Star Citizen: Happy Hour Community Show

The Carrack is on our schedule for next year, if I'm not mistaken.

That's correct.

So until its time on the schedule comes up, there won't be an update on the Carrack. Of course, the ship schedule, you can see that as part of the production schedule. It's up on our website. You can see the ships that are scheduled to be worked on this year. We'd love to work on every single ship. Like I said, we have 99 ships, and we have quite a few resources. We're over 400 staff across four studios, but that's still a limited number. They can still only work on so many ships at any given time.

But find comfort in knowing that the Carrack is my favorite ship and I can be very annoying.

And honestly, a truism throughout Star Citizen ship development, we get better as we go along. Every ship we make is better than the last one. So I know there's a lot of impatience. I want my ship now. But honestly, the longer it takes for us to get to that ship, I think the better you can expect the ship to be. I think history has proven that.

And I think it proves that we eventually do get to the fireworks factory and deliver pretty cool ships.

We did a tease for the 600 in the last Eclipse.

Are you willing to confirm that that was the 600?

I'm willing to confirm the 600 is the thing that exists.

I think it was the one before the Eclipse, actually. It was at the end of the Banu Defender brochure.

There's nothing we can say yet. It is super, super cool, and it seems mean to tease it like that. I will go ahead and say it's not the next one you're going to see. We're taking a lot of time. This is a really, really special one, so it won't be the next ship you see, but it'll be soon after that.

I see it comes up a lot. In ATV it was mentioned that the 600 is concept complete. That is just one stage of making it ready for sale. There's still all the marketing requirements and stuff like that.

Iteration.

So it is concept complete, as they mentioned in ATV, but now it's to us and now we're creating all the marketing materials and designing the sale. So it does not mean it's ready to go to sale right away the second it's concept complete. But when it's ready, you'll see it.

Well, one great thing that we're actually doing with these sales now is we've learned to do the additional marketing stuff and the game work in parallel. So we now know that we don't need to make some high-res image just for the sale. We do it in such a way that the ship is starting to be integrated into the game already and we take those assets and work with them. It's made the whole thing a lot more efficient. As I think you guys saw with the Nox, we were able to show it in Bug Smashers in the engine the next week. It's so smooth now compared to years ago. It's great.

Actually, that's a really good question and something I've been thinking about. We give studio tours in our studios occasionally. And every time people come in, they're like, are you ever going to do Which Glitch again? And it got me to thinking that I think it would be really fun to do one 3.0 related, maybe post-release, just even if it's just a one-off, because some of the bugs that I've been seeing coming out of QA, I mean, they're hilarious, and I think that they should be seen by the world.

You submit a ticket through the CS system. Tours happen on specific days and times, usually once a month at most. That's just to minimize the impact on our development. So you can submit a ticket to CS. They will tell you when the next tour or maybe the next two tours are available in that studio. And if there's a way to make that work for you, your chances are good of being added.

We did initially expect that there would be different pods underneath instead of the fuel pods. We have not built them yet, but I think definitely that is something we will revisit down the line. And in fact, I'm familiar with another configuration of the Starfarer we're talking about. So there's more to Starfarer.

I was speaking with Will Maiden, who's one of the designers in the UK. One of the things he's working on specifically is the cargo system, and he was asking about the Starfarer and being able to swap that stuff out. So not necessarily something you're going to see in 3.0 or anything, but it's definitely something that's on our minds.

One thing that we're finding a lot with ships, and it's one of the reasons why we don't do so many variants when we kick off a ship anymore, is that as we build out things like planets and solar systems and so on, we're finding more and more situations where we say, oh, wait, we need a ship that does this. And then we go back and say, hey, the Starfarer could be modified in this way. Or, oh, the Sabre could have this change. So yeah, you'll see a lot more of that variance for the purpose we've discovered rather than the purpose we imagined, which is great.

Oh, that's leftover from our Wing Commander 3 stream we did a couple of weeks ago. That is Hobbes' physical prop. Back then, you filmed video game cutscenes with actual actors. We still do it with actual actors, but it's motion capture. Back then, it was literally just a...

So is that the prop?

That's the prop, yeah. In fact, that specific one, the first time I saw it was when I got my fan tour of Origin Systems in 1998. It was on the designer of Wing Commander Secret Ops's desk, and I was in awe of it. Later, he needed money.

Yes, I can. We are adding a couple more tiers of referrals between 1 to 10, so there's just some more easier to earn rewards. Those have all been selected and they've been sent off to Turbulent and they're just waiting for some art and copy, I believe, right now. And we're going to be looking at higher rewards as we go. We kind of think it makes more sense to reward people who are starting the program. Just get them involved, make it something they actually want to do. Oh, I should point out, they will be retroactive. So if you have six referrals and we add a six referral tier, you'll get the stuff anyway. So no worries there.

We do like to do things retroactively when it can be done. One of the common refrains we hear is, what about all the people I referred before the referral program? Unfortunately, we weren't tracking that before. There's no way to go retroactively.

That was the pre-Turbulent website for the initial referral program, and I feel bad about that all the time. I wish we could go from account to account and know.

But when it's something we can do, we'll do our best to do it.

I'm going to kind of break that and say the flight model will probably continue to change. If you've played a lot of traditional MMOs, for example World of Warcraft or something, games that have been out for 10 plus years, they continue to have patches that change how much damage something does, how fast an ability goes off, et cetera. It's kind of the nature of supporting an online game. So I imagine that it will continue to change, and that is the beauty of iteration.

Is it the Devastator? The shotgun, yes. I'm bad with gun names.

I think mine is still the Behring SMG. It's still a quality weapon I've always used.

I will tell you my favorite gun is one that I saw just this morning. It's a bug Vinny Sinatra sent to me. He had a P4-AR that accidentally loaded the railgun ammo. And it was amazing. Vinny was in there in Star Marine running around with a handgun that shot railgun. It just exploded everybody. I'm trying very hard to find a programmer who will program that into the game as a dev weapon so we can cheat.

I just want to clarify right now that he's joking. We do not have secret dev weapons.

Just to jump in on that, by the way, for me it's the P4-AR with the silencer on it.

Yeah, of course. Totally.

If you watched ATV just yesterday, you'll see that all ships can operate in atmosphere. So you're perfectly capable of picking up from one location and flying around in atmosphere to another location. It just won't have the ground vehicle.

I know there's a concept of oxygen because you can be without it, but I don't know to what degree it's a... As we discussed in the Subscriber Town Hall last month, blood oxygenation is actually going to be a function of the game. So the amount of oxygen that you have left, the environment that you're in, whether it is particularly oxygen-rich blood, will mean your stamina will replenish faster and whatnot. And if it's an oxygen-deficient environment, you're going to have a harder time refilling your boost, your sprint, and stuff like that. So oxygenated blood will be a game feature. And how that works out, we'll see when 3.0 drops and what you guys do with it.

The loaner for the Banu Defender at present is the, I think it's the Scout. I think it's the Khartu-Al, I think. And the reason we did that loaner is because we wanted to give you alien for alien. It's important to remember with the loaners that they are not a one-to-one equivalent to the ship. We're attempting to bring a variety of ships into the universe through the loaner program. It helps the project, helps everybody if we get a variety of ships out there. So while an argument can certainly be made that a Super Hornet would be an appropriate loaner for it, the argument could be made for several ships and we have to pick one.

But if you'd like to make that argument, do it on Spectrum, and we will pay attention to it for sure.

So I could tell you how Austin is, you guys could tell us how LA is. So the thing is, for Austin, everybody is kind of heads down. One of the reasons that we're having this style show as opposed to one of our other ones is just because we don't want to bother anybody, because everybody is super focused. So while everybody is working a lot and heads down, there's also a level of excitement, because one of the things I always like to remind people is that a lot of the people that work at CIG, we work here because this is our dream game as well. A lot of us left other game companies or other jobs or moved halfway across the country because we want to play this game too. So everybody is focused because we want to play it just as much. And I've seen some really cool stuff, just people getting creative because everybody wants to be efficient and get stuff done. We want it out. And so just the other day they were doing a quick pick-me-up mocap shoot in the Austin studio where they took a bunch of ladders and they set it up and it was like duct tape, and they were really just like, we can do this just with what we have here and with this equipment. And they just made this really cool setup and captured a few animations. It's really cool to see everybody right now so proud of what they're working on and so close to being able to share it with all of you.

Yeah, I would say very much the same here. There are certainly long hours. There's people working insanely hard, but there's no sense of despair at all. We know we have something extremely cool that's about to happen, and everybody is together on that. I think the most despondency I have seen here is on our side. There's the support side and there's the dev side physically in the office. And I think the most frustrating thing is we want to support the devs more. We want to feel like we're working as hard as they are. But no, it's definitely a team that's cohesive and believes in something.

To piggyback on trying to stay out of folks' ways, if you watched Bug Smashers earlier this week, you saw it was very low tech. We were back to only the webcam. Our voices were muted. It was, all right, let's just sneak this in there, a quick 10 minutes, not to bother. You can hear everybody talking in the background. We're shooting under the radar right now to try to get something out for you. And to piggyback on the level of excitement, this is a true story. Ben and I got a Skype call out of the blue from one Tyler Witkin in the Austin studio earlier this week. And we're both like, what's Tyler doing calling right now? There's no meeting right now. We answer. And he's got the screen share to his 3.0 open. He's like, just look at this. Look at how cool this is. I'm in here, and I'm playing, and look at this base, and look at the textures here.

He was on the dark side of one of the moons, and he was zoomed out above it, and he was like, look down there. You can see the ship from all the way up here, and I can fly close to it. It was so cool.

Seriously though, we work a lot too, and a lot of it isn't directly in the game, and so we don't always have the time every day to check the latest build and jump in. There's a lot to do. And so I had a little free time. And so I downloaded the build. I used to be in QA, and so it was kind of nostalgic. And I jumped into 3.0. I went to Yela, and I had a rover, and I was just driving around, and as I got to the dark side of the moon, I was just taken aback. I'm not trying to tease anybody. I just want to share this experience with you because I know that we're all going to get to do it together soon. But yeah, I called Jared and Ben, and I just had to share it with them. I was like, guys, this is incredible. The headlights on the rover lighting up the path in front of me just looked unreal. The red glow on the ground behind me from the brake lights. It was awesome. And honestly, it got me so hyped even more than I already was.

So we have an entire video department now called GVP, Global Video Production. We have a fantastic video team. You guys met JJ before, you met Justin, John Schimmel, who is a guy who has worked with Chris, he worked on all the Squadron stuff. He's been leading video stuff and he's an old Hollywood pro, so it's fantastic to see how that's come together.

He and Duncan, Cameron, who you saw earlier, helps out in the UK. We just hired a new video producer in the UK to help that out in the EU. In order to expand Around the Verse from just a couple people in the UK studio doing what they could every week, we had to create a global department to do it, and I think the results speak for themselves. That effort that started back in July of 2016 has just done nothing but improve since then.

And the people to really thank for this is our subscribers. The subscription program just continues to grow unexpectedly. We were able to put more resources in the video.

Evocati is the NDA group. So if a patch is in the Evocati phase, it is sequestered under an NDA. It's when the patch moves to the open PTU, that's when you'll be free to stream to your heart's content. So there won't ever be an Evocati period that isn't NDA. They are one and the same, synonymous.

One thing we hear about Evocati all the time is, why are these people being rewarded? Why is this group special? It's not a reward. It's hard, hard work. And they do it very well.

Just to give a little look behind the curtain at some of the stuff that Evocati works on, some of the time that we're testing with them, they're very focused tests. They really aren't fun. Occasionally, they're on unstable builds, very early builds, where we might request, hey, can anybody help us with spawning a ship over and over and over? These people are willing to help us out just to gather data and stuff like that. People are like, oh, Evocati's got the build, I'm so jealous. They're willing to sacrifice their free time to bang their head against the wall for us sometimes.

Issue Council.

Yeah, Issue Council. We regularly add people, a few times a year. We take a look at how many we have, how many we need, depending on which test cases or what we're doing. But the biggest thing is really just to participate. The Issue Council is one of the biggest factors. And just helping out.