Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - What Makes A Helmet?

Putting helmets on is always a challenging thing. Even in movies, a lot of the helmets you see don't actually... Even some of the stuff in movies like Interstellar: the helmets in Interstellar are so incredibly small that they don't actually fit on any of the actors' heads, as a classic astronaut helmet. So things we've got to figure out when it comes to the functionality of it for these characters is...

Going back to the function, some of these things don't exactly make sense how to get it on. Marvel movies lately have gone to the "oh, it's just a button and the helmet builds over the head."

Yeah, it's just so easy, right? It's kind of one of those: we have this problem, and a lot of that stuff is built out of necessity for the script, actually. So when you see something like, we want to immediately get into an action scene, but they need to go fly in space or they need to do something, rather than spending the quick suit-up sequence time or whatever, it just turns into a "well, what if we just make it appear? How can we make it appear?" So those kind of conversations are pretty common, and we need this to go on very quickly. And it is just kind of an easy thing.

Yeah, absolutely. And when you look at organic stuff or you use a lot of reference from nature, you can see that occasionally, but especially in animals... A very common thing, especially for general artists, is to look at anatomy; human anatomy especially is where you start. We were talking before about comic book movies and stuff before the show started, and a huge inspiration, I think, for a lot of people is comic books. And when you look at and you start drawing the human figure, there's not a lot of those hard lines just in general. But there's a different type of line, which is an insertion line. So that's basically where two muscles would meet. There is a separation line, but it's very natural looking rather than a 45-degree line. So that's kind of what I'm actually playing with here: we've got some softer shapes that have lines, but they're meeting each other in a way that's more of one side is kind of easing into that angle and one side is not.

That's the thing. If you're a subscriber, you have access to something called the Subscriber Vault. And in the Subscriber Vault, you can see dozens and dozens and dozens of concepts for ships that didn't make it to the Star Citizen universe, or versions of ships that did, but versions that we didn't use. So many, many concepts are created for any one particular design, and only one ever usually gets used. It's one of those things: when you buy one of those Art of Star Wars books or whatever, you can see two dozen different variations of what eventually became Kylo Ren. And you're just like, "Oh, wow, so many different designs. Oh, I love that one. That's the one I wanted."

It's pretty common. When you do concept art for movies, film, entertainment in general, especially on the art side, it's so common to do hundreds of iterations for one thing, and you have to accept, as part of the gig, part of what that job is, that only one's going to make it. So all your efforts and all your team's efforts are basically going to making the best possible thing. So is it possible that this helmet will go in? Yeah, it's totally possible, but we'll probably do plenty of other iterations on what a Banu helmet could look like before we really come to that resolution.

Right now, it's definitely on track. One thing to note about the female player is that it's a massive feature. Obviously, we've been talking about it for a really long time. But the biggest thing about it is that there's so many different elements going into it from all different kinds of things we're doing right now. So we're having to adjust our shops, for example. So our shops are being adjusted because now you have multiple genders to choose from. So what is that experience like? Our character customizer's being overhauled because you have an additional gender. You have all the animations that are going to play, from just the basics of playing, all the gameplay stuff from shooting to flying ships to jumping; every possible animation that you have is going to need to be there for the female. So I guess what I'm getting at is there's so much in that that there will be some bugs. There will be some visual bugs. Maybe an animation isn't perfect, or some of the animations we haven't had the time to make a female version, and so we've just patched over the male version and we're using that. So there's going to be some stuff that we want to iterate on through the rest of, definitely, this year, to get it to a more final state. But I think for myself, looking at her as a feature, it's not worth a couple bugs of visual fidelity or shopping to put it off for another quarter, because you kind of get into this point of, "Oh, at the end of this quarter, this thing would be nice to have in. Oh, okay, we'll wait for that thing at the end of this quarter." So basically, for example, one of the big things is the female player is going to not have all of the clothing options that the male will have, because our tech team was hit very hard this quarter on our DNA work and our shop work and our character customizer work. So they haven't had the time to skin stuff this quarter, not as much as we would have wanted them to, right? And that basically just means they'll still have all the gameplay components and they'll be one-to-one there. But we had to make a choice of: is it nothing, or?

I just want to be really super clear on that. You're not saying that those options aren't coming.

No, of course. They're coming.

It's just that, like you said in the Pacheco segment in yesterday's ATV, pursuing that fantastic hair for Pacheco, if it's not ready by 3.5, we're not going to let it stop us from putting Pacheco out in 3.5.

Exactly. We'll give her a hood. We'll find something else.

So it's not that we're not going to do every armor one-to-one and all these clothes one-to-one. It's just we're going to do as many as we can up to the release of 3.5 and then put it out with what's ready, and then continue to iterate on it after that.

Exactly. And right now the female will have all of the armors that the male has. So as far as what we're kind of calling gameplay clothing, where the armor has more gameplay — you can store weapons, you can do things in it, you can go into space — we'll be one-to-one. So that's something that we've definitely focused on.

Well, that was one of the tenets of moving to this quarterly date-based release system: we were no longer going to wait until we had everything to put something out. We hit these quarterly releases and we push out with what's ready to push out.

So in 3.5, we'll have a set released for the female, and then in 3.6, I can guarantee we'll have more.