Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse 2.1 - LA

The goal in general for the Persistent Universe, we want you to be able to feel like as you've gotten into your ship, as you've landed on the planets and you've roamed around, that you're actually in that world. So you're going to start seeing things like as you go into the nightclubs or the bars, you're going to start seeing things that are common in those things. People eating at a booth, people drinking at a booth, ordering drinks, bartenders doing things, waitresses doing things. There's going to be different levels of energy of those animations as well, right? So we don't want everything jumping around and bouncing around like Sonic the Hedgehog or something like this. But what we want is we want this illusion of life for all of our characters, right? And we want you, as you go in to the bar, if, say, it's in the middle of the day, perhaps the animations that are being played are more subdued. And as the night goes on, people start to drink a little bit more, there starts to be a little bit more dancing going on. So characters getting a bit more intoxicated and things like this happening, so that the world itself lives and breathes, and we show that through the animation.

No, they should change. Now, a lot of this comes down to how the AI programmers and the AI designers execute those sorts of things. But from an animation standpoint, we'll have characters that when they come in, let's say if we use the bartender as an example, they'll come in, they'll sit down at the stool and they'll order a drink. Then there's sets of animations that functionally do the same thing, but they do them in a different way. So one character comes down and sits down and he orders a drink. And you'll have characters who aren't intoxicated and they'll be sitting there with their drink, and other ones that are just the Steve Bender, we call that. But yeah, it's normally what I'm like about 3 o'clock in the afternoon.

The answer is kind of yes and kind of no. So the goal eventually with the enter/exit, as you might recall from when we showed you guys the ship enter/exit updates, I think it was about two weeks ago or three weeks ago: we intend that the current one, I call it Grandpa Goes to the Store, which is in the Hornet, is somewhere, I think, in the realm of eight seconds faster. So he gets in at quite a pace. And eventually, you'll be able to utilize your walk modifier and your character will climb into the ship in more of a relaxed sort of pace. Still faster than Grandpa Goes to the Store. And with a shift modifier, he would then get in there in an emergency way. Same thing with getting out. So say your ship's about to explode, and at the moment you exit the Hornet, you're [garbled], and boom, it blows up, right? You've got a problem. With where we're going with this, when you hold the sprint modifier and you get out, your character would execute an emergency exit. In some cases, these are actual leaps from the seat of the ship. Now, as far as whether you can execute a change in the animation that is playing: say I hit the F key to enter the Hornet, and then, as I'm playing the enter animation, I then hold the shift key, the sprint modifier, in hopes of it going emergency enter. At the moment, there's no piece of technology that allows us to do that. It doesn't mean it's not possible, but if you think of the way that characters connect to the ship, right? So we have to climb up. We climb this railing. So I'm going to go left, right, left, right, left, right, climb it. On the emergency, because he's leaping quite a distance to get up onto that ladder in the first place, he may not be left here, where he needs to go left, right, left, right. He's going to be on the off hand. So I don't know how that would function. The first thing is getting those three speeds in. So from an animation standpoint, we're focusing right now on the combat speeds, because that's the one that players are using most of the time. And then we'll move on to the other two. And then once those are implemented, then we can see, okay, well, what happens if we try and allow you to modify that input during this portion of the animation.

It's a design question, actually. So the answer from an animation standpoint is there's no reason why look poses could not be executed on those enter/exits. This is especially, I think, important for players who want to play in, say, VR or something like this, so that they can look around. And we should be able to, or we need to be able to support that. So once we get in, again, it's this step-by-step sort of thing. I want to get the combat enters feeling good so that this isn't like every time I get in the ship, I'm like, 'God, I don't want to get in that ship again.' So that it feels good to get into the ship, and then we go, okay, well, now I'm climbing into the ship. I want to give some freedom of movement so that if someone's shooting at me, I can go and I can see them. So once we have that in, we can execute those look poses to give you more freedom to do that.

Oh, no. From an animation standpoint, as you guys know, we're doing a lot of things where the third person animation and the first person animation are very closely tied together. So there's nothing that stops us from, if you want your character to be a junkie, we actually have idle animations for a junkie leaning up against the wall, 'hey man', and things like this. There's nothing within the animation system and the animation design that says you couldn't do that. It's more of a high level design question and how you would allow your character to execute that. And that falls into things that we're doing with the different emotes, with the different dancing and things like that. So that your character, say if I'm a Navy pilot, I'm going to salute like this. Whereas if I'm an Army Ranger, a British Army Ranger, perhaps I'm going to salute with my hand facing forward. And that's up to you and who your character is and how you want to role play.

Ultimately, gameplay always wins. What we want is we want to be able to have really great looking animations, and they're fluid and they're fun and everything like this. But if you can't get out of them, it can be brutally exhausting. This is why we're doing the combat animations for the ships, because all the backers and us internally were just like, 'Oh my god, how long does this take to get into the ship?' So there's nothing that stops that. So if we're playing, say, a sit-in-chair animation, and it takes one second or a second and a half, perhaps we can or cannot give that ability. Within the engine, it's like a flag that allows us to leave an animation or not leave an animation. But that being said, when you're constantly allowing people to pop in, pop out, pop in, pop out of things, and you don't have good animated solutions for how to leave them, the thing can look very gamey. So it's a fine balance between those.

Well, the biggest challenge is just the volume of content. The Caterpillar has 14 spaces in it. I'm including hallways and staircases and things like that, but they're all spaces that have to be built. And so going from something like a Reliant, which has two tiny little spaces, to a Caterpillar, which has massive, massive spaces and many spaces, it just comes down to the volume of content we have to produce. That's the biggest challenge for us, is time.

How many little ships is it in poly count?

Oh wow, in poly count? I'll give you a number: probably three.