The developers cover the upcoming MISC mining ship concept, Starfarer's hangar-ready sale at $300, and the Caterpillar, Idris, Javelin, Reliant, Herald and Carrack schedules. They also cover Aurora rework plans, Nyx, the Vanduul language, Org 2.0 and Gamescom plans.
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships
Yes, the small mining ship is coming along very, very well. You guys are going to see it in the not too distant future. It's in the concept art stage right now. It started off looking just like the Aluminum Mallard from Space Quest 3. It's changed quite a bit from that original version. It looked exactly like it, except it was orange. I commented on a shotgun. And then Chris hated it. But no, it's coming along really well. That will likely be the next concept sale we do. Likely. Bar against it, because we aren't for sure until we sign off the final stage of the concept art, but it's coming together very well.
TL;DRThe Carrack still needs a full interior workup, which is on one artist's schedule after he finishes the Caterpillar, which is running longer than planned; no date is given.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships
Carrack is still scheduled for a design pass at the interior. It needs a full interior workup, which is currently in Gurmukh's schedule. Gurmukh is finishing up the Caterpillar now, which is taking a little bit longer than we'd initially scheduled between some of the changes they want to do to integrate stuff with the Dragonfly and with him being out for a little bit.
For those of you who don't know, Gurmukh had a knee injury, so he's recuperating. He had surgery on his knee. But he's doing very well. And he specifically sent me a message today, actually. He said, make sure you tell the fans today, I'm sorry I couldn't be there to say hi.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships
Yeah, he actually tried to come in a couple days ago, but he was in too much pain, so he's working from home now. But working on that Caterpillar, and it's going to be good.
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships
Yeah, they're developing the style guide. It was funny because we sent out a draft style guide to Jim Martin, who was developing one of our ships. But he's the one who came up with the colors in the first place. He should know. But it's all very formal now.
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships
I mean, Caterpillar would be the next... So the Idris is finishing up in the UK; they're starting to do multiplayer tests and Squadron stuff with that. So that's a big ship that's coming in the not too distant future. The Javelin is very far along because it's also being used for Squadron. But probably the next non-limited, non-military big ship you'll see in engine will be the Caterpillar. But before even that, we have to make the Starfarer flyable, which is one of the priorities right now. Now it's hangar ready, and folks are working on the flight stuff.
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships
Reliant is very close. That's really close. It's just polishing at this point. Not going to be in 2.3, but I would bet heavily that you'll see it in some form in 2.4.
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships
Yes, that is in the long-term plan. Because, of course, the Auroras are technically our most popular ship by some wide margin. It will definitely get a bump up to the current state. In fact, that was one of the items we were scheduling out, later in the year stuff, with production as part of these Erin Roberts meetings. And the Aurora rework was in there, the Hornet F7A finishing, so a bunch of stuff that is more housekeeping than big fancy reveal.
I have considered that. We don't have as easy access to Jeff as we do Pedro, but that's something I will pursue.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships
That was another thing we were working on this week, setting up the Vanduul language. We're going to be bringing the fellow who developed it in for some shooting and have him give a Vanduul lesson.
Yes, dog tags are still available. They'll be available through the 4th. So pick that up if you want a customized dog tag. And if you missed out on a star map and really want one, send me a ticket and I can help you. Unless there's like 500 of you.
Really well. I talked a little bit about that with Erin Roberts in our ATV interview. If it wasn't in the first half, it'll be in the second half, which airs next week.
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships
No, no additional ones with this sale. This is just the, hey, the ship's hangar ready, we're going to make it available again sale. And we hadn't even been going to make that big a deal about the post, but we saw this artwork that Nathan had been doing, and somehow he got to doing a trailer, and it just made for a nice fancy post. And we like any excuse where we get to write some lore and do some universe building.
I did talk to Corentin. I can't say his last name, but he was part of the Ship Shape segment we did last week. I talked to him a little bit yesterday about something a lot of people were asking about, the fish tank that was originally concepted into the Starfarer. And he says that that is something they want to work on later on.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships
I actually know what some of the fish issues preventing that are right now, because I got a great email thread. It started like a week ago. It's like, 'fish persistence issues' is the subject, and it's flagged red. They're bringing stuff into persistence in one of our branches for the hangar, and there's some technical problem causing issues with the fish swimming back and forth. So I saved that email in my inbox because it was one of my favorites.
TL;DRThe Starfarer price rises for new buyers because the ship grew far larger than first planned, existing owners are unaffected, and the flight-ready sale price is warned to rise by a similar amount.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships
Yes, I think we had talked about that a couple days ago. It's going to be $300 for the Starfarer this time around. We sold it for $200. Very, very cheap initially. The initial plan for the Starfarer was that it was going to be a truck cab with a fuel tank, literally something of a flying tinderbox. And UK made it a much, much larger ship, similar to what they did with the Idris. So the price has to go up.
And we've said that for a while, that one of the virtues of supporting a ship in its concept stage is that that will be the cheapest price.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships
Yes, this will not impact people who have already bought the Starfarer at all. They got it in at the cheaper level, just new people. And I mean, as fair warning now, it's going to go up a similar amount for the flight-ready sale. So this will still be the cheapest chance to get a Starfarer. We hear about pricing for every sale ever, and it always is going to be what it is. We know everybody would like a ship that's as cheap as possible and that has as many features as possible and that is as interesting as possible, but it's always going to be a balance.
TL;DRA VR update was never promised; the speaker only said they'd ask for one, and hopefully there will be an update next week, depending on what can be discussed.
That's not what we stated last week. I said that I would ask Brian to include it. That's not the same as saying that there will be one. I've checked in with Brian and hopefully we'll see an update on the state of VR in next week's News from Around the Verse. But again, it's what they can talk about and what they can't talk about, guys.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships
I think one thing that never really comes across is we are one foot in backer territory and one foot in development territory. A lot of the same things you wonder about are what we wonder about.
For as much as things change in game development, we do try to be certain that what we're telling you at a time is the truth of that time and the truth it will persist on.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships
But it is an extremely difficult position to know what 400 people around the world are doing at any time and also to be able to accurately relay that to 1.2 million people.
TL;DRA mock-up exists for the ship spec page rework, but it has no ETA and isn't a top priority, since the web team is busy moving platform features into the game.
Yeah, I've seen the mock-up that Turbulent wants to do. It's one of many things that Turbulent has in the pipe to work on. No ETA. It's probably not our highest priority thing at the moment. But they have worked it up. They have a plan in place.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships
And they're working towards it. Pretty dedicated to this persistence crossover thing. As we move towards persistence in the game, a lot of services and features that are currently run through the platform, that's a fancy word for website, a lot of the things that happen there such as melts and sales and credit purchases and so on, ship transfers, moving stuff around in your hangar, blah, blah, blah, all is going from kind of the spit-and-glue platform-side stuff we developed initially to get it out there to inside the game. So a lot of Turbulent's bandwidth right now is interacting with the folks in Austin who are bringing that into the game, figuring out what they can and can't do right now. If you're wondering what Turbulent is working on right now, that's a big part of it.
I have not seen anything on the Merlin in a while.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships
I don't think folks are working on that this week. I mean, I saw the demo they did where it docks, but I don't think that's been put into production or really come close to it.
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships
No, not immediately. We will go back and integrate a lot of the legacy parts that we've introduced in the future. 2.4 is a major, major change to components. We've been playing with individual component systems, changing these two. I think it's the crest of the wave, this next one. So you'll see a bunch more components then. With 2.3, we are adding two engines, I believe. There's two engine upgrades that are coming.
No. So what we did was we had lots of people asking us who bought this. In the physical packages we had a folded star map, right, because a game box will have something like that in it. And then we also sold the star maps separately as an item. So we are fulfilling the ones that were purchased separately. We're going to do those as rolled maps because we had so many requests for that since it was a standalone purchase, wasn't part of a box. So it is the same subject on the map. It's just going to be a slightly different version, if that makes sense.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships
No, the map is the same. The subject matter is the same. Yes, it's the same star map. One's folded, one's rolled. The one in the game box is going to be folded to fit in the game box.
Well, last I saw, they're doing some layout changes after some feedback from the team in Austin. Behaviour's working on that. It's coming along great. Everything I've seen looks amazing.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships
Yeah, they just finished a new lighting pass, I believe. I've got a meeting with Sandi and Tony next week where we're going to sit down and look at the schedule for that, so I should know a little bit more then.
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships
Yeah, I actually told them yesterday. It's MISC. Which you probably could have figured out by looking at the Space Quest 3 reference I made earlier, figuring out which of our companies look like that.
TL;DRNo release date is given for the soundtrack; the composer's mentioned deadline is an internal one for getting tracks into the game box, not a release date.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships
I will point this out about Pedro. Because this also came up earlier in the week, where he was like, oh, you'll see the Starfarer video tomorrow. He is thinking of things in terms of his internal due date, which is, yes, we tell him, oh, we have to have the Starfarer track done by Thursday because we need to put this together. We have to have the tracks for the soundtrack because they have to go to the factory and be printed and then be put in the game box by this date. Not the same thing as that it will come out that day. The reason there is a deadline for the soundtrack, though, is for that exact reason: we want to put everything in a box and ship it to folks in the, I don't want to say immediate future, but the not too distant future. So that's the deadline he's thinking of.
I need more footage. There's a thread in Official Announcements. We're collecting footage of Big Benny's, people flying Big Benny's machines all over the galaxy. We still need more footage. So I can't tell you when that'll come because I can't tell you how fast people will supply me with footage. But we need more footage of Benny everywhere and anywhere he's not supposed to be.
Well, the next one's going to be a ship model because we do those every other month. So April's going to be a ship model and then May will be another plant. So, yep, every other month you'll have a new plant for the next year, I believe.
It's the second Friday of every month. So I have a schedule up in the Subscriber Den, which if you're not a subscriber, you won't be able to see. But it's stickied in the subscriber perk post. I have some dates in there. So become a subscriber.
Both of which Erin talks about in the second half of our interview, next week on ATV.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships
I mean, you'll also see more bounty hunting stuff as the reputation system grows, but I'm not really counting that. I'm thinking of professions as stuff like science and exploration and so on.
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships
Yes, the fellow who did the Vanduul language is going to be coming down here for some interviews. Well, it's actually half interviews, half to talk about other languages. But we're going to shoot some stuff about, you know, show you guys how you can speak Vanduul.
TL;DRThe big Gamescom party and presentation were never set up and are being dropped, but there will be a full-size show-floor booth, backer get-togethers and smaller presentations.
There won't be the big party like we used to. There won't be the big presentation.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships
The thing we're dropping is the planned presentation, because we don't want the team working for a month to get to that. We want everybody working straight through on Squadron and whatever patch we're up to then, 5, 6, 3, 4, 2, 3, 2, 4, 2, 4, 2, 7, or whatever we're at then. But we will be having several social gatherings. Everybody will be there: Chris, us, Sandi, David Swofford. We're going to have a full-size booth this time on the Gamescom show floor for anybody who is attending the show, and then we'll have off-site get-togethers with backers. And there will be smaller presentations. We will have some cool stuff to show, especially, I think, with the procedural tech that's going to be ready by then. But we didn't rent E-Werk this time, is the only difference.
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships
Yes, Herald is in active development right now. It went through a minor design thing earlier this week, because I know I had to sign off on some stuff and Chris had too, and we both weighed in on some changes to a little bit of the outer look. You'll be seeing more about that in the not too distant future. The folks who were working on the Scout are now handling the Herald. And we are paying special attention this time, which is why Chris and I are signing off on some very specific elements of it, to make sure that nothing like the seat thing happens again.
TL;DROrg 2.0 is part of a larger proposed replacement of the website's chat and forums, still in design and not yet being built; hopefully in place this year, with no further ETA.
Yeah, it does, doesn't it? But they're still working on the proposal, still working out all the plans for the technical parts, how it all links together. But it's all part of a bigger proposal to replace the chat, replace the forums, basically the way that you communicate on our website. Because we don't want to just develop something just for orgs. We want to develop a bespoke solution for our entire website. So we can move away from Vanilla Forums, because Vanilla Forums, of course, has quite a few limitations. So we can move away from the chat, the XMPP chat that's currently there. So yeah, it's part of a much bigger thing. So that's why it's taking as long as it is. So they haven't started building it. They're still designing it at this point. But hopefully that's something we'll have in place this year. No ETA beyond that.
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships
No, Cargo Olympics is something the designers have been talking about forever. The fact that it would be coming out today was lore slash fans, but it's not something we were planning to really say. Yeah, not a viral.
I talked to the writers about it. It was a good one. They set a date when they first came up with it. And then when they realized, hey, we have a lore story in the week that's the same as that date, they just made the lore story about that. But it was not a sign of anything happening today, guys. There's no Cargo Olympics happening today.
Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships
Probably not CitizenCon. The studios in Montreal, while they're absolutely integral to the development of Star Citizen, it's Behaviour and Turbulent, they're not actually our studios. They are contractors. So it would be a lot harder for us to run a CitizenCon event there.
Yes, those will be available soon. That was our sample, if you saw photos of it, and they are being produced in the near future, so we'll have pre-orders up in the next, I'd say, week or so.
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Ben LesnickDirector of Community Engagement, Online Strategy and Spaceships
He was, yes. And I actually talked to him; we were concerned that it was a little purple looking, and Gurmukh said no, it is purple. He likes to inject a color into his concept art, he was saying.
Yes. Jump Point is going to print. We're going to start printing it soon, so soon they will ship. I'd say probably June those will start shipping. And yeah, we have more. Sandi and I are looking at doing some hoodies with the same fabric that we did the redacted ones with. We're hoping to find something close to that.
Yeah, they work on that stuff. In fact, in next week's ATV Fast Forward, you'll see some of the work we're doing to help you find your way around in 3D positional space. It's a new augmented reality prototype for EVA.