Star Citizen Live: IAE 2952 Supertalk

David Colson · Vehicle Programmer

Unequivocally, the interior layout of the ship. Straight up. It is. It's the interior layout.

David Colson · Vehicle Programmer

Hang on, though. Does that just discount single-seat ships? Are they just not good spaceships?

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

Well, they're fighters. They're terrible.

David Colson · Vehicle Programmer

Fighters are still spaceships, though.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

It's the big things. It's the big ships that they can live out of.

David Colson · Vehicle Programmer

The question should be, what's the best spaceship for what you want to do? That's the better question.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

But in general, what makes a good spaceship? So we have the internal layout. You've got to be able to find your way through it.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

It has to make sense. Everything has to feel like it's in the right place without being spaghetti junction.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

It's got to be believable. I think that's the thing that sums it up for me. That kind of covers the layout, the functionality, the visuals: believability. It could exist. Things feel like they're in the right place.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

I still struggle to find my way around the Starfarer. I'm the one that looks after it and I still to this day cannot get to the crew deck without spending like five minutes going around the wrong way.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

We've got interior layout, what else makes a good spaceship?

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

Gotta look good. Looking good's relative though, because it's different people's opinion. Argo is by far the best looking manufacturer. I love that big bright orange.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

That's solid design language right there. You know what you're looking at with an Argo ship.

Cory Bamford · Ship content team

It can be ugly, in a sense, right? Brutal industrial, right? I think that can be iconic. That can look good, right? I think it's led by its function, isn't it?

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

If you've got something that is a big workhorse, an Argo ship, you don't expect it to be super sleek and organic. Whereas if you've got something that's a fighter or something that's like a racing ship or something, you want it to look sleek and feel believable.

David Colson · Vehicle Programmer

Do you feel like you want the ship to have a character, like an identity that's very obvious when you look at it?

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

I feel when it comes to our project, it's really important that our manufacturers don't merge into one. Our manufacturers have their identity. And then within that, you've got a subclass of what the functionality is. If we were doing, like I say, an industrial ship that was made by Origin, you wouldn't expect it to be like an 890 with a laser beam in front of it. But you would immediately want to recognise its Origin still. It's fine for it to be industrial, civilian, combat, all having a very obvious direction that the visuals go, but at the same time you still want all of the manufacturers to immediately be recognisable from each other.

David Colson · Vehicle Programmer

I mean, yeah, obviously. But it also doesn't matter to everyone. Because there's a certain place in my heart for the 890 where I just like the image of living this luxury lifestyle and I don't care what its performance is.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

That delivers what it laid out to deliver. Its sole purpose is to be a luxury ship and it performs very well at being a luxury ship.

David Colson · Vehicle Programmer

Performance means different things in that context though, right?

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

Well, performance means different things based on what the ship we're talking about is. So in terms of the 890, its performance, I suppose, is how luxurious it feels. It handles like a super yacht, because it is a super yacht, but what would you say quantifies the 890 performing is it delivering the luxury experience. You're not talking about its combat capabilities when you're talking about performance, because it's not a combat ship. But if you're talking about the Gladius or the Hammerhead, you're talking about its combat capabilities: how well the Hammerhead's turrets can screen you from fighters, or how well the Gladius can do in a 1v1 dogfight and combat. So the performance is based on what the goal is to achieve with the ship. So performance matters, but what performance matters depends on what the ship's for.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

You mentioned things changing, and it is changing, and it's the perfect group of people, because Mark and Corey have literally, the last month or so, been working on updates for it. So completely unprompted, I'll throw it over to you two.

Cory Bamford · Ship content team

The biggest changes are more of a focus on an actual planning phase between pre-production and production. So we've actually defined planning as an individual thing, so we have to go away and estimate it. We've been looking at how we estimate how long it takes to do this stuff. Actually getting the team more involved. We're basically grabbing everyone, doing planning poker, which is kind of fun and a weird thing, but it works surprisingly well. We've rolled out a couple of new...

Cory Bamford · Ship content team

I should have brought the cards. I used to manage the prop team, and I've recently transitioned over to ships, so that's why I'm here with these people now. So basically, I mean, it's probably not the most legit. I'm sure there are agile development experts out there who would shake their heads at how I do planning poker. Basically, you have a stack of cards. It's got numbers on it that represent values. I tend to just do it in days because art tasks are pretty easy to break down in days. But if you're doing more nebulous things, you can use a point system. It's kind of weird. I don't really like that. I like days as a measurement. Do you guys use story points for stuff?

David Colson · Vehicle Programmer

We use points, yeah. The only difference really is, as you said, art is pretty straightforward and easy to estimate how long something might take, but engineering tasks tend to have all of this R&D and experimentation work, and it's very hard to guess. So we tend to quantify things in terms of the complexity rather than the time.

Cory Bamford · Ship content team

It's like a consensus on how crazy what you're asking someone to do is, right? It's not necessarily saying this is six months of crazy, it's saying this is 30 crazy, right?

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

30 points of crazy. Compared to other crazy things we've done, this one feels about the same sort of complexity as the other one.

Cory Bamford · Ship content team

So you could probably derive an estimate from that, but it's a bit different. Anyway, so that's a bit of a tangent. But basically, so you have these cards, they've got values on them. Everyone has their cards face down. And you say, OK, so we're going to look at how long do you guys think it will take to do the white box pass for the exterior of the ship, for example. And everyone will have a little think. They'll select their card. And then you say, show your cards. Everyone presents their card. And you basically look and see if everyone's got a consensus on how long it's going to take or if there's a massive deviance. And if there is, you say, Henry, you said it's going to take you 20 days to do this task. But John said it's going to take 10. Why is it going to take you twice as long? And then you might say, well, here's a bunch of things that John didn't think about. And then John might go, oh, OK. Or he might say, Henry, pull your finger out, mate. Come on. But basically, the point is that you've got the people working on a task, and you're trying to reach a consensus. It does take a bit of time as well.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

I think in the past what we've tended to do is we've tended to do this on a ship scale. So we've basically looked at a ship as a whole and kind of gone, okay, well, we know another ship of roughly this size and this complexity, with a really well known art style or a completely unknown art style. We've kind of broken it down that way. Whereas what this allows us to do is the team to have more input into that. And also because the complexity of our ships has grown so much over the years, it's no longer a case of, oh, here's a small single seater and all small single seaters take X amount of time, because some of them have one wing that you can just mirror around. Other ones have completely unique parts and completely unique functionality. And it just allows us to get a better understanding of how long we think things are going to take and because of that, hit our targets better.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

Compared to how we used to do it, it used to be at a high level, leads and directors would say, it's roughly going to take this long as a best-guess ballpark. Sometimes it's been so long since we've been actively doing some of the things that our estimates have fallen short, or new tech's made it more complicated or easier. So we don't have as accurate an idea of it anymore compared to the people who are doing it day in, day out. So we've had a couple of ships go through this process now and the estimates we've got from doing this have been almost to the day correct. And with some of them we underestimated the whole scope and cut back what we were going to do because we knew it wouldn't fit because of the better estimates, and everything got as much attention as it deserved, and we now know we just need to go back and revisit something else later, but we also know how much time that's going to take so we can plan for it better.

Cory Bamford · Ship content team

Yeah, we can adapt the scope of a project to the time we have, basically, because we have a better idea of how long each individual thing's going to take. So we can say, right, we've got 30 days. All this is going to take 40 days. Ben, what are you willing to cut? And then Ben will say, well, this task is 10 days, so we'll cut that. Better planning.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

So TLDR, as we start out, John and his design team come up with the idea of, we want a ship to do this role and deliver this, and then I think you normally sit around, you pitch it to people, don't you?

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

We have the very high level, like one sentence: I want a space food truck van. We use that as an example for this. And it has to be Drake. And either I've come up with that or I've got it from Chris or Todd or Tony or someone like that. I give that to a designer and they flesh it out into the full brief. That goes back around all the design leads because there's a lot of design teams and they're all working on slightly different things. They all may have slightly different ideas; the designer who did that vehicle brief may not be aware of, say, what EU PU is going to be working on in nine months' time, which may have an effect. So they all have their feedback. We update the brief, it goes to Chris for the final sign-off, and then it goes into the concept phase. Pretty much unchanged.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

But we spend a lot more time on the concept to make sure that everything is going to work now. So we do the interiors fully fleshed out to make sure that everything that's going to fit inside the ship actually fits inside the ship. And with the extra complexity we've now got, there's so much more to consider during the concept phase.

David Colson · Vehicle Programmer

It would also be worth adding to this point, obviously I'm not the most knowledgeable about the concept pipeline, but I am aware that concept is literally not just drawing a picture. I know you mock up the geometry of a ship and the general shape and everything. So you have a reasonably clear idea of what it's going to look like.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

It's much easier to make changes and to invest time when it's in concept than it is when you get into production. Because in concept you've got one artist working on it and it's fairly easy to course correct. Whereas by the time you're into production, you've got an art team invested in it, plus all the downstream teams and design and everything. It's a much slower shift.

Cory Bamford · Ship content team

And you've got to worry about performance and actually having it work and stuff. Whereas in concept, it's a visual representation of it. So it doesn't matter if you look at the geometry and it's really jank, because we've got a whole team of production artists to basically convert a concept mesh into something that actually goes in a video game and runs, right? And looks good.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

And looks good. So concept's complete, we then do proper planning. Planning phase. And then it gets scheduled. I'm still learning the new production. And then into white box, which is basically, we do a fairly quick breakdown of the ship and all the parts that need to be in it and get it into engine as quickly as we can, just to allow us to run around it, make sure that what we think works visually actually works from a gameplay point of view, and make sure it flies, make sure thrust is in the right position.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

The ever popular: when I open this door, does it actually stay within the ship? Does it go outside?

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

We actually have that test, just to drag the ship around to make sure everything stays attached.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

At the end of each phase we have a review process where we sit down with everyone, get everyone in a room and make sure we're all happy with it. White box is basically: make it work. We don't really care what it looks like at that point. It's about making sure that we know what we're doing and it's all going to work. And then into grey box is where we do most of the modeling, most of the artwork.

Cory Bamford · Ship content team

We don't care about what it looks like aesthetically, but we care about what it looks like as a basic representation for every aspect.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

We need to get proportions right and everything in white box.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

Designers start day one. I feel like I've undersold it. It's not that ugly. It's representative of what the final ship's going to look like.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

We have to be involved from the beginning because certain things have massive impact. So like with the flight, it's something you have to consider from day one, from the concept phase, because thruster positioning and location makes a huge impact. The actual locations on ships: saying that we need a thruster closer towards the wing could change the way that the concept works for the entire ship. So it's something that has to be considered the whole way around. There are multiple teams that give feedback during the actual concept phase to make sure it's going to work. Because if the concept art puts all the thrusters down the center spine of the ship, it's never going to work. It just won't.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

We'll go really fast in one direction.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

Yeah, but you won't be able to turn.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

LOD Zero. So it used to be that Final Art would be the next phase we moved on to, but we found that the amount of things that got put into Final Art from an art perspective was so vast that having it all as one phase meant a lot of things bled over into each other, and it had a knock-on for other downstream teams like the audio team, the VFX team.

Cory Bamford · Ship content team

And TechArt as well.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

And TechArt, because theoretically they could get involved in doing their work earlier, but they didn't know when certain criteria had been met. So we drew a new line down Final Art and split it into LOD Zero and Final, so that basically the end of LOD Zero is when the other teams can then start getting involved and doing more of their work, and it just means they don't have to get involved immediately.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

It was a very polite way of basically these two making sure that I don't make changes right at the last minute. It makes us sign the ship off at the earliest possible opportunity so that it can unlock other people to do their work. And I can't come in at the last minute and be like, oh, do you know what? Can we just move that wall just a little bit?

Cory Bamford · Ship content team

LOD, level of detail, is basically you take your geometry, so your 3D model for the ship, duplicate it and then smush it down, optimize it more. You do that a few times. Less complexity, right? The further away you get from it in space, it will transition to the next LOD. So it's basically a way of optimizing a mesh as it gets further away from the camera. LOD 0 is the highest quality one, so if you've got your face up against this table, and you step two metres back, these ridges in the table won't be modelled anymore, they'll be flat. And also if, for example, we do LODs on something and then we get feedback about it, it kind of makes those LODs redundant, right? So you really want Ben to be like, we're not doing any changes to it after we've done LOD Zero. That's your last chance to say, change this, because we're going to move on to basically all these destructive processes that mean you can't really go back from that point.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

Bear in mind, right, Corey joins the team, and within about two weeks, he's like, right, we need to talk about the pipeline. And I'm like, okay. And he's like, yeah, we need to change this. And yeah, it's much better for team health, much better for scheduling and everything else.

Cory Bamford · Ship content team

We're trying stuff. This is all stuff we're noodling with. It's not like, this is the way. I'm not coming in and just being like, oi. These are suggestions of things to try.

David Colson · Vehicle Programmer

The situation you could get into is that you make four different versions of the ship geometry. And then myself or Mark come along and are like, that thruster's in the wrong place. And you now need to redo that area of geometry for four different versions.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

Some things are easy. Because again, as you go down through the LOD chain, you're making the ship less and less detailed. And so by the time you get to LOD 4 and 5, moving things around a little bit doesn't really matter. Sometimes you play with the scale of them so that you reduce the amount of pop you get as these things change. But the LODs are the icing on the cake in terms of where it is in the production pipeline, but it's also the least fun and the most tedious part of the production pipeline.

Henry · Vehicle Artist

I think, well, I was working on props before and had a somewhat similar pipeline. There's a lot more technical aspects that go into it on the vehicle side. And it seems like it works. And there's a lot of room for conversations about stuff during the pipeline, which I think is very good, honestly. I don't know what to say bad about it. I'm learning about it and it seems it does its job, that's for sure.

Cory Bamford · Ship content team

The Cutter, right? I don't think we did the planning in that way for the Cutter. Yes, we've done a variant of a ship. It's a variant. But basically this is just kind of things that I learned, because I was managing the props team for a while and had an opportunity to push the pipeline forward there. And it's just kind of stuff that I found worked for that team, trying that kind of stuff out on the vehicle team, basically. Seeing what works.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

It's a trend here, because I left the props team and you remade the pipeline. You then come to this. I must have been doing something wrong.

David Colson · Vehicle Programmer

We actually are largely independent of the pipeline. The first reason is that we tend to try our best to not have to do code work for every single ship, just because there's loads of ships and it would be unfeasible to do so. So we sort of live adjacent to the pipeline, doing things to support it every so often. So that could be making tools to help designers, or a new piece of tech that you can integrate into the ship to make the doors open differently, something like that. And so we interact with the pipeline in the sense that we're trying to support it functioning. Most recently, for example, we made this tool that shows the designers why certain thrusters are being used in a certain way, which was received pretty positively, so that was good. So for example, the way the flight system works is it'll take the positioning of the thrusters that the artists have done and it'll try and automatically put them into groups to use them for certain things. So when you fly left, it has a list of thrusters where it's like, oh, I need to fire these thrusters when you go left. And that process is automatic. And the designers very often found that the thrusters were in odd groups and they didn't know why. So now there's a tool that shows them these thrusters are in this group and these are the reasons. And it's usually because, oh, you've rotated this thing in the model incorrectly or something like that.

Cory Bamford · Ship content team

So it thinks it's in the wrong direction.

David Colson · Vehicle Programmer

Correct.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

It was a nightmare having to go through the entirety of the XML and find out where we'd accidentally put X or Y, or a minus instead of a positive, and there was no real good feedback for it. So we'd have to just comb through the whole thing and try and figure out what wasn't firing or why it was pointed that way.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Thousands of lines, and as far as the game knew, you intentionally put it that way. Because you're telling it that. You said fire down the X axis. It didn't know that you wanted it down the Y instead.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

Well, if it's physically pointing in the wrong direction, it won't fire if the implementation file has it in the opposite direction, because there's a degree of functionality with it as well for how far away from the angle it can point. But then that was the other problem: if we were one degree too far on a fixed thruster or something, it then wouldn't fire, despite the fact that it was correct, positive X and Y, because the angle wasn't the right angle, and we wouldn't know.

David Colson · Vehicle Programmer

So now there's a tool that tells you.

David Colson · Vehicle Programmer

It is called the Thruster Group Debugger. It's very posh. We didn't call it something like, I don't know, Jackson. It's just a functional name.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

It depends on the ship, really. Depends who you ask as well. Ben's a very rule of cool person and you keep having to reel him in.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

I've just got Jefferies tubes, that's what I want. Why aren't they all Jefferies tubes?

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

If you look at the Hornet, that's a really good example of thruster layout for what a real spaceship would be, in that it's got a big thruster at the back, it's got two retros that are in line with it, and then the maneuvering thrusters are all equally spaced around it. So it's very functional. It's a cube with spaceship dressing on it. So that's a real spaceship. But if you want every spaceship to be like that, that's sort of the perfect layout, which means every ship's thruster layout has to be like that, just on a scale. The Gladius, hopefully everyone knows what a Gladius looks like: those thrusters aren't in line like they are on the Hornet, they're spread out because of the shape of the wings. So technically that's less perfect, less real, but it looks, in my opinion, cooler than a Hornet. And it's like that on every ship. We always try and make sure, and I'm pretty sure we have in every instance, but I'm not going to 100% confirm that, that every ship has enough thrusters to believably do what it's supposed to do. And they may not be in the scientifically correct place. If you look at the 400i, there's thrusters there to move it, but they could be in a better place, but that would mean changing the toothbrush nose of it. Snout. And that's where the rule of cool compromise comes in. And that's different for every ship.

David Colson · Vehicle Programmer

The decisions that were made in the design of the flight system are such that we tend to forgive imperfections with regard to the balance of things. So the thrusters, their positions do matter, as Mark has made clear. But if you, for example, have a slight imbalance between the front and the back of the ship, the system will ignore the imbalance. But you do kind of need to be sensible, because there is a point where you can do something kind of dumb and it won't fly.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

It's very good at mirroring real life in that way anyway, because I think with our advances in technology as a race, we could probably come up with the perfect automobile, right? We could probably come up with the car that is the most efficient, but if you look at cars on the road, most of them are different. And I think there's always a point in real life where a decision has been made to be like, okay, we could do it like that, but this way just feels better. This way is nicer. As a collective, we prefer it like this. And our systems allow us to have that freedom as well, pretty much.

David Colson · Vehicle Programmer

I want to also give a shout out to the realism with regard to the way ships animate and move. Like you mentioned earlier, the way doors move and animate, all of it is not faked. There's physical space for how everything moves, which is really cool.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

Nothing disappears into... Well, what you were mentioning earlier, which is, you start white boxing and you're walking through the ship and it's like, oh yeah, you've done the doors and everything. And you're like, cool, just put it in the outside camera and open the doors. It's like, oh, okay, all right. We can hide stuff if we wanted to. We just don't draw it when it goes into the wall. But we want to make sure... we want to sell the dream.

David Colson · Vehicle Programmer

Those are the sorts of details that you can notice a lot of the time, especially when you've got lots of things that are breaking the laws of physics in subtle ways. The more they build up, the more it breaks that sense of, this is a real place I could be.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

And it was a real stumbling block in the past for a lot of our concept artists who worked on other projects, and they were used to, it's just a movie set, or it's just a TV set, so I don't care where that door goes once it's opened.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

The inside has to fit in the outside? It seems like such an obvious thing, but it's not a consideration that exists anywhere else. Not just in other video games, but in any of sci-fi.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

But it feels great when it does, though, because everything makes sense. As you're walking around the ship: why is it so thick? Oh, well, that's where the bulkhead door goes. Why is this wall thicker than this wall? Because that's an outside door. And it sells the realism of the ship more, which is so important, that it feels like it could be a thing.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

What are XForms?

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

I don't know. You tell me. You guys keep giving us them.

Cory Bamford · Ship content team

Basically, on an animated piece of geometry, every bone has a position stored on it. If you haven't oriented it correctly, that position is stored in the file and it can skew things. A helper point in the wrong way, so when something attaches to it, it's in the wrong orientation, or it might offset when it goes to its LODs, so something just flies out into space when it goes into the LODs, stuff like that basically. And it stacks on nested objects, so you can have a big corridor section that's made of like 50 child objects, and there's an XForm issue somewhere. It'll kind of compound everything beneath that. If it transforms it one meter off for the first child, then the next one's two meters off, three meters. So you just get this weird cascading event horizon. And it looks fine in the Max file. When you hit export, it goes in engine, and it's like, oh.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

But you can't just look at the entity and go, oh, well, this is the parent of it all, so that's why it's wrong, because the entire thing breaks, so you've got to painstakingly go through bit by bit and potentially fix them all, because there's no way to see if it actually fixed it in Max, because it doesn't show in Max.

Cory Bamford · Ship content team

I think the biggest challenge, for me at least, is just the scope of a ship as a whole, right? It's so many different moving parts, so many different bits and bobs. They're just very complicated, and because of their complexity, you have to be very attentive and you have to make sure that you don't miss any details. And it's very easy to break stuff sometimes. And then it's a case of everyone getting their heads together and being like, okay, why is this broken? And you need someone from design to look at it, and then someone else will look at it and they'll be like, I don't know. You have to track down what the issue is. They're very complicated. I'd say that's it.

David Colson · Vehicle Programmer

I've got an answer that is sort of unique probably to the programmers' experience of these ships. Most of the ships probably don't come directly through my hands, because the tools that we've made for the design and art teams work, and the ship is created, and it's all fine. From my perspective, it's all good. And then there are some ships that have special, unique functionality. And these are the ones that come through my plate, because the artists and designers will come to me and be like, this thing that we want to do with the ship does not work because there's no tech to do it or the tech doesn't support this. And those are the ships that are difficult to deal with. The turret starts on top and then it rotates around to the bottom: the Scorpius is an example of this. The animating section on the Hull C is another great example of this. A very difficult thing to deal with, the edge cases from that. Another thing is the thruster folding on the Redeemer. Those folding thrusters, they have special case code to deal with those. All of those weird edge cases of the things that make the ships unique and special.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

There's a lot of challenge just because of the size of the team and the global nature of it. I manage a lot of people, so anyone that's done management of more than 20 people knows the pain of just keeping everything a well-oiled machine. And I think vehicle pillar-wise, if we include vehicle feature, the artists and designers in the US, tech artists and the VFX and audio, it knocks on to like 80 to 90 people, trying to get everyone all working together on maybe six or seven vehicles simultaneously in various stages, just getting that all harmoniously working and being able to tell the people at the top, yep, 12 months from now, this is what's going to come out, and hit those dates. And that's where the planning poker has helped a lot. The previous version was just, we give the t-shirt sizes of small, medium, large, extra large, and we just book those in. And the teams would always do their best to hit those dates. Sometimes they slipped, sometimes they were ahead. But yeah, that management side of it is a difficulty, but that's part of the role. But related to the actual ships themselves, for me, we have a lot of ships in the game, and it's every time we bring a new one in, getting a real believable justification for it. Because it's the first question you always ask me when we do the filming: why? Why this ship? And we don't want to just make them because they're cool looking ships. They need to have a role and purpose and not tread on another one's role, and all just work together nicely.

Henry · Vehicle Artist

I think making everything work. Just putting it all together at the end. Seeing it come together. It is exciting when it's a thing that works.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

I think one of my favourite bits is when we get to the point where we hand the ship over to other people to deal with, and you've spent the last six months staring at this ship, and you've lived through the frustrations of all the annoyances that you've had to deal with to get it to where it is, and then you hand it over to the marketing team, and they go away, and they do their thing, and they come back through, and they're like, oh yeah, can you just approve these shots for me? And you open up and you're like, click, oh, I like that. And click, oh, I like that. And you've had a bit of time to kind of step away from it. You come back to it, you look at it, and actually being proud of what the team's delivered is super rewarding. And like I say, with our ships, they are super complicated. They break a lot during development. One of the hardest things, I think, for me, is managing expectations. And that's not managing the execs' expectations. It's managing my expectations and the team's expectations of what we can deliver for these ships. And you sometimes get lost, like, oh, it sucked that we couldn't quite do this because we didn't have the tech, or couldn't quite do that, or didn't have enough time. And you're making compromises, but then when you see it all come together at the end and you get these beautiful screenshots that have been made, or B-roll or trailers or whatever it is, you're like, yeah, do you know what? I can have a whiskey tonight and I can feel proud that we did good. And I think that's the rewarding part for me.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

Similar: when the backers first get their hands on them. When they first get to spawn it at the ASOP terminal, run over to the ship, and you just start seeing it all over Spectrum, all over Reddit, all over Twitch, where people start to play with them and use them, and how excited and happy they are to actually get the ship that they've been waiting for and use it. It's fantastic seeing them actually get their hands on it.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

I think mine is similar, seeing the reception to it, especially at live events. So the last CitizenCon we did in Manchester, where we were sat in the dark on the sofa at the front of the stage whilst the Carrack trailer came on, and the noise and the physical... everyone was clapping, pounding their feet, and you could feel it in your chest. There was like a thousand people in that room. And just the noise and the pressure of that hitting you on stage was amazing.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

Well, all the staff were in the other theatre and we could hear people on the other side of the building absolutely exploding. It was fantastic. I was terrified, for the record, because that was my ship and I was absolutely bricking it, but it was amazing to see.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

So we'll start with the Merchantman. That's the big elephant in the room for me. It's the big expectation. It's a very, very beautiful elephant, but it is very large. That's the one for me that has got the most unknowns around it. We're still actively working on it. Due to people chasing new adventures and slight priority changes, we've got a skeleton team that are currently working on the exterior. The exterior is progressing along well. It's gone through most of its modelling. We're starting to do material breakups and that sort of stuff and really defining the overall exterior shape. But we do need to look at that and decide whether or not now is the right time for it with the current team we've got, or whether or not we focus on other ships. So it's still in progress at the moment. When it's going to actually come out is completely unknown at the moment.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

We're at a sort of crossroads with it, where the interior is white box, the exterior is further along, and we're at a point where we continue down the path and we absorb the amount of time that a ship of this size is going to take, or we, production phrase, put a pin in it and move on to something else which is going to be a better use of our time. So I can hear all the Merchantman owners screaming now. But it is a big capital ship. Maybe there are smaller ships that would come sooner that add better value to the game.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

It's got to be one of the most complicated ones. It's the size of the 890. For being a Banu ship, the art direction style is so much more than anything we've ever done. Even with the 890, we had some Origin stuff to go from with the 600i. Yes, the style completely evolved over the course of the 890, but the Merchantman's not just a capital ship. It's an alien Banu Merchantman, a huge capital ship.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Pretty much every other capital ship in the game is human and is modular to some extent. You make one corridor piece, you've made 90% of the corridors in the ship. And with the Merchantman, that's not true.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

Every corridor is unique. It needs that time. We could make it all modular. It wouldn't be what we want. It wouldn't be as cool. There's a fine balance. With every ship, we try and reuse stuff and we try and take the most sensible approach to it, but the Merchantman has very little to pull from. Okay, so, other end of the scale. We've just wrapped up the Cutter and we've just wrapped up the [Course?]. So those resources have freed back up. In terms of the people that were on the [Course?], they're moving on to doing some gold standard work on some Squadron ships that will eventually lead to that work coming into the PU at a later date. And then the people that were working on the Cutter have moved on to working on the Spirit. So the Spirit is in early white box. We're tackling the interior. It's all coming along pretty well. We're focusing mainly on the bomber variant right now. But we are making sure we white box the VIP variant, because the VIP one is the one that's going to cause the most headaches. It's got multiple floors in a small space. Got an escape pod.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

I don't know if we've actually announced that yet. Oh, now we have.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

So yeah, we have to work out the middle section, being the escape raft.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

So yeah, there's a few technical and visual hurdles we need to tackle with that, so we're working through that at the moment. We're working on the Lynx. That's also in white box, again, early days. We've white boxed most of the interior and are going through the exterior at the moment. And although it's based on the Ursa chassis, I think the only real bit that's being reused is probably the cockpit. Even that will get some love. But visually, it's going to feel part of the same family, but will be a different vehicle altogether. We've got the SRV, which is going super good. It's trucking along for Argo. It's going through LOD Zero. I'd say about two-thirds of the exterior is LOD Zero complete in terms of modeling and material breakup and that side of things. And then on the interior, the cockpit and the engineering section are both progressing through LOD Zero, and it's just the habitation area that's still in grey box.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

Vulture, yeah, so Vulture is pretty much ready to go. We're just really waiting on the salvage feature to be completely ready for it. It has meant we've had to go back and make some adjustments to the interior, but they're minor things, nothing major, so that's going good. The Hull C is with tech art. We're mostly art complete on it, but we need tech art to go in and do their pass to get it all moving. And once that's done, we can go through and do a final lighting pass and fix up any bugs.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

Yeah, absolutely, and that's it. There's things that are pipeline internal and then there's things that are game wide, and the Hull C is one of those things that juggles both, or careers straight through both. They're always the tricky ones as well. Sometimes we're ahead of those gameplay teams, sometimes we're behind.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

We always get the damned if we do, damned if we don't. The ship could be ready, and in the past, we would have just released it without the gameplay. But now we try and not do that. But then it's the case of, well, hey, this ship's disappeared off the roadmap now. It must be done. So it's coming in the next patch. And it's like, gameplay's not ready.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

Yeah, and things like the Hull C, it's [Hull?] on steroids, basically, because that rear section, you can walk around it, which you can do on the [Hull?], and that causes a whole lot of pain. Lifts in moving... anyway.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Giant, one physical screen that separates and becomes two physical screens.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

Three. I have quite high expectations for that, and so that unfortunately requires some additional work from the different teams to get that looking right and feeling right. Okay, and then, talking of salvage, that's one of those things that is somebody else's baby and feature and has a massive impact on all of our ships. So the team, Henry's been spearheading some of this stuff, have been working exceptionally hard looking at all of our current ships that are in game. All of their damage and underlying damage meshes were created for a damage feature that was worked on many years ago, and now we're like, well, that works for salvage, but some of it works great, some of it didn't. And so we're going through, and for me, I love supporting new features. For us to take all of the damage meshes and the UV2s on ships and everything and do them to a gold standard is years of work. And I don't want to be the person that's holding back a feature that can be really good fun for the sake of me being like, you can kind of see through that bit, kind of see through this bit. So we're going in, getting all the ships ready, getting all the UV2s updated. We're improving damage as we can as we go through.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

I was talking to Lars the other day and Lars was telling me how much work he did on the Cutter, specifically the damage maps.

Cory Bamford · Ship content team

And that's what I mean by impacts our pipelines. It's tech debt basically. And I mean, that's the natural part of being in a project that's creating new features, right? The ships we made several years ago, they're not necessarily going to be fully compatible with these new features we drop. So that is tech debt, and that's sort of a part of development, right? And basically we just had to triage the ships.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

That happens with everything. It's just not every game happens to be running a live environment right in the middle of this development.

David Colson · Vehicle Programmer

Usually you have to pay off the tech debt before a game comes out.

Cory Bamford · Ship content team

And there's good kinds of tech debt and then there's kinds of tech debt that you can avoid, right? But things like salvage, we want the damage to look good anyway, so it's a pass that, you know.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

Yeah, the salvage work that necessitated all this was built off the damage system, which we introduced with the Gladius, I don't know, 2015, 2016. And that system hasn't really changed since then. And it looked good for damage, like when you're shooting another ship with a spaceship 100 meters away and you see the burn and the glow and everything come on. And when we looked at salvage, it was like, yeah, we've got a system, it works. But then when you pressed your face up against it, scraping it with a thing, it was like, no, actually, this technically works, but it's not to the standard we want.

Cory Bamford · Ship content team

I think as well, over the years, you call it rot or just changes and stuff, damage maybe hasn't been scrutinized as much because it hasn't needed to. And then when a feature like salvage is coming up, we sort of need to take stock of where everything is now and review it again and be like, these ones probably want a bit of love, right? And then there's some that you're like, oh, that'll work. It's not all going to be perfect for tier zero salvage with hull scraping, but it will work as a feature.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

Ship damage, you mean the visual damage. I keep having to correct this.

Cory Bamford · Ship content team

The visual damage will all mostly work. And the shader's had a bit of love, and we've created some new textures for it as well, so there's a little bit of visual polish that will benefit damage as well. Less tinfoily damage.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

On the plates. Dan's done a great job on the team. We've got issues that were ship-specific, which means we have to touch every ship, and then we've got improvements we can make that are ship-wide, and the new shaders and the texture improvements and stuff that we've done affect all ships in one go. There are going to be cases where you salvage a ship and you might see a bit poking through. It's still fun. We did our best. We've done some work on resource management. And we're in prototyping phases, getting stuff in and working. But we're not at the point yet where that's actively rolled out across ships and we haven't done a big pass and stuff. We're early days with that stuff.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

Design's done their pass on it.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

Yes, sorry. On the art side.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

They're so complex that, for me personally... every single one feels like it's a puzzle that needs to be solved. And solving that puzzle for me is really satisfying, to put it bluntly. It's why I like doing the layouts of ships so much. Does it make sense to put a corridor there? Why does it not make sense to put a Jefferies tube in anything? Why does this ship need a rework?

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

For me, it started a very long time ago at my former job at a former company. I was sat there one day and a colleague reached out to me and was like, I'm working on this project with someone I can't talk about, and he's trying to put a one kilometer long spaceship in our engine with a full interior. And I was like, that's impossible. There's no way that could work. And he's like, well, here you go. Here it is. And I was like, oh. It is possible. Cool. This seems like a fun thing. And then some months passed and then I ended up here.

David Colson · Vehicle Programmer

As an old backer of the game long before I worked here, for me it goes back to just the sense of adventure of going to space. That's a very fundamental driving feeling behind being interested in spaceships. And then the second level, which makes Star Citizen particularly interesting to me: I'm also a physics nerd, and the realism and physicality of the game and how things work is just unbelievably satisfying. So you get this double hit of the sense of adventure and wonder of going to space, with this feeling that, oh, this can actually work. And it's just so satisfying. It just feels really good.

Cory Bamford · Ship content team

I mean, I've been a longtime fan of sci-fi and space games and space stuff. And coming to this company was a really exciting opportunity for me. And I had a really great time working on props and weapons. To be honest, I'd been on the props team for a very long time and I kind of fancied the change, and this opportunity presented itself to me. And I've always really admired visually the spaceships in the game and how they work functionally. I find it just amazing. So for me it was a chance to renew my passion in a way. When you've been doing the same thing for quite a long time... don't get me wrong, I love props, and that team was so fun to work with. But starting something new again, it's exciting. I feel like I've got a lot of challenges and things I need to learn again, which is a feeling I haven't felt for a while, if that makes sense.

Henry · Vehicle Artist

Oh, they're just the best looking thing in the game, aren't they? I mean, I'm pretty simple in that way.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

I think for me, I grew up watching Red Dwarf on VHS over and over, and then watching Star Trek and Star Wars. And I think, like you said, that sense of adventure is a big draw for the project. When I first saw what Star Citizen was, I was making racing games and that side of things. The vehicle art being inspiring is one thing, but I don't think I'm lucky enough that I will make it into space. So this is as close as I can get. My kids might, if they're lucky. Star Citizen for me is a game that I really want to play, and I want to have that exploration. Playing Star Wars Galaxies and those other games, the big MMOs and exploration, that to me is just a huge driving factor, the exploration of the game. And also, I told my sister that I was going to go and make spaceships, and she thought I was going to go and make real ones. And I'm like, no, Sammy, I make video games. I do not go from making cars in racing games to actual real life spaceships.

Cory Bamford · Ship content team

I quite like non-combat ships, so I really like the idea of the colonizing ships, like the Pioneer. Something like that I think would be pretty sweet.

Mark Gibson · Vehicle Designer

I'm going to keep pitching to John the idea of us making a giant ground vehicle base. That's what I want to see in game, so I'm going to keep asking John. A giant ground vehicle moving base. So think like a giant tank that has three floors on it. Like Mortal Engines, a Mortal Engines style giant base. That's what I want.

David Colson · Vehicle Programmer

So I don't know how the artists might enjoy working on a ship like this. However, I love the idea that exists in some sci-fi worlds of organic ships that are organic creatures and move in weird, strange ways and are animated very fluidly and smoothly. The sense of wonder and strange newness from that just appeals to me. And I'd like to see something like that out there.

Ben Curtis · Art Director, vehicle content team

There's definitely space for more alien ships in our universe. I'd like a traditional space rocket, just because I think it would just be cool, right? Proper portholes on the side of it, big thrusters, takes off vertically. But I've just seen Space Sweepers and their junker ships. For me, that's what our universe is missing. It's not a manufacturer, and I've been harping on about how important manufacturer identities are and everything. It's not a manufacturer. It is people that live in the... duct tape together, Scrapheap Challenge style. A ship that people have passed down through generations, that has been cobbled together with whatever they can find, and it might see a station once every 10 years, and it's really unique and homely and it has a personality of its own.

Henry · Vehicle Artist

Wallace and Gromit ship. The one from Wallace and Gromit.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

The thing that I want is the old space jalopy. I want a ship that isn't sold. You can't buy it in a store. You can't pledge for it. It's the old hulk that you have to find, and that you have to repair. Basically you have to go on a 28 point mission through 13 different planets and locations and find the parts and basically reassemble this thing. And what you've got is not the fastest and not the most capable or anything. It's an old 200, 300 year old spaceship. But when you're done, it's a status symbol. I put in the work, I put in the time, and it's a collector's item, and it's restored. It's like an old classic car. I would like a questline ship, something that you have to pursue and develop through gameplay.

John Crewe · Vehicle Director

For me, it's sort of like Ben's. I want to do either the original Zeus or an [Asperia regression?], which, if people don't know, is the first RSI ship that could do a quantum jump, that had a quantum drive. I think they were notoriously unreliable. So there's a lot of them just scattered around the universe. What if we combine the ideas? It's just a really cool visual. It's like the old space plane.