Star Citizen Live: Invictus All-Vehicles Roundtable

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

I don't think it's that they're too big. Snubs play a very particular role within the game. They're not designed to be used the same as fighters, but that's why fighters are bigger than snubs. They're supposed to be as small as possible to be able to take them into much smaller environments, and they're cheaper to operate, maintain and run because you don't have to have everything to support the quantum drive. Well, not disposable, because I mean there's a person inside of it. It's cheaper. It's the same conversation I've had with people in the past where they're like, oh, well, why would you not just use the best ship to do something, by best being the biggest ship, whatever. If I was doing a pizza delivery in my local neighbourhood, I'm not going to do that pizza delivery in a tank, because the fuel costs, right? But if I'm doing it in a much more dangerous environment, I'm not going to do it in a little Vespa, I might do it in a vehicle, right? So it's about bringing the right tool for the job. So once again, snubs, they serve a particular purpose and role within the universe. They're not designed to compete on the same level as fighters at everything, but that's why fighter is its own category compared to snub fighters.

Cory Bamford · Vehicle team

It's cheaper to run about in a Caterpillar than a Kraken.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

Well, it'll be cheaper in the Caterpillar than the Kraken because we're talking capital-grade components, and the maintenance of them will be much, much higher. Granted, it's not something people massively have to worry about at the minute, but eventually you're going to have to repair them, and it's all the costs and fuel to operate. It's going to get much worse.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

No, definitely not. It's only a problem when there's too many of the same type. We obviously have, I forget the exact number now, but it's like 200-ish.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

We're at 197 now, that have been announced and revealed so far.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

If we had 197 light fighters, that's too many light fighters, I think. But when you spread it over all the careers, all the roles, all the progression within the roles, I think there's certainly room for plenty of them.

Chris Stanks · Vehicle Content Designer

Would you still say that if there were 197 different manufacturers? Or 197 different styles of light fighter?

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

No, if there's 197 manufacturers and each of them wants to do a light fighter, then there's going to be some very close, similar attributes beyond visuals, but in that very specific instance, no, I don't think so.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

I think that's what's right for Stanton as well, isn't it? A whole host of different manufacturers and a whole host of different roles. And not every manufacturer is going to deliver every role. And yeah, I think that's fine. I think there's also a lot of space in our universe for things that aren't necessarily straight off the production line. So we're bringing these new systems out, and you don't expect every system to have, oh, it's got a new manufacturer in it and it's got this, that and the other. But I think there's definitely scope for less official ships, so things that wouldn't necessarily fall under certain manufacturers, or they might have started out as a particular thing, but they've been retrofitted and kept alive over generations of...

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Millennium Falcon kind of thing. Things that have been customised so much...

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

Can't even tell what it originally was. Junkers.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

I agree with John. Even within subgroups, it's important to have even very similar ships to each other, because every manufacturer will do it a little bit different. Players for the most part have manufacturers they prefer and certain traits that manufacturers do compared to other ones. So certain ones might be more luxurious, more military, et cetera, et cetera. Having multiple of a similar type across multiple manufacturers, I think that's fine, because it gives people variation about what they want to pick. There's not one type of estate car in the world. There's not one type of sports motorbike in the world. There's variation because people like different things. So if we had 50 Argo single-seat mining ships, then absolutely. But having five or six across multiple manufacturers, they all bring little bits and pieces to the table.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yeah, I don't see why not. A lot of our stuff is based off cars. It's going to be a very British reference, but you have Vauxhall cars, which is Opel in Europe, and I forget what the actual name of this particular brand was, but basically the Saab 9-3 is a Vauxhall underneath, and at the time they owned the same companies, and they're like, take the car, you can change the bodywork slightly, make it a Saab. And Saab just ignored that.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

Was it Porsche? Porsche always made racing cars or sports cars and everything. And then they brought out the SUV and it did all right. And then now we've got Lamborghini SUVs. And they're like, that's selling all right, we'll have a cut of that pie.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And you've got companies like Mitsubishi who are making sports cars. They're making giant 18-wheel trucks. They're making TVs. And it's like, what's that brand identity?

Dan · Vehicle Artist

They're making air conditioners. That's one of the things I like about the racing stuff, like the Razor and that. A lot of times car manufacturers will take something from their racing pedigree and then implement it into the normal, like Quattro with Audi and stuff like that, and like Porsche with the flat six and things like that. They kind of get informed by their adventures. I think the Ford GT was a massive push as well, where they tend to use the racetrack as a place to experiment what works.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

They can take the technology away from that and put it into the mainstream.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

So MISC ships will probably steal a bit from Mirai, if it worked, and what didn't work, and less experimental stuff, but some of the new direction.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

Yeah, I think when it comes to MISC and Mirai specifically, there's a hard distinction for me. MISC are very utilitarian, they've got a purpose, they've got a role, they've got a job, whereas Mirai is definitely the performance division. Anything that doesn't necessarily fit into that industrial feel. MISC is a very, very strong art style and I'm very happy with where that's at. But yeah, that doesn't mean they can't try new things. And even if you take things like RSI, you take some of our old RSI ships versus our new RSI ships, they progress over the generations of their vehicle releases. They span hundreds of years or so. Many hundreds of years.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

Mule. Mule's an easy one. Kind of split the vote a little bit, didn't it? I think the functionality of the Mule leads more to Drake than necessarily... it is quite a high-end vehicle for Drake. It feels a little bit more refined, but a lot of the inspiration for the Mule came from what we see now in tractors and combine harvesters and that sort of thing. And they are very purpose-built, so they kind of tick that brief, but they are just a little bit nicer.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Melkor the Wise is like, the Mule is high-end?

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

Well, compared to Drake.

Cory Bamford · Vehicle team

Yeah, compared to some of the other Drake ships. It feels more kind of Argo-y, in the sense it's, like you say, like plant machinery.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

Yeah, if you look at the interior, the interior is all sort of moulded plastics, whereas if you look at the interior of some of our Drake spaceships, they're...

Cory Bamford · Vehicle team

Very stripped back. Screens very basic.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

Screens on the floor, helicopter seats, that sort of style.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

The Vulcan concept was Anvil for probably 80% of its concept development, and then it got towards the end and we're like, it's sort of not particularly Anvil-y anymore. It's getting towards Aegis, and then the whole cockpit bit of it changed to be more like the front of the Reclaimer.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

I think the Vulture looks more Argo.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Well, the big dirty secret is that there aren't 15 different manufacturers making all these. It's the people at this table who are making them. And so you've got to put your brain in, okay, I've got to put my brain in Drake mode, I've got to put my brain in Crusader mode. And sometimes the brain just doesn't want to do what you want it to do, and it will push you towards whatever these other manufacturers are. And occasionally that leads you to invent new manufacturers, when your brain just wants to do something completely different.

Dan · Vehicle Artist

I remember just before I moved on to the Fury, I'd spent a little bit of time on the Corsair helping Lodit, and my entire visual library was just Drake. And then it's like, now you're doing a MISC racing ship that's kind of Mirai performance kind of thing. We weren't really sure which direction it was going to go then. And every time I modelled anything, I went square. I went big bolt, and Ben was like, no, rivets, metal, like chrome. I was like, okay. And every mechanism was more Drake-y until I remembered the direction of it.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

You just referred to the Fury as a racing ship. Obviously, the two variants that we just released are not dedicated [racers].

Dan · Vehicle Artist

No, no, I meant nippy, like they're fast and stuff like that.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

I'll start and then others can chime in if they want. So the last year or so, we've been really improving and just making the pipeline work better. Mark and Corey have done a great job revitalising all the documentation that I wrote years ago and we've just lived with. But because I've done more and more leadership and directorship, I've not been so hands-on with things. So they've taken that over and built the pipeline. The last few ships we've released have gone through that new pipeline, and things have mostly gone smoother. Still doing some tweaks as we go. But ultimately, at the end of the day, big ships need a lot of resources to make them. And where we want to get to is a place where we're still delivering the same amount of content as we do now a year, as well as one to two capitals a year on top of that, and supporting all the other teams like we do. And at the end of the day, that just needs more people.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

You're not saying that we are at that point?

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

We're not at that point yet. We're building to that point. So the last few months, we've been starting to expand the team, which people have probably seen with the introduction of the Montreal vehicle team. And we're also looking for more artists in the UK. So if people are watching...

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

Yeah, and any lead artists watching.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

I think just to touch on that as well, people kind of think it's easy, right? You want more spaceships, you hire more people, and done. It's just 10 more people, you can do three more ships. But there's obviously a lot of time and effort that goes into training up staff. Growing the team is quite a difficult challenge, especially when we've got leads that are already at capacity, and then we're like, okay, we want to double our team. It goes from one person that's already trying to juggle three or four ships at once to then going, okay, well, they can now juggle... and it's like, no, it's just not sustainable. We have grown the team quite a lot in the last six months to a year. We've started a new team in Montreal. We're looking to grow a second team and probably a third team in the UK. So yeah, we're expanding, but it does take time.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Yeah, there's a misconception that, like you said, you just add more people and instantly more things get made. But the reality is, and this isn't just for vehicles, this is for any discipline in anything, when you have to teach, when you have to train, when you have to onboard, your production gets slower, because you now have to slow down everything that you would normally be doing in order to explain everything and make the support. So things slow down before they get faster. And then, God help us, the person doesn't last. The person goes and finds a different opportunity, or they interviewed well but the reality wasn't [there], and now that slowdown has yielded no positive results. So it is definitely a process.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

I think it's a really dangerous thing to get into if you have multiple teams and you're like, oh, you're the A team and you're the B team, or you're team this and you're team that. And it's not a case of that. The way we prioritise our ships is we get our ship priority, and that comes from John and the execs and all the important people. And then we look at what resources we have and what people are best fitted for, and then we allocate work that we feel confident that people can achieve. If we had a new team come in and we're like, hey, we've got some capital ships for you, here you go, you're not setting that team up to succeed. You're just setting it up to fail. Realistically, our big capital ships take a sizable team to deliver. So yeah, initially we're getting them on board to help fill out some of our backlog ships, help do some variants of existing ships. At the moment we're just trying to, like I say, onboard them. They've been going for... April 1st is when they officially started.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

A couple of months now.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

And they're getting up to speed, they're doing a fantastic job of learning the ropes and understanding our processes and pipelines, working through a few ships that will be coming out at some point, and then we'll put them on something bigger.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

That's the other thing, they're a brand new team, they're not massive. It's not like they're anywhere near the size of the UK ship team. If I remember correctly, it's three artists, one designer. Is it four artists, maybe?

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Four, technically. Four artists, technically, but one's in the UK at the moment. And one designer, who was here for the last three weeks doing his onboarding. He's literally on a plane now back to Canada to carry on with those guys when he gets there.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

And when you get a brand new team like that, it's not even just them learning how we do things, because obviously every team does it differently. The way you build an environment isn't the way you build a ship, and the quality and the techniques and everything are massively different. So if you've got a brand new team coming in, you're not going to throw them on a ship that's going to take them, for argument's sake, the next 18 months to develop, because the quality in their work over that 18 months, from when they first start to when they get towards the end, is going to massively change. With the larger ships, you need people who are more experienced, who are already embedded within the pipeline, because otherwise you're going to have such an inconsistent experience across the actual ship.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

Small ships can be complicated, big ships are complicated. It's all fairly complicated stuff. But like I say, when you get to a capital ship, there's a lot of unknowns there. We've got Jason, who's come across from the environment art team, and he's got a whole wealth of knowledge on building environment assets and building out those kits. So he's got a huge amount of knowledge that we can lean on for building out our capital ships. But yeah, like I say, sticking someone on something for a year and a half when, initially, you want to get a few under your belt, learn the processes, touch lots of different areas of the ships, do interiors, exteriors, and just learn everything.

Cory Bamford · Vehicle team

I think another point as well is that in general for interiors, at least, the quality of what we receive in pre-production is generally spread a little bit thinner. So the interior concepts for capital ships are generally key art and some fairly vague interior spaces. So the production team has to do a lot more of the exploration, whereas if you have a smaller ship, generally the interior concept's a lot stronger, because there's just fewer things to work on, right? You get a lot more detail, a lot more to work from. So yeah, definitely, coming into production, you have fewer things to figure out on smaller ships.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

The other thing is with the capital ships, once we actually put them in, we want to try and build them in a way that makes it easier to then do the other ships of that exact same manufacturer. So once we do one RSI, we want to set ourselves up so that we can roll into the others a lot easier. So instead of having to reinvent the wheel every time, we have stuff as a foundation to just move it forward quicker.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

So with the development of the Hull C, we've pretty much figured out the last hurdle. In fact, Chris is responsible for the test that I got him to do for it, where we can have object containers, which is the interior collection of assets, loaded as an item, loaded onto the ship, because that's how the rear of the Hull C is attached to the ship and moves with it. What had stopped us technically going any further with this was that items inside those object containers couldn't talk to the vehicle they were connected to. So the example of the Retaliator: the torpedo droppy arms, they're actually part of the exterior of the ship currently, because that's the only way they can work. So if we allowed you to swap the modules, no matter what module you had, there'd be a pair of torpedo arms dangling through the middle of it. Chris did a test where he attached a load of missile racks and torpedoes to the inside of the back of the Hull C, which is not going to ship with it.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Wait, you're saying we're not having a torpedo Hull C?

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yeah, there is a shelf that says 'do not submit' in very large letters. And the pilot had full control of that, and they could fire them. So after the Hull C ships and we've found any more quirks with that setup, we're in a position where, to my knowledge, touch wood, technically there's nothing stopping us doing modularity now. That was the last big hurdle for it.

Cory Bamford · Vehicle team

There's nothing technically stopping us from building it, but there's also priorities and building a team.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Nothing technically stopping us.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

So it is really under heavy active development at the moment. The physics team have done a lot of work in the last six months on it. We're now at a point where other feature and gameplay teams have joined them to work out the quirks with it. The vehicle content team have provided assets of ships set up in this new way of doing things. I should caveat this: it's not a vehicle thing. It's an everything thing. Every destructible system in the game will use this. So whilst everyone uses the vehicle example of bullets going through ships, it replaces the prop breakable system, it replaces the environment breakable system, it replaces the vehicle damage system. There's another one I forget. So environment teams, prop teams, vehicle teams, we're all working on this at the moment, with a bunch of use case scenarios that are with the engineers.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

So it's more like an overall destructible physics system.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yes. People have probably heard the word Maelstrom in various monthly reports and pieces. So that's the name of that overarching system.

Chris Stanks · Vehicle Content Designer

It's the internal project name.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

But it's more than just the physicalized damage for ships. It is a global destructible physics system. We're not going to sit here and commit to it being applied to every single element of Star Citizen. There's always going to be performance considerations. But you develop the system, and then you start to see where you can plug it in and apply it.

Cory Bamford · Vehicle team

You'd find use cases for it. It'd be like a general system.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

So the ship tractor beams, we've done a lot of work for them recently. We have the current implementation set up on multiple vehicles that are meant to actually have the tractor beam attached to them. The current implementation works from a vehicle setup standpoint. There's still some remaining work to do from the actual EU PU team. They're actually delivering the vehicle tractor beams themselves. But right now, in the environment we've developed it in, you can spawn the ships that have them in and use them. Another big bit of confusion is the sizing. When we did some of it, we did it to weapon sizes instead of component sizes, whereas EU PU have done their development on it, and they've decided they want to go in the direction of component sizing rather than weapon sizing. Some of the size numbers will have changed, but how much they lift is consistent with how much we've always wanted it to lift. So, for example, instead of going all the way up to, I think the biggest one we ever said was size six or size five or something, the biggest one now will be the size three. We might do size four if we ever do something for a very niche situation.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

The SRV is a three now.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

The SRV is a three, but three is able to move ships. Size twos can do 32 SCU containers. I can't remember how much size 1s and 0s do, but we've just reformatted it as the system's formalised a lot more. On the ships, we've got an implemented version of it working currently.

Cory Bamford · Vehicle team

As far as the vehicle content team is concerned, we've done a pass on the artwork for ships that were supposed to feature a tractor beam. We've now added supporting geometry for them and made sure that it actually works, basically.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Caterpillar, Nomad, Cutlass, 315p. I feel like there's one more. Connie Taurus.

Cory Bamford · Vehicle team

We didn't really do anything for that one, though. It was kind of a freebie, right, for now.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

But we've done proper geometry integration for the ones where there just wasn't any, because there wasn't any on the Cutlass, there wasn't any on the 315, there wasn't any on the Nomad, so there's proper integration for them now.

Cory Bamford · Vehicle team

There was stuff kind of hinting at it, but it wasn't legit, so to speak.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

It wasn't actually a utility mount. So they're now proper turrets, so you can swap to the view and use them and move boxes and things.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yeah, so it is in progress. We're working on the cockpit at the moment, bringing it up to modern standards, because it's a bit old-fashioned, I guess is one way to say it. It's not really got MFDs to the right metrics anymore. We're doing it for Squadron first, and then it'll work its way into the PU when we're happy with what we need to do for Squadron.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

So we wanted that originally, for the original implementation of the docking collars, but we found that the current positioning of the arms and the engines was off. So we're going to have to go in and fix that, as well as, I think, we found the actual doors were the wrong size as well. The door is just some random door.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

I think we looked at that and we did some work towards...

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

No, we wanted to do it, we just didn't have time when we were doing all the other salvage work.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

So it's wanted, but it's going to require changes to the exterior, the physical arms and everything, which are very complicated mechanisms. So it's a big time investment. So it's something that's going to get done, but it's when we can find resources to actually do it. Because like you said, with the ramp-up, every time we try and expand the team, we're losing resources to actually train the new people that are coming in.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

There's certainly a lot of room for improvement with the Reclaimer.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Like the rear cargo lift and everything.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yeah, the whole rear section of everyone's favourite multi-stage elevator.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Wait, did you say Starfarer or Reclaimer?

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Reclaimer.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

Starfarer is not perfect. Starfarer is having its insides pulled out. Redone completely.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

All right, we'll talk about Polaris. So Polaris is, I'd say, more in pre-production. We are spending time investigating at the moment, as we've already kind of hinted at when it comes to our capital ships. We want to make sure that we're tackling them in a way that allows us to scale up, to not just do one capital ship, and we can tick off a few more from the lineup. Literally the last couple of weeks we've been looking at it, breaking down the concept, breaking down what is involved with actually delivering it. I think what people need to understand as well is this is quite an old ship. The concept is quite old. There's a lot of gaps in it, as Corey mentioned. So really we're just doing our sanity check on everything, making sure we've got everything in progress. It will be going into full production very soon. Very, very soon.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Very soon™. Chris deleted the old interior setup level for it this afternoon, ready for the new one.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

So that's how soon it is. We are working on it. It's just [not] a full team on it. We're doing the pre-production. There's been a lot of pre-planning changes to help us not trip over ourselves. So it is in production in that sense.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

Yeah, we haven't started adding assets to the editor and stuff, but we are basically doing a full breakdown of what we've got, working out how we're going to tackle it, trying to get the plans in place and answer the questions. There's some holes in the concept which could do with a little bit more work, and they're a bit loose. So it's just breaking down that stuff. But we haven't got a team of artists that are working on it. We have one, and then I look at it every so often, Corey sticks his nose in it, and it's us trying to... we want to come to a point where we can come together, have a proper kickoff with the team that are working on it, and go, okay, we know what we're asking you to do, rather than being like, hey everyone, let's have a look, click, hmm, this is cool.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yeah, and to touch on the roadmap bit, something that often gets overlooked on the roadmap is it doesn't particularly show people moving on and off projects or tasks. So you could have someone on the Polaris for one week, and they go off it for a week, and then they go back on it for another week. That will show as three weeks continuous. Or you could have one person come on, one person go off, then another person comes on. That will show two people for that entire time. In conjunction with that, as part of all of our pipeline work, we've been moving away from our previous scheduling method, which is what the roadmap uses, to being more in Jira, because that live-updates with the data as we're working through things. And then at some point we go back and put it in there. So there is a bit of lag in how the roadmap updates. So yes, people have been working on it. But it's not like, hey, we've got eight artists working on it since two weeks ago, when the roadmap said.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

I was going to say, with the Apollo, because the Apollo was mentioned as well, that's pretty much what we've done on the Apollo. We had one artist working on it, doing all the pre-production work, making sure it was in a good state, answering all the questions that were unanswered on it, so it's ready to go into production. It is not in production. We haven't got a whole team of artists working on it, but we've done all that preliminary work, and that's why it's been on the roadmap, because someone's been allocated to it, they've been chipping away at it and getting it ready.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

A lot of that's what gold standard's for. So when we go through and do gold standards, using the Retaliator as an example, a lot of the components wouldn't fit through the doors of the Retaliator as you tractor beam them out and move them. So the doors and things have been widened so they would actually fit. Another thing is which components are actually meant to be taken out with a tractor beam. Size three and capitals obviously aren't meant to be tractor beamed out. You're supposed to go to a dry dock and someone else will take them out for you, because they're too large of components, because theoretically to get to them you need to cut parts of the hull out, because they're just too large for a person to lift. So size 0, 1 and 2, you should be able to tractor beam out. Doors that don't fit currently, gold standard will address that. But until we do gold standards on the interiors of a lot of the ships, there may be doors where you can't get them out, or places you can't get the components through.

Dan · Vehicle Artist

There are a couple of random occasions where, as artists, we get, oh, can you jump on the ship for a half-an-hour fix to allow you to get your components out of your ship. We've got all of the ships divvied up amongst ourselves. So even though people leave and people join, there's the list of all of the ships, and it's like, okay, you're responsible for these. So if there's a component swapping issue on a particular ship, one of mine, I've forgotten which one it was, I had to remove a little bit of the room. Nothing players would really notice, but it's just enough to make the collision a bit more comfortable to move it out. So you get occasions like that where you'll get a random bug come through, and it's like, oh, if you've got a spare 10 minutes to do that, you quickly look at it, you're like, oh yeah, that's a really quick fix that will hopefully make your lives a lot easier. So we do try to. Even though I'm on this ship for X amount of time, I will disappear for an hour or two if it saves you guys the grief. It depends on the amount of work, right? If it's a massive overhaul, obviously that takes... But if I can sneak it in, I'll try.

Cory Bamford · Vehicle team

Some of it's really quick wins, like when the ship was initially modelled, or when someone created the component base, they just forgot to cut a hole in the collision for the components. So it's literally impossible to remove it, because it's behind the collision of the exterior, for example.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

I think a lot of our ships were made before there was any feature work that had been done on it, so we didn't know how we were going to tackle it. So we were just making the best decisions we could at the time, and now we know better. So that pipeline has evolved. Some of them are super quick; some of them are like, this door has no animation, it has no mechanics to do the animation, there's just a hole behind it, and they're the ones that take a bit more time. They need a proper art pass, proper design pass.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

The Vanguard's a good example, right? It had that little railing, which from that point looked nice, having that little railing as you go up the stairs, where you just cut the railing off. It's a small little thing, easier to do, but at the time when we did it, looking from that standpoint, no one really thought, oh, that railing's going to get in the way of the components, because it wasn't something that people actively thought about.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Same with some of the component hatches that have doors that sort of clamshell open. So they open, it looks nice and cool, and like, yeah, it'll fit out there. And then when it comes to actually taking it out, they're a centimetre not far open enough. So there's all sorts of little things that you don't spot.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

And this is the kind of stuff that happens with any video game. It's just usually they don't have a live environment in the middle of their development.

Cory Bamford · Vehicle team

It's just tech debt, really. A feature comes online, it gets proven out, and then we have to reimplement that into a bunch of existing assets. We try our best to anticipate what kind of features will be coming, but we don't necessarily know how a feature will work. So part of the challenge of being a team that's affected by a feature is you have to then retroactively support it. So I think that's a big part of what gold standard is. It's: these are all the features we need to support in our vehicles, and it's basically making those vehicles comply with those features.

Dan · Vehicle Artist

We had it with salvage as well, right? It was exactly the same thing, where it was like, oh, there's loads of quick fixes we can do, or, okay, we need to dedicate some time to this. And then when salvage first came online, we had quite a few of us working on it to really try and get that stuff sorted out. And other ships that were made maybe more recently, you go to fix it and you're like, this is fine.

Cory Bamford · Vehicle team

It becomes a part of your validation. It becomes a part of the acceptance criteria for the ship, that it needs to support this feature. So we would bring those features into the review process and basically make sure, if we're making a new ship, it should have physicalized components, et cetera, that all of the features that exist for the ship will be validated as a part of the review process. So it's more the older content that was kind of... when we first started out, we were kind of discovering what a ship was.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

The salvage thing was a really good example of how some things you just can't plan for ahead of time. Salvage is coming online. We know it's going to use the UV2 damage system. We've done all that for the ships already, because that's what damage does when you shoot ships. So we're good. And then when it came online, we're like, oh boy, we're not good.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

We didn't realise quite how much the visuals would affect the actual data. So the parts of the ship that were slightly [hidden] wouldn't necessarily take as much damage, and it would look fine when you're blowing this thing up. But then it meant that you could never 100% salvage the ship, because you couldn't salvage certain panels. And obviously it just looks a bit weird that you'd be salvaging along and it would just stop.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

When there was stuff behind it that would make you see through.

Dan · Vehicle Artist

Or you salvage the left wing and then the rear right fin would just disappear, and you're like, what?

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

Yeah, that's what I was talking about before. It's not supposed to tractor vehicles. It's 32 SCU cargo containers, the size 2. So it's getting changed to a size 2, but it's just part of the refactor of the tractor beam sizes.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

It's still just as powerful as it was.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

It doesn't do any less or more than we said it was going to do originally; it's just that the numbering's changed, because we're now doing component grading instead of weapon grading.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

So if you've got a PTV that's super small, can that be picked up by a size 2?

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

32 SCU containers. What was set as the maximum, you'd have to ask EU PU.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Is the PTV smaller or larger than 32?

Cory Bamford · Vehicle team

Well, physically, it's smaller. It's much smaller.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

And it would weigh less.

Cory Bamford · Vehicle team

Definitely would have less mass.

Cory Bamford · Vehicle team

We'll do them at some point.

Dan · Vehicle Artist

Me, I guess. So, I want to put them on it. I just need to find time to do it. I was told today, after learning of it, because, again, I'm one of the newer members of the team, so I didn't actually know that the Carrack needed these shutters and stuff. That's for these guys, who know it inside and out, to tell me. So I was informed today, because the Carrack's one of the ships I look after. It's like, oh, Dan, if you get time, you know you can put the blast shields on the Carrack. And I was like, oh, and you're going to say it on live as well now. I'm going to get bombarded on Twitter until it's done. I will try for you guys, but yeah, it's just a case of time. Dan doesn't dictate his own priorities. When we talk about when you jump on, it kind of comes back to the salvage stuff or the tractor beaming of components. If I look at it and I go, oh, that's a quick fix, it'll be a quick thing. But if I look at it and I'm like, that is not a quick thing, I need to ask for some time because it will affect my other work, then it becomes a wider thing.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

You can have a look at it and see how much work it is, and if the file's already been set up, all the animation data's there, it's all ready to go, and it's just a case of we just need to export it and do it, then cool. But if it's going to take you away, and you'll be on the Carrack for a week or two, then...

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

When the Carrack was developed, we did prove that... We made sure it would work, but that's it. What I'm saying is we just proved out the spacing, the animation mechanism and stuff. It's going to need UV2s, it's going to need LODs, it's going to need more detail, all that stuff.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

It's sort of more of an EU PU thing now. There are definitely plans to have those different types, grades, sort of like performance windows for different items. And they have a pretty comprehensive engineer slash tuner slash repairer gameplay proposal that they're working on as part of some of the other features they're doing. So tuning items is part of that role. So it's definitely planned.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

I'm going to slowly do it and look at John. So there's [redacted] that's on Josh. There's Adam... will I talk about that one? I'm trying to think what Adam's doing. Spirit. Too late now. I was pretty sure that one was safe. So we've got the Spirit in. What else do we have?

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

SRV, just finished art and design. Hull C, just at the end, in its final teething.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

We've got some more [redacted]s that are on Chris.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

What's the US working on? X1's about to start.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

Technically, that's had a little bit of work done already.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yeah, the Storm is storming through production.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

In case you guys didn't catch it from the episode, the Storm is in a concept promotion right now as part of Invictus, but it is already in production with the LA [team]. Well into production. It's looking good. That stuff you saw at the end, that was not concept art. That was the actual whitebox and well into greybox stuff. It's looking great so far. They're doing the San'tok.yāi as well. We'll be showing you an update on the San'tok.yāi for Alien Week in just a few weeks.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Montreal is working on some variants of an existing ship. I'm just trying to mentally go around the floor. The Retaliator stuff we're doing, we talked about before. G12 will be going. So in the next year, backlog ships that will be going into production, caveat, things can always change: Polaris, Apollo, G12, Railen, X1s.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

I don't know what you're talking about. So we'll talk about the Merchantman briefly, because we discussed how we want to do the backlog of capital ships. So we want to start with RSI, because doing the Polaris first helps reduce the amount of work needed for the Perseus and the Galaxy. So those three will likely be a chain of dependencies from each other.

Cory Bamford · Vehicle team

Kind of shared assets.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yeah, there's a lot of shared assets between them. Obviously, the exteriors are quite different, but you do an RSI hull kit or corridor kit, floor kit, doors, beds, and it all gets reused across them, maybe with some slight material differences. So there are a few things that are problematic with the BMM. Firstly, everything is unique. So it's not like we do one corridor kit.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

It can't be modular. It has to be unique. Nothing on the ship can be modular. Every corridor, every room.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Everything's unique. So the amount of time investment...

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

I mean, there's some chairs, but even some of the chairs we couldn't reuse because of the shaping of the room.

Cory Bamford · Vehicle team

It's all moulded, right? There's lots of bespoke geometry.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

So yeah, we had a lot of people on there. We had some unfortunate people leaving who'd been here quite a while, so we'd lost a lot of that team knowledge, and part of it is rebuilding the team. Obviously, again, like we said, you don't get new staff members and go, hey, welcome to the Banu Merchantman, here's a completely bespoke thing that does not follow any of our existing art guidelines. And all the time we would have put into that would be just for that ship. We get no reuse from it. So yes, we will do it again. But personally, I think the time is better spent on other capital ships, to get people up to speed, and then we can start putting people back on it.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

Yeah, there's definitely a lot of love within the team for the Merch. I think there's a lot of excitement there for it. It's just making sure that, again, like we said, the team's set up to succeed with it, and we can actually deliver it to the standards that we expect.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

Can you imagine training new people on developing a brand new art style for a ship? I genuinely think the Merchantman is going to be one of the hardest ships we ever do, just because of all the additional factors involved: the scale of it, the fact that nothing is really reused, it's all unique moulded, all the rooms, all the floors, it's that cool art style.

Dan · Vehicle Artist

It's a different style of modelling as well, right? In terms of our actual discipline of how we make ships. It's more like traditional vehicle modelling than it would be hard surface. It's hard surface meets organic, and it's weird.

Ben Curtis · Vehicle Art Director

We'd worked on that process, and we had a good process in place, and it was just unfortunate that they chose to go off and chase new adventures, and we wish them the best of luck, and it was a big loss to the team. That initial pre-production was done and it's there. We just need to get to the point where we can still deliver our current line-up of ships we want to deliver, and we want to be able to do it justice. It just takes a bit of time.

Cory Bamford · Vehicle team

And keep on top of the bug backlog.

Mark Gibson · Lead Vehicle Content Designer

We're constantly supporting other feature teams. There's a lot of work for the tractor beam, there's a lot of work for salvage, other features coming online that we have to support, and all of them are time. Lots of time investment from our side to actually implement them in the ships.