Star Citizen Live Gamedev: Making Ship Up IV-2

That we switch a manufacturer in the early process, it happens quite often. And to be fair, it's not a tragedy. It happens sometimes a little later. It depends. Maybe if we do some rebalance to what the concept was and it doesn't fit the manufacturer anymore, that's something we have to do. It's something we know can happen.

Layering of shapes means that the surface is not constituted by a continuous layer, like, for example, the canopy of your computer is, but is actually made of literally layers, like an onion, that are cut with different shapes, every shape cull on each other, and there is what we call echoing. Try to use a few established angles, use this one and overlap them to create nice dynamic shapes.

When are they going to let me do it? So I asked John about this, actually, because I really wanted to do it after the Syulen, but the Polaris was higher priority, so Carrack fans and Polaris fans will have to fight out what they would have preferred to have sooner.

The ever-changing priorities of game dev.

Yeah, it's a real thing. I haven't forgotten, they won't let me.

Well, the NPC pilots actually come from a generator. There's actually a list of first names and a list of last names, and when it auto-generates random NPCs, it just picks one from each. So, yeah, I think just about every employee that was here at the time of the list generation is in there, as well as a bunch of generic name lists that you can download from the internet. But yeah, my dad actually caught a Jared Huckaby in there and sent me a picture once. That was around the time I found out he was a player and a supporter of the game.

Yeah, for sure. So for those of you that aren't aware what POM is, it's basically like a decal, so a floating sticker that gives the game engine information which essentially fakes depth or height into that sticker. So you see there that looks like it goes in, but it's actually not. That's essentially what it is. And you can save so much memory.

There are ships where, as you're walking through, you look down, there's a grate, and you can see a bunch of wires beneath the grate. The wires are not there. Neither is the grate, for that matter. It's just a fancy shifting texture there. It's a very, very powerful tool. But it's one of the ways we can add a lot of detail but maintain decent performance.

No. This is part two of last week's show where we take the thing we made and utterly change it because of feedback. A crucial part in the concept process. I've never gotten to showcase it before because nobody was willing to come back the next week.

It depends on the shape and the situation. I can say that we had 17 for the Pulse. We had nine for the 'serum' [unclear], for example, and three for the Storm. So it depends.

And in these two hours, we've done one with some slight feedback changes, but essentially one silhouette, one thing.

Yeah, and it is very junky. When we present stuff, especially to the art direction of the company, we try to polish it a little more.