Star Citizen - Around/Reverse the Verse Live Edition!

No, there's no progress to announce on the Merchantman. It's not one of the ships we need for the current version of Arena Commander or for the first episode of Squadron 42, so it's later on in the schedule. But I should stress that it doesn't diminish its overall importance, and it doesn't mean we're having second thoughts about the design or anything like that. It's just in a holding pattern while our artists work on the smaller ships and then the mid-sized multi-crew ships. And a couple of exceptions like the Starfarer, which is needed for Squadron.

No. So we have two more sets of variants that are on the schedule right now, which are the Mustang and the Avenger. For variants beyond that, it's more of a question mark. We're going to sit down and see if they make sense. Not every ship will have variants. The goal isn't to try to sell you as much stuff as possible, it's to do interesting things in Star Citizen. I'm guessing from the Herald that there's not stock variants. I can't think of any offhand. You're going to see it and you're going to imagine some pretty weird stuff you can do within the Persistent Universe. I think it'll be more about giving you guys the tools to mod them, to be more than just a data transit ship. And I suspect you will look at it and figure out how you do that.

I'll look into that. So me and Brian and Ben will try and figure out the best way to get that done.

Whenever there's something new like that, we'd love to find out about it and try to take advantage of it the best we can. One of the things that I think has made Star Citizen so successful is the fact that we will do things like work with the Oculus Rift, just technology that's a little bit out there. So we want to be on the cutting edge. In fact, Chris insisted we do a 3D version of the commercial recently because YouTube allowed that. And we did. Definitely we'd like to show these things off in 60 frames per second.

So the thing about the Herald as a racer is it's very, very fast. But maneuvering it is going to take quite a bit of skill because it has an asymmetrical silhouette. In the hands of a skilled pilot who's made some interesting modifications to it, I think it could definitely be incredibly competitive. But it's not going to be for newbies.

That's a good question. I think initially it probably will be. There has been a lot of talk about those mechanics, and I would say we haven't necessarily come to any absolutes on it yet. You do want to have your fairly safe places because some people don't like getting shot at wherever they go. But we've been talking about it. I know on ArcCorp, we're planning on definitely some seedy back alley, and you will get shot if you go back there, maybe. So ArcCorp, I don't know that. Or Terra, we're still kind of debating about it, because it depends on what kind of planet you're talking about, right? You would think Terra being the mecca of civilization, the security there would be absolutely ridiculous. So, I don't know, man. We're still talking about it, but it's definitely on the table.

That totally implies that.

Or maybe is that just on Prime? So, on Prime it would be PvP-free, but on another landing zone, maybe not.

Yeah, we definitely want to push that, right? Where it's like, okay, you're going to expect if you land on this planet that you're not going to be able to shoot your way, but on other planets it's a lot looser and it's just kind of Wild West. I think it'd be interesting to have both extremes. And we'll have space stations in the initial Persistent Universe stuff at some point where you can fight all the time. Think about it: as the plot of the game actually evolves, who knows what could change about different planets as time goes on.

No, no. Nope.

Sorry, prospective ship thieves. So if you only backed Star Citizen for like $5 because you're like, I'm just going to steal another player's ship from their hangar, it's not happening.

So once you land on a planet, your ship is safe?

That is the plan, as far as I know, in almost every place. There may be cases where it's not. For instance, if you're doing a boarding action, no, your ship is not safe, but that's different. But as far as landing on the planet, so far as I know, that's been the plan all along, and I haven't heard anything to change that.

Oh, it makes me ill. We have been looking under every rock to optimize everything to get down to a frame rate that the Oculus Rift could accept. Because there's an acceptable frame rate, obviously, that the Oculus Rift has, and that's our biggest push forward, the optimization side of the PU, because obviously these planets, as you saw on ArcCorp, these planets are huge. And there's tons of buildings and tons of polys and tons of draw calls. And the Oculus Rift is not going to cut it with 20 frames a second. That will make you sick. So that's the big thing. It's just optimization, trying to get it to work right at the moment. It's tricky. So we're just going to have to get there. Optimization ongoing forever.

Well, it will help us lay out the planets themselves. As far as the cities, right now we're working on the home cities, the hero cities, if you want to call them that, which are much more carefully laid out. And then as we start to add many other landing zones that have been written about, we will start using procedural generation to put together some of those, or at least get a starting point. If we get like 85% there with the procedural stuff, then the rest of it's going to be tweaking. But again, we're laying the groundwork for all that.

You don't want to take illegal cargo to some places. That's probably a bad idea. That's the correct answer in some cases, which is just don't do that. But not only can your ship be scanned in space, but when you land, customs, yes, they're scanning your cargo while your ship's sitting there. They're checking you for weapons. You saw the demo. That's what's going to happen. If you're a bad person, they're not going to let you carry weapons around in cities, at least some of them. And if you're carrying contraband, well, hide it really well. Good luck.

Most of the exploration-type vehicles are going to be much more dependent on when we get procedural planets, because then you'll be out motoring around on some unexplored planet. Initially, they're more useful for getting places fast, but I don't think you're going to be driving your buggy around in downtown Terra. It's totally not cool. Old pedestrians diving out of your way.

Yeah, that was something that we were actually talking about. I have a Greycat, why? Do I have a rover? No. Right? I don't know. That's to be determined. We're still talking. TBD. And I'm sure that all of the running-over-people things are going to create bad reputations for a lot of players.

That's one of the things that you won't really know until you have more time playing with it in-game. Because you have to get a feel for how it looks, whether you detect the difference. And then there's also an algorithm. I would envision you're talking about matters of days, but I don't know if that's going to end up being fun or just too much.

Yeah. The number of conversations we've already had about that. That would be totally cool. Like if some huge convoy of goods gets hijacked on its way to a certain planet, then obviously that disappearing out of the economy of that planet will immediately affect that planet, right? Whatever they're producing from it will suddenly become in short supply. So those small changes will be readily carried all the time. And then we're talking about big things like more construction, or a town getting all dirty and growing weeds, people looking like hobos. That's slower.

There are going to be lots of fish. It's using the CryEngine, what's it called? The swarming technology. There's got to be a mission around fish, right? We've done a lot of development work on the whole tourism slash photojournalism slash exploration stuff, and fish are definitely part of it. You've got to catch them all with the fish. You'll be able to go all over the verse and pick up fish.

Soon-ish. Sometime before the game comes out. Working on it. Very important to us.

I think we've got it to where everybody's happy with it. It's a lot more flexible now than originally planned. I know people like to hear that. There's definitely more customization involved with it now. As it currently stands, the idea is definitely there'll be a lot of mixing and matching. It's going to be more flexible than I think originally it was going to be. Originally we had a certain contained closet. And in that closet, the things in that closet you can mix and match, but you can't mix and match things outside of that closet, and that has gone away. So now I think the current plan is you can pretty much mix and match anything, within reason. You can't take like a Titan armor top and mix it with like pirate boots.

Everybody.

Yeah, we have that scanner, I believe, that's up and going in the UK right now, so they've got it all calibrated, so they're going to start scanning people's heads.

We plan to do org hangars, but there's engine limitations that would have to be worked through. We're definitely thinking about it. There's a lot of things that come up with it, like when you leave and land, if all of them leave and land at once, how do they go? I don't know.

That is actually a serious problem, which we will be looking into before it is flight ready. But as you've seen with the Scythe, we can have asymmetrical ships in Star Citizen. It just causes nightmares for our physics guys. But we're really proud of this one. We think it's shaping up to be really cool. Adds a new role to the universe.

Yeah, you've got LTI, you'll have the model and the picture once those are ready in the hangar.

And that will be available from tomorrow.

Through the following Monday.

Next month's hangar flair is a fancy liquor cabinet.

And in fact, if you follow the lore builder stuff, the backers selected a brand of liquor in the Star Citizen universe they created, and it will appear in the liquor cabinet.