Star Citizen Live: Weapons and Props

So I can start us off at least. So yeah, we are currently working on medical gameplay. And the plan, so I won't go too deep into the feature work, but the things that we are releasing alongside that, I want to release alongside that, are the multi-tool attachment and the standalone medical tool. So the multi-tool attachment is a bit simpler in its use. Essentially, you'll get a lot of the information that you'll be getting given on the dedicated tool, but all you're really going to be able to action from that is heal someone, kind of in the traditional way that a med pen might do now. But you will also get the additional information that tells you what long-term injuries someone might have sustained. So you're able to at least go, oh, I've got additional medicine in my bag, I'll be able to deal with that. Or it'll be like, hey, you need to go to a hospital because you can't walk anymore. Although that might be a bit obvious without the tool. But yeah, it's a much simpler version. And then the medical tool itself is a lot more advanced. So the gel, or the goop as we've been calling it internally, inside that we can purpose it toward healing different aspects of your injuries. So you could do the exact same thing that you'd be doing with the multi-tool. So you can just go pure healing if someone's taken a lot of damage and they immediately need medical attention. Or you can purpose it towards, if they've got broken legs, you can repurpose it as a painkiller to get them walking. I mean, obviously, if you had a completely snapped leg, you won't be able to walk anymore. But the way we treat it, it's like, OK, you're filled with painkillers, you can go a little bit further. And it's meant to temporarily give you a bit of a boost to be able to get the proper help that you need. And it will have an advanced enough UI to allow you to look at what it is you're moving around, what it is you're going to apply, and what it will do to the person that you're planning on healing. So it all ties into this healing system that we're currently working on.

I can take this one. I mean, I was modeling it, but it's the concept artists who come up with the designs of it. So they're the ones who are creating all the lovely creative designs and then they hand them over to us and it's our job to put them into Maya and create them and get them engine ready so they work for the animators, do a bit of rigging as well here and there. We've also been doing a lot of wear and dirt as well, so any new weapons have that, so they're all ready to go with that as well.

I think one of the visual challenges from making the multi-tools is it's the jack of all trades, isn't it? It does a bit of everything. Whereas the standalone medical, we call it the standalone medical weapon, but it's only called a weapon because it's handled by the weapons team and you hold it like a weapon, if you know what I mean. So I think obviously, visually, the manufacturer that's making it, it's got a much sleeker aesthetic to it. And I guess it makes it look a little bit more welcoming. I do remember having some discussions, and some of the ideas that were thrown around were like, I wouldn't want to be healed by some of this stuff, especially when, like Jake was saying, the wear and dirt. I think that came up recently, like, we turned all the sliders up and it's like, no, I'll wait. 'I'm here to help.' Rusty old device, it's fine. So I think getting it across that it's there to help is one of the things. And I think, like Jake says, the concept turned out great. The assets turned out really nice in game. So it should be a good one.

I think it's also, like you say, very sleek and clean, right? So that's a huge part that informs the design. It's that clinical nature of it.

I mean, I'll start on the weapon side. I think one of the things that has, not necessarily improved over the years, changed over the years, is that we try and invest a little bit more time in the concept phase, like Jake's already mentioned, to try and make sure that we're solving all the visual questions as early as possible and trying to get that concept nailed down from the start. It works out a lot better for the development team, the guys that are actually delivering the asset, if there's not changes in the direction during the process, if possible. There's always going to be challenges and things that you need to resolve when the concepts come in. You don't see the concepts in the player's hand. You're not running around with it. And until you get to that point, you don't know exactly. It can be the prettiest weapon in the world, and then you get it in the character's hands and you're like, it doesn't quite look how I expected it. And concept take care of that, and they do a lot of things with the character models and things. But I think until it's got into the animators', the designers', the weapons artists' hands to play with, it's kind of difficult to judge. And I think that's probably the other change that we've tried to make, at least more recently, is that we now try and front-load as much of the setup work as we can in the pipeline so that we're not taking an asset to a final asset and then it gets handed over to the other department. The makeup of the team has changed slightly, so we're working much closer with design and animation to make sure that as soon as the concept comes in, the artists, like David and Jake, try and get that in game as quickly as possible. It might look a bit rough, but it gets the idea in game and lets people play with it.

Yeah, we talk with the animators quite a lot now. I think that's probably the team we're the closest with in terms of how often we're talking with them. We'll get that blockout in, and then they'll be like, oh, this doesn't quite work, let's review this. I think with the shotgun in particular, the shoulder would have to stretch way forward. That wouldn't quite work. So we had to make that shotgun much stubbier. And overall, that changes the design, quite surprisingly. So yeah, that's really beneficial of the new pipeline that we've got and any changes that we've made.

I think metrics are probably one of the biggest changes for every content team, not just weapons and props. As the game progresses, metrics get refined, better defined.

Also the female rig that we added, that also caused a couple of issues that we had to rethink or go back to older assets and change them a little bit. So you have the grip a little bit more towards the character, so the arm doesn't stretch too far to the front. And I think just things like that, that we didn't think about earlier.

I mean, I think the key is as well, the process keeps changing as we go. Like Dave said, you have the female rig, that adds some more steps in the process. You add attachments, you've then got to make sure you do all the attachment checks as you go as part of the pipeline. And then for the future stuff like magazine stripping, we've now got to think about the process and how that changes going forward. So it's constantly evolving and updating based off how the game changes.

It's very much the same on the prop side of it, really. If you take, for example, usables, a lot of assets that were previously considered just dressing, you could consider, it's going to be carryable, it might have power, it might have certain features associated with it. There are instances where we've created these assets purely as an art content team, we've created them as dressing, and then we're having to retroactively, as new features come online, consider how those impact our existing assets. We're a lot more conscious of getting ahead of the curve now than we were five years ago when it comes to, okay, I'm creating a new asset, there aren't any existing ones, let's make a template for it, make sure it gets signed off by the relevant departments. We're creating a usable and there's an existing asset, let's corral our library of assets and review them, and if there are inconsistencies, make sure we're correcting those. Basically, also just considering how to make...

And also there's one of those elements, especially with the props, that you dress an environment and then you get a designer or someone running around that environment and they're like, it'd actually be really cool if this asset would do X, Y or Z, or I could do a mission here and we could have whatever functionality we might then need. And it's like, yeah, cool, I just thought it was a bin, but okay, if we need to add support for additional things. There are things that we could do if we had the time to do them. Everything can function, but it's about seeing what's the most important for missions and that sort of stuff. But a lot of it, like I say, you get from just getting in the environment, running around, being like, oh, this would be really cool, and then that gets added to the 'can we have this feature, please?'

I can speak to this from a design side first if you want. Basically, it's something that we really, really want to do. And obviously, we plan on doing it at some point. But I think I may have said this before. Essentially, we're trying to build out our more standard set of weapons first. So everything you'd basically expect to see in an FPS game, all of the tools available. You want your anti-vehicle weapons, LMGs, rifles, all that stuff. And we've got these existing human manufacturers that we want to build out while we've got our heads in the right space to do them, so we're not jumping all over the place. But yeah, it's the most exciting part of making weapons in my eyes. When we start to visit this new tech, we get to speak to the writing team and talk with them about what would this alien race have technology-wise that differs them from these human manufacturers. Then that ties into the art and it's like, how can we get this tech level across and this special functionality across in how the weapon looks? Which then ties into animation, and you talk to them as well, and everyone's just getting really excited about this new thing that you're doing, and everyone gets to input and shape this weapon together. And an example of that is what we've done before with the Atzkav. That was a new manufacturer when it was coming out. It was new tech because it was an electron weapon. And you're going through all of these really exciting steps of collaborating with all of the other teams and going, how does it work? What happens when you shoot someone? Speak to the VFX team, speak to the art team. What's it going to look like? How's it going to feel? It's just very exciting stuff. So yeah, certainly something that we on the design team want to get to doing at some point. And we're starting to move very slowly in that direction.

Art team, are they moving fast enough? Do you want to get your hands on some alien weapons?

Definitely not fast enough. We want to do more weapons, right, Jake?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I really do. With the alien weapons, they're quite complex, and they're much more organic in their form. So I think they'll be more challenging, but that's part of the fun of it, really. So yeah, I'd like to do some more alien weapons.

Yeah, and I think pretty much everyone's really excited about getting onto alien stuff at some point. I think the scope there to do some really fun weaponry is massive. Like JJ says, at the moment we've got our focus, and as we tick off all of that stuff we get to explore the new stuff, especially when we start exploring other systems. Not committing that the next system is going to be an alien system, but what I'm saying is that as we do a game with as many star systems in it as we're looking to deliver, if it was all human, personally... I can see Jared looking at me being like, what's he going to say? I survived last week, so I'm bulletproof. From my point of view, there's scope for so much variation, not just alien, but advanced tech.

Stylistically, with ultra-modern stuff, there's a lot of room to explore, I think.

Yeah, but ultimately this is story driven. So the further we go with the story, the more we can explore things like aliens and alien technology.

Maybe the concept artists don't have as much excitement for leather as we do as a group.

So to keep it back on track, again, I think that comes down to the manufacturers and the brands that we've currently established so far. A lot of our stuff is military and a lot of it is dictated by its functionality over necessarily its form. But I think as you branch into the less military-specific weapon manufacturers and more into the civilian or the collectibles or the rarer stuff, that's where you start to experiment a little bit more with the materials that are used. I think there's lots of opportunities for other materials to be used.

We've shown some homestead stuff as well, right? That includes a lot more organic furnishings, including pelts and felts and all that jazz.

We do have a lot of leather sofas.

Yeah, it's that office synthetic leather, I guess, right? So there's a lot of that kind of furnishing.

Yes. In short, yeah. Lots of discussions, definitely.

Yeah, it's something we're actually discussing a lot at the moment, how we want to be able to scale the weapons pipeline to fulfill the amount of variation we think we require for weapons, like the tint system from ships. I now look after ships as well, so I've been learning a lot about how that system is working, and I think it'd be a huge benefit to the weapons pipeline to be supporting that as well. I don't think in its current form it necessarily delivers everything that we would like to do with weapons, so I think there are still going to be some technical challenges that we're going to need to overcome. But me and JJ have, every month or two, 'what's up with skins, Ben? When are we going to do the conversion?' We'll get to it. But I think it's going to get us a lot of variation and allow us to do a lot with our existing weapons and our existing tech. But if we want to go down the real customized weapons route, which visually we've not explored internally properly, as crazy as that sounds, we haven't really defined that, okay, here's our run-of-the-mill weapons, here's our much more customized, I guess more unique weapons. And it's really defining what we want that to be, whether or not we want it to be, okay, you can change a few colors or you can change the materials from plastic to leather if you really want to, or whether it's, no, I've gone to a shop somewhere and I've had a real unique piece of artwork put on the side of my weapon. You see so much of weapon engravings and things like that, how people really care about these things, and it's how much of that we want to incorporate into the system, and that's what we haven't ticked off yet.

And to be clear, we want this same system across both ships and weapons, but also we're trying to keep in the loop with the character team as well, because we obviously want one unified system, if possible, that we can use.

Yes, as far as I know, that's the plan. We're certainly going to have wear and tear on our FPS weapons. To an extent, we can already implement some of that right now. So we were able to affect the weapon stats and stuff as wear would go down. We just need the underlying system that works with it. So what causes the wear and tear, and then where are we going to go and get that fixed, providing that you want to take care of your weapon as well. So that's something we're definitely going to get to and something we want to do. And it goes for the same things like the multi-tool and the medical tool as well. If you don't take proper care of it, you'll see the efficiency rates go down. It might even start to misfire, you might have problems with the battery, you have to take it out and clean it, put it back in, stuff like that. So yeah, it's definitely something we want to work towards.

From an artistic standpoint, sorry, Jake, we're quite happy with where the cosmetic wear and dirt is. Obviously, there's talk about, I want snow to affect things, the biome-specific stuff. It's a separate discussion to, I guess, a weapon getting grimy and worn out, right?

It's very much related. I mean, it's kind of the same answer for that question, but there's a lot of reasons why. Company-wide, the whole idea of wear and dirt is not unified. And it depends how it's being done, if it's a ship, a weapon or a character. But on the artist side of things, at least from my point of view, we're trying to get ahead of that as best as we can, in the sense that now part of the pipeline is making sure that we have those WDA maps and those blends there and ready. So when the system is in place, a lot of those guns we can just tick on and they're ready to go.

I think it's largely just down to the stuff we've seen so far is, I think it's safe to say, fairly experimental. I can't really write checks on behalf of the graphics team. There's work to be done in terms of biome-specific wear; that's a larger system, really. I think that's a global system that expands beyond just weapons. It's a huge thing.

Yeah, I think, although all of these things are just a 3D object in the world, the way they're actually brought into the engine and the way the engine handles them is very different depending on if it is a character or if it is a weapon or a static prop. It's all just 3D geometry, but each one of those things has its own individual pipeline and technical limitations. And the character team got their stuff working and that was the initial push to get that tech in there. But it's not rolled across to the other teams yet, as far as I'm aware.

Yeah, and there's plenty of hurdles to come across really, isn't there? One example: you could drive the wear up on a weapon, the entity, and it will work, you'll see that being driven up, but any attachments, they'll stay pristine. And that's just one of the many things that need to be worked on and we are working on.

I think we have a couple of glowy bits on the Gemini weapons, the blue spinner, and the glowy bits on that SMG that Jake did. Of course, we need to be a little bit careful because it needs to have a certain purpose when it glows. We can't just put glowy stuff on it because it looks cool. It needs to make sense that it's on there. I mean, weapons usually, from a tactical perspective, don't glow that much. Of course, futuristic weapons like the Atzkav, they have glowy bits, and when you reload or if the flaps at the front open, you can see glowy bits inside. We have a lot of stuff like this, not all over the place, but where it makes sense, I would say.

When we move on to alien weapons too, we should have some nice glowy stuff.

I've heard aliens like glowy bits.

So we don't really have any plans at the moment. We've certainly got nothing set in stone. Right now, it doesn't really fit in with the combat that we're currently pushing for. Especially if we're talking about a military shooter, are you really going to want to run across a planet surface at someone with a sniper rifle with a giant chainsword? I mean, it sounds very fun, but it's not going to be very practical. So at the moment, it's not something that we're focusing on. Big weapons as well, they will be taking up a slot on your backpack. If you're talking about chainswords from Warhammer, they're absolutely massive. So if you're talking about using a big two-handed weapon, it's going to take up a lot of space on your loadout. It's going to be a bit unwieldy, and it just doesn't feel very Star Citizen. I mean, like you mentioned there, energy swords, you can go down that route as well, but we've just not found a space for them at the moment. But I think it's definitely a case of never say never. We never want to say we're never going to do these giant weapons, like giant thunder hammers or chainswords or anything like that. Super cool weapons, and stuff that might be really good for boarding, for example. But yeah, at the moment, no plans.

Sure. I mean, from a feature point of view, we've obviously got electron damage already in. We can pull the levers on that to either be lethal or go full stun, essentially, and knock someone out. Or we've even got the idea of blunt force actually doing stun damage as well with the melee combat. So personally, it ties in really well. We could certainly do something like a taser-like weapon that purely does electron damage that will basically knock someone out unconscious and allow them to be captured.

Let's go ahead and expand the question, either non-lethal weapons or melee weapons. What would you guys like to see?

Shock gloves.

Actually, internally, we did a little test on one melee thing. And the thing is, you need to make sure that it looks really good from the first-person perspective. And that's where most games cheat a little bit, where it's right in front of your face, basically, and that's not how you hold the weapon. And we need to also make sure that it looks good in third person from the outside, and that's also a problem that you need to solve, basically, when doing such weapons.

Yeah, we've got the toy pistols and they're technically a non-lethal weapon. I'd love to expand it. We worked hard to get those in. And I guess non-lethal... I don't know. For me, what I'd love anyway is anything should be a weapon. I keep on banging on about that to the feature team. If I'm in a bar and there's bottles, tick, weapon. If you're in your ship, in engineering, and there's tools, weapon. Sandwich, yeah. I think being able to pick up anything that makes sense... Actually, we can throw stuff at the moment and do that sort of thing, but we're not that far away, surely.

Being able to lob heavy boxes at people from balconies and completely squish them would be quite hilarious.

Fire extinguishers, definitely.

We have fire extinguisher props already and having them function would obviously be good for that system.

Yeah, from the weapons side, we've been thinking about things that we can put out that someone could take in their loadout. So if they were, for example, playing as part of a big multi-crew ship, and one of their jobs is essentially to make sure they are literally putting out fires, running around and dealing with those, then we definitely want someone to have something on them, as well as we need to think about the props that we've got in there at the moment. So if someone is completely unprepared, they could just go and grab something and help put it out. Flamethrowers? Obviously, it's been talked about, because as soon as anyone mentions fire, flamethrowers come up. But I think at the moment, with there being so many ways to start fires and not very many ways to put them out, we want to focus on the fire extinguishers for now.

In ships? It's just like an airlock.

You just open the airlock and then there's no oxygen, so there's no fire.

I can't commit to anything. But good question.

I've personally not been working completely directly on the system. Parts of our team have. I've not heard discussion about fire suppression systems being built into ships, but obviously it's built off the room system. So even though you're half joking there, Ben, if you did vent a room of oxygen, then the fire would, in theory, go out, unless it's got fuel that can burn without an oxygen supply, essentially. So there are definitely environmental levers that we can pull. Say, for example, if we had a petrol can, in theory, you could make the fire bigger with that. Or if you were pouring water on, then obviously the fire would start to douse and the flames would go down. So I don't know if it's being built into ships or space stations, but it's certainly something we could do from a systems side.

We are definitely still very pleb-like in our use of 3ds Max. I'll put it this way. There's a lot of artists who are very enthusiastic about Blender and would love to use it on a day-to-day basis. However, and this is just my personal opinion, we have a massive library of scripts and also a custom exporter for our engine, and obviously all of that would need to be ported over before it was something we could consider. I'm not sure how the tool programmers feel about that; probably they're like, 'nah, mate.' So there are artists who are very passionate about the use of Blender. I'm not one of them, I'm still a knuckle-dragging idiot, but I would love to learn to use Blender, I just don't really have time at the moment. But yeah, basically not right now. Some of the concept artists use Blender and they take advantage of the fact it's got its own PBR engine to present stuff. It's a very nice workflow for them as a production workflow without massive amounts of work from tools programmers. I couldn't see it being used day to day.

I'm sure there's also the element of a learning curve for production artists as well. Take a week out of one person's schedule, it's cool. Take a week out of 200 artists' schedules, and all of a sudden you've got a reasonable amount of delays in that.

It's a bit like when people say, why aren't you using a different game engine? And it's like, well, the amount of resources we've invested into our workflows make it very challenging to make such a drastic pivot. I'm sure people will still ask about it though. They're still basically saying, we're interested in this tool or in this program. Personally, I don't see it coming in. But that's not to say there's any reason other than that. It would just take a lot of time for programmers.

On weapons, we usually use Maya, which is also a struggle. If you come from Max to Maya, you need to learn a lot. The same thing would apply for Blender. So if one person has a Blender file and the other person needs to work in that file, they would also need to know the software. And training people and so on, that takes a lot of time. And as Corey said, all the tools need to be converted to the other software, and people need to know everything about it and all the little tricks. And getting one file from one software to the other causes a lot of problems, especially if you consider animations, rigging and so on. And yeah, that's the whole reason behind it, I would say.

I guess we could say, I don't know, the turtle. That came about because one of the concept artists just drew a tiny thumbnail of a table or something, and there was a little turtle on it. And we were just like, well, it's in the concept, so we're going to have to make it now. So we made the turtle.

I think the weirdest is a tough one. I mean, I find myself always referencing the automotive industry for a lot of stuff, I guess. And I couldn't put my finger on something that stood out as being exceptionally weird. I reference a lot of just general gadgets and electronics and keyboards and...

Usually when you want reference, you're referencing something pretty close to what you want, or at least very accurate, be that geometry or materials.

Yeah, there's two sorts of references. There's the visual reference that you're going for, and then there's the functionality reference that you're going for. So if you're trying to find reference for something that's functional, the best thing you can do is look at how that problem has already been solved. And then what you need to do is take that core element of, okay, these are the core mechanics that I need to use to resolve what I'm trying to do. And then how do I aesthetically make that pleasing and fit the manufacturer or the art style or just our universe? And those two things go hand in hand. So it might be that you're referencing a great big digger for some of its mechanical functions, but then you're translating that into a small little detail that you're using on a weapon or a prop or a ship or whatever it might be. When it comes to references, there's loads of variation. But as Jake says, if you're looking at switches and dials, because you're adding some switches and dials to the back of an asset, then generally you're looking down into those details.

I'm going to go ahead and jump on that one a little bit. Nothing's been decided about converting them to the skins or the paint systems. But as far as the permanent loss, one of the things that we're driving towards is using the reputation system to resolve that issue. Basically, as the reputation system comes online and gets further developed, one of the things that we're exploring with the sub team and the US PU feature team is to have subscriber vendors in locations, where you can basically go and reclaim your subscriber items if you've lost them. So I think that's how we'd want to address that first. As always, things are subject to change. We may find a different solution, a better solution down the road. But that is the angle that we are driving towards at the moment. No ETA. It's all dependent on the continuing evolution of the reputation system. But when it's ready for us, that's what we're hoping for.

I think on a technical level, the short answer would be yes, if we want to convert it over to the system as well. What we're trying our best to get away from is everything being unique. And so we want to be able to set up the weapons in the same manner completely. So from a technical standpoint, we want the system to be all-encompassing and allow us to do whatever we need to do. The rest of it, what Jared just said.

Yeah, and just to speak quickly from our point of view as well, because like Ben said, we've been having a lot of discussions about this recently, and as Jared said, nothing has been set in stone. But an idea that we have had is essentially, you keep the weapon that you've got. You might have had this P4-AR for a thousand hours in the game. It's just a weapon, but you might be able to take that to different places and get it resprayed. So if, for example, you did have a subscriber skin available to you through reputation, then even if you lose that weapon, you might be able to take another one that you've just bought because you lost all of your stuff, and go and get that resprayed in that same skin. So while I'm not saying that is the plan, that's something that's been thrown around internally at the moment.

What you can take from it is that we have multiple options to pursue and to explore.

It's a solvable problem.

It's a solvable problem. It will be solved. It all depends on how it interacts with multiple other game systems.

Yes, there are plans. There is a system for breakable props being worked on by the VFX team. I have no idea how far along that is or when it will make its way into things. We do have breakable systems currently, existing ones from the engine, though we are not really pursuing breakable stuff a lot right now, just because we're waiting for the tools to mature. But yes, we do intend for certain assets to break.

Yeah, we have done a few breakables in the past. We've got the breakable beer bottles.

Yeah, we did some beakers and stuff like that that break. We did the fire extinguisher, obviously you shoot it and it sprays stuff. We've got some exploding gas canisters and things like that. It's something we want more of because it creates very fun gameplay. Like I say, there's work on that actual system being done.

And it does usually cause some headaches. At least it has in the past with the beer bottles. Because we had a situation, back when we were using prefabs, where one of those found its way into a prefab library, which then populated all around the universe. And nobody really knew. And for some reason there were some real big costs on the physics, because there was one bottle that would never settle. It would constantly update its position. It needed help. And yeah, it caused all kinds of chaos.

Definitely the crossbow for me. I know that has been wanted for a really long time. And when that concept was coming through, I was like, I want to do that. Look at it. I really thought it looked good. And so far, it's been a real challenge, but also really, really fun.

The rig's pretty crazy, right? Because you've got the cam with the strings, it's like a compound, right? So it's quite an intricate mechanism.

Yeah, I guess the reference I was looking at for that was people shooting bows and arrows in super slow motion. How does this work?

Yeah, how the hell does this work? Cables are always tricky to do, and that's the biggest challenge of the rig.

It's quite complex in its geo as well. There's a dense amount of detail to that. There's four arms to it. Just getting that under the poly count, which for us is quite high naturally because of our custom normal workflow, getting that under that highest poly count was pretty tough, while keeping it looking really dense in detail. But I did it. So it's there.

What about anybody else?

Well, I'm working on two things that I think we haven't talked about yet. So I better not talk anymore.

You mentioned the Volt stuff, we're all right.

The Volt stuff? Yeah, that's all right. I'm working on that Volt Parallax rifle right now, which is also pretty cool and has lots of detail and has the same issues as the crossbow of too many polygons that need to get optimized. And yeah, that's a really cool one, and I really like that.

JJ, you got something?

Jared, I'm excited about everything we're doing. And I'm in the very fortunate position where I get to see a lot of it in my day to day. So there's nothing in particular. And there's probably a lot of things that I'm not allowed to talk about. So let's leave it at that.

Corey?

Obviously I spend a lot of my time doing management stuff, making sure the teams are all happy and all that. I do sneak in a few assets here and there just because, obviously, I'm an artist and I enjoy making artwork. So I do little bits here and there, things like hip flasks, flair items and stuff, stuff that's not really a release task. So something that's on the back burner, I jump on some of that stuff. So yeah, hip flask. I did the handcuffs for the Star Runner trailer. They were really fun. Stuff like that.

I think props follow environment quite a bit when it comes to the style, right?

Yes, we split props into, I guess, location-specific props and then props that are separate from locations. If we're making a bench for microTech, it would adhere to that art style. But if we're making a generic flashlight that is used everywhere, that would have its own concept, whether it's high-tech or low-tech. We'd still have a tech level associated with it. And obviously, it would borrow style elements from that.

Yeah, I guess it's like a yes with the high tech, low tech, and universal. But due to the nature of props and the variety that we make, it's more of a spectrum than specific categories.

Yeah, I guess as well, an apple is an apple.

But since props are not only in environments, but also sometimes in ships, there's a lot more variety for that. Because the ships are not necessarily bound to the style of the environment.

Yeah, basically. In short, it's a question of how much content's enough for a game that's going to keep growing and evolving as it goes. There's never really enough. But, as we've said earlier, we've covered a lot of the more standard and expected weapons you'd see from an on-foot shooter. Not all of them need a new manufacturer. So like I say, we're building out the current families that we've got. But tying that into new manufacturers is like when we were talking about alien weapons earlier. It gives us that opportunity to revisit the tech and go, is there anything cool and new that we could do with these new manufacturers? So we're not just going to release another Behring. We're not just going to release another Klaus & Werner just because we feel like we want another set of laser weapons. I mean, that might happen far in the future, but right now, if there's a new manufacturer, we've done it for a reason. Like Volt, for example: we wanted to make weapons that evolved as they fired, but were also unreliable. And that obviously ties into the aesthetic of them looking like they've been made in a shed in someone's back garden almost, with all of the wires all over the place, tying in everywhere. So yeah, that's at least why we make new manufacturers anyway.

Yeah, I think everyone's going to say a lot. No one's going to be able to put a number on it. Like JJ mentioned, from a design point of view, they want every new weapon to have a new feature set or be there for a reason. I'm slightly on the side of, I just want pretty things. So if you give me another shotgun that's just a little bit prettier, by what I assess to be pretty, then I think there is still scope for that as well, especially on the scale of the game we're making. We keep saying it, but every star system that there's... I don't think there's a limit, apart from how many we can fit in with a handful of weapon artists.

We didn't go crowdfunded. We didn't eschew the normal publishing system to self-impose limits. We'll keep going until we're content.

For pizza, you would definitely get one, yeah.

Yeah, we're all on board with that. If you send all of us each a pizza, we can make it happen.

It comes down to manufacturers, to answer it sensibly. It kind of loops back to the why no leather. Someone's going to prove me wrong that there is a manufacturer out there making military weapons with wooden stocks, I'm sure. But anyway, it comes down to: a lot of the manufacturers we've got at the moment are functionality-based manufacturers over form. When we get to the form-over-functionality manufacturers, the people that are making custom weapons or weapons that are not meant for a battlefield with however many hundreds of thousands of people using them, I think that's where you'll see a bit more experimentation in the materials used.

There's a market for high-end weapons in the universe. But obviously, a lot of the manufacturers, based on the fact they're quite, I don't want to say bog-standard weapons, but we're covering our bases in terms of the more generic weapon manufacturers, I suppose. They're more like your bread and butter. There's obviously more exotic weapons in the game. There's the explosive pistol whose name eludes me right now. Very ornate design. Lightning Bolt Company obviously furnish their weapons with some interesting stuff.

I was just going to say, it's interesting, because it comes out of that conversation between the writers, design and art, where Lightning Bolt Company, when we were assigning the manufacturers to this type of weapon, fit perfectly in terms of description. But when you looked at the company, it was actually almost like a Russian-based company that was brought into the future. I think even their original logo, their description, some of it was in Cyrillic even. So it's that very Russian aesthetic.

We had the UI solely in Cyrillic. No one understands it, but it'd be cool. It looks great. And it looks great because I'm not Russian and I can't read it. A Russian guy was probably like, yeah, it's normal.

A lot of the early reference that came out, I think even for the Atzkav, one of the reference weapons we had was the Dragunov. And while obviously the tech is completely different to that, it's not even a ballistic weapon, and the barrel's completely different because it's got that electron tech in there, we wanted some elements of that to come into the silhouette, and obviously some of the elements from that to come into the materials that are used as well. So I think even in part of that process, you mentioned the Kalashnikov, I think that was brought up at some point. And while I'm not saying we're going to make a Kalashnikov, that will probably come up as reference when we start looking at assault rifles for the company.

I remember years ago having a bit of a discussion with one of our designers about magazines and newspapers and how they shouldn't be a thing in the universe because there's no trees. And it's like, wait, there's no trees? And then that was discussed with narrative and stuff, like, oh, yeah, we're not doing magazines because there's no trees. There's planets filled with trees. What are you on about? Why are we not doing newspapers and magazine stuff? They're like, why would anyone ship one of those across the universe? Think how long it would take and how much it would cost to ship a magazine across. And you're like, yeah, all right, that's a valid argument. I accept that. But when it comes to bespoke weaponry or furniture or these sorts of assets, then it's probably something someone's going to keep and not just throw away instantly.

We're trying to convey an aesthetic at the end of the day. It's the same with the cardboard boxes, for instance. We have a lot of cardboard boxes in the game. That's just an asset that was made quite a while ago, and it's just proliferated since because it was a box. It's easy dressing, right? And then people are like, why would they use cardboard? It's the future, where the level of scarcity for resources and the refinement of resources is much more advanced. Why do people still have cardboard boxes? And it's like, well, should we have cardboard boxes? I don't know. I'm sure some people will tell you we should, some people will tell you we shouldn't.

If trees are a commodity that you have, then I'm sure there will still be people that will be making cardboard.

Yeah, it's a resource at the end of the day, right? Like plastics and stuff, you need to get it from somewhere. So I guess it depends on what resources you have available.