table via the mobiGlas VMA loadout, owners without a Phoenix are intended to use it in hangars, and whether it returns for purchase is undecided.
So that is a setup item, so you can either have the conference table or your piano, depending on, I guess, your preference. If you want to have more meetings, you can have that, and if you want to have more parties, you can have the piano.
So if you're in-game, what you have to do to get to the piano is you're basically going to bring up your mobiGlas, and you can change your loadout through the VMA, and you'll be able to switch out the conference table and the piano just like you would a weapon on the ship.
And this is a good time to remind folks that not everybody who owns a Phoenix owns the piano. The piano was an early pledge item when the Phoenix was first introduced in 2014. So folks who bought it in the original concept promotion, it came with it automatically. It was also sold individually. So there are actually people in the game who own the piano and don't own the Phoenix, at which point I believe our intention is to allow you to use that in hangars and stuff like that when that comes in. As for whether we will bring the piano back as its own item to buy or to pledge for in the future, that is still TBA. Let us know what you think on Spectrum. But no decision has been made in that regard yet.
What do you want to do? It's just space right now. But there's some extra space for you to have a party. And if you want the hot tub, you can open up the covers.
In what I'm in right now, no. But what's below right now is still just the placeholder. We do have the props team. They picked up the hot tub after I took a single pass on it, and they finished it up, and they did a fantastic job. Right now I'm working on a couple of metrics issues with it so I can get it to fit in here. And I think they also remodeled the cover, and that was another one of the issues. Because it's animated, I think we had a little bit of a metric issue there that I have to just correct really quick.
If you put someone in the hot tub and they're sitting, and then you close the doors, it actually just chops their head off. Not actually, but they would probably clip through.
It'd be cool if I pushed them down in there and you could actually drown them in the hot tub. Or boil them. You could turn the temp up. Don't get in the hot tub. It's a trap.
So for the master bedroom, I think this is also a question about glass, about different types of glass. You don't want people looking in, so I wanted to do a frosted glass. This is my first run at it for the master bedroom. And you'll notice when I go inside that it's not frosted from the outside.
Yes. And this is the master bedroom quarters, and you have a good clear view out that side. That same glass technique's being used on the exterior windows. They're perfectly clear from the inside, but on the outside you've got appropriately limo tint.
They do have some frosted... I think they have two or three frosted glass materials in there for different purposes. And I referenced those just a smidge when I was doing mine.
And of course, it can fit either the Lynx rover that this will eventually come with, or it can fit the Ursa rover, since the metrics for the two of those are almost identical.
Yes. So the bathroom is going to be located in a familiar spot, which is in the neck area as well. The space in this room is more devoted towards, think of it like a really nice bar that you go to. The bathroom's not really in the middle of the party area. You kind of have to walk around the corner, up some, down some stairs to go to the bathroom. The latrines are located in the neck. There's always the hot tub.
No, there's no hatch. This one's fully floored. Oh yeah, when you lay down in here, you should have a nice view of the cosmos as you're zipping by. I can't wait to see this thing flying at speed and just standing here and watching out the window.
It was a little menacing to walk into a room and you're just looking down the barrel of all these missiles aimed straight at your head while you're sleeping. I wouldn't want that.
TL;DRThe Phoenix is only modestly larger than the Andromeda, roughly 14% wider and about 10% longer by Josh Coons's recollection, to fit its asymmetrical layout and AI pathing.
I wrote the math down exactly, it's on my notepad here somewhere, but I think it was around 7% in width overall, so multiply by 2, so that's 14% a little bit wider, and then the length, I think, was around 10%. So just those small numbers gave us enough space to do what we were wanting to do, because the other one was just small and it was symmetrical. When we went asymmetrical, we needed a lot more room, and we wanted to make it AI friendly. So the AI pathing had to have its space and the metrics had to be proper.
Of course, you'll get the actual measurements when they get measured out, when the pledge page gets updated and these ships enter the game in the upcoming Alpha 3.3, currently scheduled for October 10th at CitizenCon.
TL;DRBecause component sizes have changed, the Phoenix can't take a larger power plant, so it gets a competition-class one instead that gives more power at the cost of durability.
The entire system has changed. So if we wanted to put a larger power plant in here, there just wouldn't be any room. So what we've done instead is we've put in upgraded competition-class power plants. And what that basically means is, what you usually think of a competition, it would be like a racing, finely tuned, high performance, but the tradeoff for the high performance that you're getting is going to be its durability. So you're going to get more power out of the power plant, but you're going to have to replace it more often, basically.
We've talked about this quite a bit, and if you want the documentation on this, I'm going to recommend going to the Shipyard series of articles available on robertspaceindustries.com. Components have three basic descriptors. There's the size, there's the grade, and there's the type. It's size one through 10, if I remember correctly. I think there are up to 10, but I don't think we've actually used any of them. We've built a scale that allows us to expand in the future. You'll see the details there. But then the grade is grades A through E, as far as the quality, with A being the highest grade component and E being the 'well, I've got to get from point A to B, whatever I got.' And then the type being the tuning: there's your civilian type, then there's your military type, and then there's your stealth.
So since the size system changed and we can no longer effectively do a one-larger power plant, what you're saying is that we've improved it from a civilian type of power plant to the competition type.
So you'll get more bang for your buck out of that. As IFCS 2.0 comes online and Item 2.0 continues to come out, our backers will get more and more information about this system. But we detailed it all almost exactly a year ago in the Shipyard, so you can check that out.
There is a whole bunch of documentation. We've figured out all of the different sizes, everything, and they all have names and descriptions. And we just don't have them all made yet.
TL;DRThe remote turret won't be on the Phoenix at initial release because the system didn't exist when it was scheduled, but they intend to add it in a later release.
So originally, when we started building the Phoenix, we scheduled everything out. Josh had to build all this stuff, and we did not actually have the remote turret system in the game when we started building the Phoenix. So when we planned it out, we didn't plan to build it yet, because we didn't have the system. Now that we actually have the system, we have to go back and schedule some time to actually get that made. So when it releases initially, we won't have the remote turret in there. But we're going to go back and make that at a later release.
I can verify what he said, because I was part of many conversations about that. What you see when you get in 3.3 will be missing what you're expecting in the remote turret, but we still have every intention to add it to the ship. It will be added when that remote turret system really comes online, because until that point, it's just geometry that's sitting there doing nothing anyway.
So they're there. They're set up. They're currently not... because we were doing that before we even had our planet stuff done, I believe. And the original plan was those were atmospheric assisted, so you'd only use those in atmo. And so that feature just kind of got pushed to the back, and I'm dying to see it finished, because I had to model and animate all that stuff, every single one of those flaps. And the fans, I prototyped all that out and made all the fans for it. So I'm really looking forward to seeing those things open up and kick dust up when you're flying around.
TL;DRThey showed the bridge with Phoenix materials, but its vertex alphas and lighting were not yet correct, so it was only a rough preview of how it should look when properly lit in the release.
So if we were in the body and we come back in the neck, you can watch the material propagate back through here. And this is just, if I literally slapped the Phoenix material on the RSI Constellation without changing anything, this is what you get by changing material. This is the neck area, of course. And then onto the bridge. For the bridge, we still wanted the bridge to be like a bridge, function over form. Put a little bit more into the actual seats, which appear to have their vert alpha messed up. So the leather is completely at 100% damaged.
The vert alphas are messed up. The interior lighting is not as it's supposed to be right now. So not prepared to show the bridge at the moment; we decided to try anyway. But you get some sense of what the finished product will be. Of course, when you see it in 3.3, it'll be lit properly and with the verts correct and stuff like that.
TL;DRThe Phoenix has no shielded smuggler cargo hold; that belongs to the Taurus, which replaced its bottom turret with it, and the Phoenix keeps both turrets, so earlier claims were a mix-up.
I think there was some confusion with this, because I had to really go back and look through a lot of old documentation to figure out what happened here, why was this missing, and where did it need to be. And what I found was that the Taurus is the ship that actually has the smuggler's cargo hold.
Exactly. So the Taurus has only the top turret, and then the bottom turret is replaced with a cargo hold. And then the Phoenix actually has both of the turrets, similar to the Andromeda.
Yes. This got confused in a couple follow-up posts. It actually started here on RTV back in 2014 when our very own Ben Lesnick was on the show. It's one of those things where we're talking about four different Constellations all at the same time, and some of our verbiage got confused. And Ben stated on RTV, as well as in a post on the old forums predating Spectrum, that the Phoenix had this shielded double-blind cargo bay, except that there's no physical space for it, because that goes on the Taurus, and it goes where the turret was missing. If you look through the original documentation that's on the original pledge page, the original brochures, you'll find no mention of the shielded cargo bay on the Phoenix. That was a feature of the Taurus. So this has been a common misconception over the last couple of years. We actually started clearing it up on a Calling All Devs a couple months ago, but we want to come back and do it again here. There is no special shielded cargo hold on the Phoenix. That is a feature of the Taurus. And we apologize for confusing the issue back in 2014 by mixing up our terminologies and stuff like that. But no, the Phoenix has the top and bottom turrets, which you can see there in the neck. And because it has the top and bottom turrets, there is no space for a special shielded cargo hold.
TL;DRYes, the Phoenix is meant to have slightly better armor than the Andromeda, though the speakers say balance is still being worked on and armor system changes may come.
Short answer, yes. I feel like there's probably a bigger discussion that needs to be had here, probably for balance reasons and other things. But yes, it has different armor than the Andromeda. It's better than the Andromeda, not by much really, but it is better. I think there should probably be changes in the future with how the armor system works, but I don't know what those will be.
I see some conversation in chat about the armor, about whether it's better than a gunship or something. He said it's better than the Andromeda. There's still a whole lot of game balance that has to go into all the ships in Star Citizen. So right now, as far as the armor for the Phoenix, we're only saying our current intention is for it to be a little better than the Andromeda. That's the only comparison we're making as far as armor goes.
There's a whole other balance team that are looking into these things, and they're thinking about these things, and they've got spreadsheets and they've got a lot of calculations, and they know a lot more about it than I do, and it's definitely something they have on their mind.
This is auxiliary. A lot of people on the forums, and I agree with these people: when it comes to auxiliary states, they were getting tuned really dark. You couldn't tell where you were going. So I wanted to put a little bit more light in here so you can actually see where you're walking, you can get to where you're going to turn the power on. So I've got a little bit more light going on for this auxiliary state.
TL;DRThe extra expansion slot idea is planned for the future, likely via the co-pilot seats and swappable computer blades, but it isn't in yet and is no longer unique to the Constellation line.
Definitely. I believe the co-pilot seats right now will have that functionality eventually. It's not in right now, and I think the original design was that you'd be able to swap out different modules, computer blades, that kind of thing. That's something we plan to do in the future.
In 2014, it was a feature unique to the Constellation line. But as the game has continued to develop and evolve over time, that is now a feature available to, well, I should not say all, to most ships in Star Citizen: the ability to swap out computer blades and customize your different stations for different needs. So the Phoenix and the Constellation line has no special advantage to that above any other ship. It is just in line with everything else. So what was a new and exciting feature that we were testing in 2014 is now, and you know this from dozens and dozens of conversations over the year, something that we planned for the entire line of ships now.
TL;DRThe piano gets tiered functionality, with the keys lighting up as a song plays by scrolling a texture over the key UVs, driven by a MIDI chart the sound team's script generates from authored songs.
So we've got some different tiers that we want to do for the piano functionality. I think we're just calling it piano roll. Tier zero is just having this right here in there. And then what we want to do is have the keys light up when a song is played, which made my head almost explode. I was watching Westworld at the time. This was brought up and I was like, oh yeah, we could scroll the texture, just like they did on the old Wild West scrolly auto players. So that's what we did. Talked to the sound department, and they had a script written up real quick where they can just take one of their authored songs and literally just hit a button, and it prints out a MIDI chart. And then I use that MIDI chart to scroll across the key UVs, which will light the glow up as the song plays in unison.
Right now, currently, the interior material is exactly the same. But if you see back here, there is a material ID. This is called the accent material. And I'm probably going to just match the green for the accent material, so that you get those shots of green a little different, so you know where you were at.
TL;DRHot tub water physics is still with the engine team, who are building planetary water, and water inside a ship's physics grid won't be in 3.3; whether it happens depends on time and resources.
So the water physics is actually something that the engine team is working on, because they're making water for the planets. So that's not something that's going to be in 3.3 right now.
We haven't actually attempted to do it. I was asking about that before we even started. I'm like, how are we doing the water? We don't have that yet, so just wait. And then attaching it to a ship was even beyond that. So I was like, all right, well, I guess I'll just make a tub then and we'll wait, and I'll just keep maybe water volume, or however you guys want to handle it, in mind, the different ways to do water.
It'll be a question about whether we have the time and the resources to dedicate to that. I think we can safely say everybody wants to see the water rise out of that.
Oh, that was pitched early. There was a bespoke decal on the outside, and I think overall it was almost all from the non-artists, and they took many stabs at that actual decal. The art department was just like, no, because it's still a luxury ship. It's still a Phoenix. It's just a paint variation. And as soon as that decal went on there, they were like, that doesn't look...
TL;DRThe Phoenix has the same number of hardpoints as the Andromeda but different stock guns and components, plus a remote turret added later, making it somewhat more capable, though it needs another person to operate everything.
So it has similar loadouts to the Andromeda. Other than the remote turrets that will be added later, it has the exact same number of hardpoints. The stock loadout is going to have different guns. I can't remember exactly which guns are on there right now, but they are different, I think. It'll have the competition-grade power plant. So the components aren't exactly the same. The components are going to be different, but the hardpoints are the same.
Well, the remote turret will be automated. Eventually, it's automated. That's what the original point defense was. It's an automated weapon, so they'll have an AI blade.
It was one-sided, and then I think that was a CR request. They were like, make that two. I was like, all right. Yeah, the tech team was getting a little... they were like, yeah, this is a lot of glass. Because, for anyone who's not familiar, looking through glass, looking through glass, looking through glass is considered bad. So right now I'm looking through ten panes of glass at the same time. And I'm not even including the glass bottles over there. That's too much to count.