Developers cover player discoveries influencing the economy, ship-boarding weapons with finite ammo, manual versus autopilot travel, radar detection levels, and persistent battle damage on ships. Oculus Rift head tracking is demoed, and a concept artist discusses the asteroid hangar and Xi'an art.
Yeah, one of the things we've talked about during economy discussions is actually using discoveries made by players to enhance existing technology, maybe for small runs, or even to create new technology. So yeah, there will be changes based on what players do.
Yeah, and Chris has been very clear about having the lore and things that go on in the universe affect the universe. And so that's one of those ways that can happen. And it's going to be evolving over the course. Hopefully, this game's going for 20, 30 years.
So yeah, the weapons, think of them as scaled-down versions of the ship weapons, same technologies in maybe some slightly different forms as well. So it's not going to be the infinite ammo sort of thing that you expect from some shooter type games. You'll have to carry it on your person. So maybe you'll have pockets where you have ammo clips or something like that. But you'll have to have clips to recharge them.
TL;DRPlayers can fly between planets manually, or use an autopilot-style fast travel that unhooks speed limits in a straight line, letting them walk around the ship, rather than a cutscene.
Okay, it's not going to be a cutscene in the sense of the landing, what they're talking about there. What we're talking about is there's two modes of transportation, of course. You can either just fly it manually, so all those explorers out there who want to just go spend an hour or two just chugging from one planet to another, we can allow that.
Exactly. But for the players who are in a hurry to get from point A to point B, we are going to have, if you think about autopilot, for instance, from the old Wing Commander games, any of those games, there is a way of traveling faster. And basically what it does is it unhooks the controls that keep your ship from going too fast because the maneuvers would injure you. And as long as you go in a straight line, much faster. So that's how autopilot would work. So you could get up and walk around your ship and look out the windows while you're fast traveling.
Let's think of it this way. Asteroids don't just occur in piratey space. There are asteroids all over the place. Notice we don't call it the pirate hangar. We call it the asteroid hangar because it is available to anyone who wants to be hanging out in an asteroid.
Yeah, actually I just had a conversation with some of the programmers this week about this specific topic, and they were discussing the fact that we can actually allow battle damage to accumulate over time, and they can sort of bake it onto the ship so it stays there. So you can see the history of your fights if you don't go and get it buffed out.
So, I&W, of course, is referring to radar and detection. So what we're intending for the radar to do is, it's not just an on or off thing, there are levels of noise and things, and we're refining some of the smaller details of it, but what you're eventually going to see is that you will have a fuzzy image, maybe, if somebody's too far away or too small or whatever, and then as they get close enough for your particular radar, and you can buy higher-powered ones if you want them, then you will see a clearer image and be able to see exactly what you're facing.
Soccer drive is ending very well, and thanks to you guys. He is the number one crowdfunder on the site of all time. It's so much so that the president of the club was like, what the heck's going on? I mean, who knew putting in the signature, you guys would pick it up. Thank you very much. He's very excited, and the people in the charity are very excited, and you're a very generous community. You support us at every turn, and we really, really appreciate that.
Well, here you can see we actually have it running. This is what the left eye and right eye, what you would see in the Rift, and you can see here, I'll move my head, and you can see the head tracking. Right now, we're doing some camera unification to make it so the first-person camera, when you're walking around in the first-person camera, when you're in a vehicle seat, are unified, so when you look around while you're in a vehicle seat, it will work like this.
A lot of it is drawn. There's some photo texturing that's used to further enhance the painting. But it starts off as a sketch, moves into colors, or sometimes I'll just start with rough colors. Really quick and block out shape.
Yeah, this one was actually the first concept for the asteroid hangar. But I'm guessing design passed on it because it wasn't exactly as modular as they were looking for.
It's very important for us to be able to scale these things because people out there have lots of ships. And then there's the asteroid hangar right now, right?
TL;DRElijah McNeil says direction varies, from briefs or Jump Point requests to filling in hangar spaces with a lot of freedom, though Chris O as visual director has final say.
Well, it always depends. Sometimes it's different. Sometimes I'll be asked to just do something for Jump Point, which is also concept slash illustration sometimes, except for maybe the painting of the Constellation. Ryan Church designed the Constellation, but I did a nice mood painting for a story. With the concept, the way it usually works is that I either get a brief or they'll say, all right, well, we have these hangars. And that was actually my second task being here, was taking care of the hangars. And so I oversaw those visually. I would check in with Chris to see what he thought about them. And it would go back and forth, but usually it was just, alright, here's this, here's this wall, here's this area, and then filling in all these blanks. And so I kind of had most of the direction of it, but Chris O is visual director, so he had final say.
Yeah, well, the masters, of course, like Da Vinci and Bernini and Michelangelo. But I'd say modern influences are a little bit of Ryan Church. He's really good. I mean, amazingly good. And Stephan Martiniere is another one. Aaron Beck, who did work on Elysium, Ben Mauro, a lot of these guys who are doing some really hot stuff right now. I look to them for some inspiration.
TL;DRElijah McNeil did not come straight from the military; he left the Navy several years earlier, where he was a welder and structural engineer, then studied 3D animation and modeling.
No, I've been out of the military for several years. After I got out of the military, I went to school to learn 3D animation and modeling, but I wanted to be a concept artist, so I would just work on my stuff in off hours outside of school, and eventually I got to a point where they started allowing me to do it as my homework for other classes instead.
I was a welder, a structural engineer, so I spent most of my time plotting and planning, welding, pipe fitting. I was also on boarding party. I was on the fire party because when you're an HT, which is my rating, you're part of repair division. So repair division has to be the flying squad. So we're responsible for riot control, hazmat response, flooding and fire response, situations like that.
Yeah, I finished. Well, I was doing a lot of my work, and one of the teachers who knew Chris Olivier had seen my stuff, and Chris Olivier pinged him because they've been friends for a while. And he said, do you have any 3D modelers? And my friend Vince said, no, I don't know any 3D modelers, but I do know a guy who's doing concept, and he knew that we were in sort of the pre-production production thing that we've got going on. So he's like, yeah, and they contacted me. But things were so busy with Chris O transitioning that after that it was kind of silent, and I got nervous. I was like, what's going on? And then a month later, one of our producers, who's no longer with us, he said, oh, can you be in in a couple of days?
These were just Xi'an helmets that I was concepting out. Because I had done a sketch of the Xi'an fighter and bomber, but before I moved on to detailing it, I thought it would be good to get sort of a style of the helmets and then think, okay, how does this look, before jumping into finalizing and detailing out all the bits for the ships.
Yeah. Well, all this, I'm responsible for all the image. I painted everything. Of course, the 300i was done by Kemper Millard and then modeled out by Chris Smith. But these space stations were these checkpoint rings for a race. That's another one, the racing illustrations for Jump Point.