The developers answer community questions on the Vanguard variants, upgrade kits and LTI, plus the status and studio assignments of the Reliant, Cutlass, Freelancer, Caterpillar, Merchantman and Xi'an Scout. They also cover the Community Hub, the Issue Council, the Social Module's time-to-kill regression and HUD style guides.
Yeah, Premiere. We all have the latest Adobe Creative Cloud so that we can share files between each other. And quite often, something will be started by Justin, and then it'll be picked up by Hennessy, and then it'll be handed off to me, and then I'll hand it back to Hennessy.
I'm still partial to the Super Hornet. Even with the balance changes and the changes to the thrusters and whatnot, I still like that Top Gun Maverick and Goose vibe. I'm looking forward to being able to fly it with two people. It's still my favorite.
TL;DRNo Vanguard commercial is planned in the immediate future; commercials are pushed back because the team that makes them is busy on Squadron 42, though some trailers are being considered.
No commercials in the immediate future. The next commercial we were hoping to do was the Retaliator. We wrote a script out for it and stuff. It's just that the guys who do that are busy working on Squadron 42.
The commercials were always just a testbed. They were for the cinematics team to get their feet wet in CryEngine and work out their tools and their production processes so that they could work on Squadron 42. And now that they're actually working on Squadron 42, they're doing that instead of making commercials. So we know they're awesome. They're great for highlight reels and stuff. We know people like using them to remix their own trailers, which is a thing the community likes to do. I've never fully understood, but more power to you. We want to get back to them. It's just right now.
TL;DRThe choice depends on play style: the base Warden is the best all-around version, while the Harbinger and Sentinel are more specialized variants, which can also be reached later by upgrading.
That's a good question. I think it's all about play style preference and what you actually plan on doing in the verse. If you buy a Warden and use its pretty versatile ship and then decide to upgrade it later to have a more specific gameplay function, then that's completely up to you. Myself, I really like the Sentinel. I think the idea of the Sentinel is awesome because you can just go out and just, I don't know, I just think it's really cool. I'm sorry, I lost steam there, right in the middle.
Generally speaking, this doesn't apply to everything. But generally, the base model is, it's kind of like doctors. The base model is your general practitioner. It's the version of the ship that you go to for the biggest variety of purposes. And then the variants are the more specialized. The Sentinel is your ear, nose, and throat doctor, and the Harbinger is your podiatrist. It's an analogy. It's not a 1-1 thing. The Warden is going to be your best all-around option, and the Harbinger and the Sentinel are for more specific purposes.
I mean, to dumb it down even further, if you're playing in FPS, it's basically the difference of using a sniper rifle versus a shotgun. It depends on how you feel like playing and what you want your role to be.
Yeah, I believe that question is in the second part of the Vanguard Q&A. The questions have been picked, by the way, so when this is done, we'll close down the Vanguard Q&A thread. The questions have been picked, and they're with the people that they need to be to get the answers, and that post should go up later today.
Yes. The Harbinger and the Sentinel one does. The Warden one essentially gives you the same parts that were in the original one. So just like the Warden, it's got the two-year insurance.
Yes, the Sneak Peek. We started a process where we were going to show various fashions from the Terra white collar line. We got a little derailed by the Vanguard sale. We showed some Vanguard. And then when the social module dropped, we showed social module for a week. But we're back to showing the Terra white collar fashions. Those are designed by Megan Cheever in Austin. You can follow her on Twitter, by the way. We have a social media post where I believe her Twitter account was on there. She'll often do commentary on those designs and stuff. She loves discussing them. So you can check those out.
Yeah, probably not on the PTU. The PTU is designed to discover what's possible. So somebody doing that in the PTU could be argued to serve a purpose. In live, it would be a different story, though.
If you want to run around town in your underwear, every MMO allows it anyways, so who cares? It's underwear. I'm not the final say on that, but I don't see why it matters.
The UK is working on the Retaliator right now, I think. And someone was asking about whether it's going to be reworked to make it more space efficient, meaning like the interior space, not like efficient in outer space. I haven't seen it too lately because it's in the UK, but yes, that's one of their goals. They're also working on making it more modular and stuff like that.
We have someone continuing to work on the white boxes, talking a little bit about what Elwyn's done already with animations and all the stuff he has left to do. After that, it'll go into gray box, which is the modeling you usually see, and then materials, which is actually making it more than just shapes and looking all pretty, and then everything after that is tech setup and all that to get it ready. So it's still got a while, but we're working on it.
We have some variants. I don't think they said what they are. I don't think I'm allowed to tell people. But we have them, and I don't know what their schedule is, so I can't tell you anything.
I mentioned last week I was going to try to do it this week. Some people were out of office, so I didn't get all the thumbs ups that I needed to officially do the Avenger, but I will be doing it next week.
TL;DRThe Community Hub preview covers Citizen Spotlight, Twitch streamers, podcasts, a link-sharing section and MVPs, with a first wave of invitees starting Tuesday and chat integration not included in the first drop.
So this is a preview of our Community Hub. When it launches, you'll see there'll be a menu option under Community. You will find the hub. And then we have a couple areas. Our first area is the Citizen Spotlight. Now, it starts off with staff picks, so the best ones get submitted, we'll do staff picks, and the first page will be populated here. Of course, you can see what everybody submits by clicking View All, and as you can see, we've already started to populate it with a couple things here. It's not open to many people right now. So you'll see what's hot. And of course, people have the option to upvote stuff. So you'll see what's hot, what's most popular, what's moving fast overall, what the highest upvotes are, things that are particularly brand new, and of course, staff picks.
Yeah. What we're doing is for the PTU rollout, we had a PTU first wave and a PTU second wave, and everybody still has those badges attributed to their accounts, so we're just going to use that. So on Tuesday, the folks who were in the first wave of PTU invites will have the first wave of Community Hub invites and they'll come in and start populating it with stuff and trying to break it for us. And we'll work with them and Turbulent and make sure we address anything that might have been overlooked.
That way we can make sure that this is in its best working order for you guys once we release it completely into the wild and there will be a minimal amount of issues so it's all sexy and you guys are happy.
And under Citizen Spotlight brings us to our next page, which is our Twitch streamers. You can register your Twitch channel, and when you go live streaming Star Citizen, you will populate here. So you'll be able to watch from the website. And eventually we'll have our RSI chat integrated. It won't be integrated in the first drop. We ran into some technical issues, but we're working on it. So you'll watch streamers there. There is a section for podcasts. So if you do a podcast, you can register a podcast and they'll be collected here. Kind of like that weekly Comm-Link that we put out, the schedule with our podcasts, you'll be able to find them here. And then Deep Space Radar is sort of our version of Reddit. It's where if you find a link to an article about Star Citizen or somebody's website about Star Citizen, INN stuff, whatever, you can post them here. Same thing with the Citizen Spotlight. One of the bugs we're trying to fix is the thumbnail integration at the moment. And then you can upvote and stuff like that. So basically it works just like the Citizen Spotlight. And then you'll be able to find MVPs. So like this week's MVP was Elton Gradash with the custom Star Citizen icons. And you can click on that and go directly to his forum thread. We've got our social integration here, so you can see our Twitter and Facebook. And Citizen Spotlight is good for videos and for image galleries. You can upload the images straight to our website, host them just like you could on Imgur, and there's no image compression. So it's really good for that. So you can put up your screenshot galleries and stuff like that. So that is the hub.
We are still discussing a lot of things internally and how that's going to work and what we're going to reward people with and at what levels and blah, blah, blah. And there will be an update coming very soon within the next month or two.
The Issue Council is separate from the Community Hub, and it could go live any day. They're basically just crossing the T's and dotting their I's on the final iteration and whatnot. Like the social module. It's right there. It's on the verge. I can't give you a date, but one day you're going to log into the website and it's just going to be there.
TL;DROnly the Harbinger has the blast shield, but since the nose is a modular piece it should be possible to add it to another variant with an upgrade kit, though the design may change.
The blast shield only is on the Harbinger. So that's one of those modular elements that you can swap around. So you'll have to use one of the upgrade kits to get that on any other.
You should be able to do that. The nose is a separate modular piece from the body, so you should be able to do that. The Vanguard information comes with a bit of a caveat that I am no longer driving the Vanguard. This is going over to the UK. So all of my information is where we were at at the point of handing it to the UK. So their implementation of it might have some differences from the original design.
As always, the only constant in game development is change. So when we give you information today, last week, the week before, it is the correct information at the time that we give it. It does not mean it won't change.
TL;DRNo Caterpillar information is available to share yet, but a designer is working on it seriously, early work looks good, and a Ship Shape feature may come in a few weeks, with no firm date.
No, we don't really have any tiny scraps of information we can share right now, but I will tell you that Randy is working on it. He's the same guy who worked on the Starliner, and he showed me some stuff this morning, really early stuff. It looks really, really cool. I gave him a heads up that I'll probably want to cover it on Ship Shape sometime in the next few weeks. That depends on when his stuff is far enough along and all the approvals that I need. I don't think it should be a problem, but I don't know exactly when yet.
I will add to that that Randy's very serious about the Caterpillar. He was excited to get it. We've had several meetings. I know every ship has that super thread with 100, 200, in some cases 700 pages. We've been poring through that, looking at the things that people expect from the ship. Doesn't mean you're going to get it. It's just we're educating ourselves about what you're expecting, what you're looking for. Again, with no claims that that's what we're going to do, but we want to make the most educated decisions we can, and Randy's taking this very seriously.
I'm pretty excited with the designs he's been coming up with. It looks like it's going to be nice to move through the ship, it's going to be nice to interact with the ship to do all the various things that you can do with the ship. It will definitely live up to its potential. I think a lot of people who think it has been on the wayside for too long, they're going to be really happy they've stuck with the ship. Randy's just doing an incredible job with it, so you guys are going to be happy.
A lot of times when you're like, why isn't this ship making progress? It's because you want to match the ship with the right person who can design that ship. Not every person can design every kind of ship, just like not every actor can play every type of role.
It hasn't seen a lot of movement lately, but it's actually seen a resurgence in discussion of movement. We've been talking about who we want to give that to next. Hopefully one of our concept artists will be just doing some polish on that coming up. Again, it's just been conversations at this point. Nothing's slotted into the schedule. But I know that's a super popular ship, so the second it is, I'll make sure you guys know.
And it's prioritization. Right now there's not a game mode in Arena Commander that would benefit from having the Merchantman in it. So it's one of those things where we try to build what is applicable to the game, what's needed for Squadron 42, stuff like that. It's not that we hate the Merchantman or whatnot, it's just that it's not the most pressing priority, but it's a very cool ship.
The UK's working on that, so I don't have a lot of detailed information right now, but I know that they're working on it. They seem to be pretty happy with how it's going. Sorry, I don't have anything more concrete.
I was talking to Nick Elms over in the UK. He's one of the main guys on there, and again, nothing to share or talk about yet, but it's not just languishing, doing nothing. They're working on it. They've got some exciting ideas about what they want to do with it. And the Cutlasses play an important role in Squadron 42. So it's not a forgotten or dismissed ship, as some people have said.
TL;DRSome Arena Commander time-to-kill fixes from the earlier patch weren't merged cleanly in the Social Module release, so it is shorter than intended, and they plan to restore it once the merges are fixed.
There was an issue when we did roll out Social Module where some of the changes from 1.1.5 didn't get merged in cleanly. So the current time to kill in Arena Commander is back to the level where we weren't happy with it. We want it to be longer than it is right now. Some of the original fixes that we had in 1.1.5 brought it up to a point where we were really happy with it. And we're absolutely going to be bringing that type of stuff back as soon as we can to get these merges back in, fixed up, and have that healthier time to kill again. Unfortunately, when we realized that the integration hadn't gone smoothly, we were fairly close to releasing. And we have to go back individually through all the submissions to figure out which ones were not integrated, which is very time consuming. It's not simply a question of did it change, because of course it changed. The question is, was this the change that we needed or is it the change we deserved?
If you check Reddit this week, the DevOps team did an AMA with the Star Citizen Reddit. And embedded in that AMA is a list of the integrations. It's a chart of all the different integrations from the different builds that have to be resynced. And you can see why something like this happened. It's a very complex process. I couldn't do it. Those guys are wizards over there who do it.
TL;DRThe HUD will probably change, since UI style guides are being made for all manufacturers and older HUDs like the 300 series are likely to change more, though nothing is final.
Probably, because we're taking a pass right now. We actually have our UI guy, Zane, who's amazing, in the UK right now to work with some of their UI guys to come up with UI style guides for all of our manufacturers. So after that, it's likely that every HUD is going to change at least a little bit. And the ones that are a little bit older, like the 300 series versus something we showed at Gamescom, are likely to change more. So you're going to see that coming along.
And then once those get in, they'll change, just like the Bitching Betty voice for the 300 series changed at some point, because the audio was done in Austin, and then the UK took over, and it changed when they did the Wwise integration or something like that. And it'll change again. They go through passes. They do a pass, and then they let it sit for a while. You paint something, you stand back from it for a while, you look at it, you live with it for a while, and then you go back and do changes. You don't just change, change, change. So even if something's been some way for a while now, it's our version of sitting back and watching it, getting used to it and deciding what we want to change.
We passed that along to the UK. They're going to be finishing it up, again, as part of the whole deciding which studio is doing what ship based on manufacturer. So we handed that off to them recently. I don't know if they've touched it very much yet, or if so, how. But I'll probably follow up in a little bit just to see, and if it's different enough, try to do a Ship Shape on it.
There are still a few exceptions right now. There's like one or two that I can't think of off the top of my head. But for the most part, yeah, we're starting to do that.
A couple other manufacturers. But again, there are some ships a little bit back and forth, like Elwyn's still working on the Reliant, and that's a MISC ship. The UK is doing the Cutlass, and that's a Drake ship.
Yes, absolutely. Soon. The social module's going to iterate. Austin has some amazing plans for it. You will see some pretty hefty iteration on the social module in the coming months.
Some time ago, flight controls was one of my tasks and it got sort of stomped by other priorities for Gamescom and other things. So as we're getting all of these different systems, I've been sort of shuffled around to support those. Flight control is still one of my tasks. It is not currently my highest priority task, but it becoming my highest priority task is on the horizon. And in the meantime, I am still doing prototypes on the side, but since none of those things have had a chance to get vetted or reviewed, I'm not super comfortable sharing too much or making things that sound like promises. So I'm still working on it, but it's going to be another minute before I get the chance to really have it pushed through.
Chris Smith and Josh Coons, when they finish the Constellation, are going to move on to that ship, so that ship will be done by them. I don't know if the Xi'an will all be LA or Texas. I think it might depend on the ship, since I know the UK has done a lot of work on the Xi'an in general. The manufacturer is probably going to be kind of depending on the ship.
I can tell you about how the progress is going, but I can't tell you when you're going to get ships because, like I said, I hand them off to the marketing team and they make the decision about when it gets to you guys. Sorry.
Dan Kaminsky and Paul Forge have done some amazing work on fleshing it out, though. Every day I go up there and I look at it and it's a beautiful, ugly ship. I love it.
It's going to be really cool when everything's up and running for it, especially all the different electronics and e-war stuff, because that was its signature role as an info runner, so making sure that it lives up to that and that gameplay feels right.
Yes. One of the reasons the Starfarer is so much farther along than something like the Merchantman is because it has a necessary role in Squadron 42. We won't say anything else beyond that. That's been said before. So that's no new information for anybody that's been paying attention.
Like I was mentioning about the time to kill stuff, there were a number of changes from 1.1.5 that didn't properly carry into 1.2.0. So, yeah, a lot of stuff broke that we didn't want to break, and we're definitely going to be getting fixes in place as soon as we can.
Working on it. When we get to the new studio, eventually we'll have our own motion capture here. So if I can convince them to do it, I don't think I'll have any problem with it. Hopefully. We've talked about it already. It's actually been a point of discussion.
TL;DRThey don't know whether the Vanguard turrets will retract; if there is space they probably will, but building the ship in the engine often changes plans.
Yeah, it's one of those things where you have all your plans, and then you have to actually build the ship out in CryEngine, and that's where you discover what the realities are. It's one of the reasons cargo space and everything changes, because we have to actually build the ship out. I've walked up there, I've seen them. They're measuring out the physical hold space of these ships. It's like, this is what we thought it was going to be, but then we modeled it, and they changed things for components, have to squeeze things, have to expand things. It's game development. It's iterative, and the only constant is change.
I asked our facilities manager like a week or two ago, and she said the latest she's heard is mid-October, but that's also when CitizenCon is happening, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was more like late October.
Yeah, and I know the big holdup right now has to do with security, and we have to make sure that the building is secure before we start moving things in, so it's not going to get stolen or whatnot. So when the security hurdles are surmounted, then we can start the process of moving in.
Getting new weapons out to you guys is definitely a big thing that we need to do. I want to say right now we're looking at generally size one to four, for a lot of the current and different weapon types there are, to just fill out the ranges. Any specifics, that's still up in the air, but it's absolutely something that we want, to get more choices in your guys' hands so you can be experimenting a bit better with your ships and doing some more interesting things.
But yeah, I agree. It would be cool to see a siege of Area 18, maybe with objectives and stuff like that. Because you don't just want a giant kill box.
TL;DRThey are thinking of releasing some upcoming hangar-ready ships earlier as far-along gray box versions, though tech setup effort and missing LODs hurting hangar performance still have to be evaluated.
Someone asked us that a while ago, and I said I'd run it up the chain. And we actually are thinking for some of the next ships that might be hangar ready, we might try to release those a little bit earlier so you guys can see them there in a sort of very far along gray box version and then sort of continue working on them and updating them after you guys already have access. So that's probably something that you'll see with, I don't know if it's the next one, but a few of the next several ships that you'll see in your hangar.
There's a bunch of considerations. One, the tech setup is a lot of work to put something into the hangar and we have to evaluate whether it's worth doing that for interim models. And second, the lower stage models won't have LODs. We want to put something in there, but if it destroys the performance in your hangar, it ultimately won't be worth it. So there's a lot of evaluation to that.