Star Citizen: Happy Hour w/ Ben Lesnick & Elwin Bachiller Jr

Right now I'm actually redoing the Aurora. So essentially what I'm doing is taking the design that we currently have and updating it with the technology that we have on all of our newer ships. So custom normals, we'll have the new damage setup. So the Aurora will end up being a lot more optimized, and it'll run a lot better. And it'll also accommodate a lot of our ship item technology that we need.

This is Elwin's current work on the Aurora. Now, this is obviously not finished.

No. Actually, I took this this morning, basically. It's the exact current state of the Aurora. I haven't gotten to the interior yet, so essentially what you're looking at is mostly just the exterior of the ship having been remodeled. And I still have to do a couple of tweaks, but I'm moving on to the phase where now I start to apply my textures, set up all the materials, add POMs, and just make the exterior all look really beautiful.

No, so the Aurora has a lot of skins. And so our skin system has gone through several evolutions. So initially, the Aurora that's in the game now has several skins using an older version of the way we create our skins. And as a result, I have to sort of try and interpret the older skin to the way we are going to be moving forward with doing different color combinations. So what you're looking at now is essentially the base Aurora and the way I'm kind of interpreting it a little bit. You'll notice that at the wingtips you have some raw metal bits exposed. The original Aurora has that across the entire ship, which I think is a little bit too strong to have across the entire thing. That's more of a MISC ship style where they have the aluminum raw metal exposed on the entire thing. RSI doesn't quite do that. So I'm going to keep some of the raw metal in there on the wings just for flavor, but the rest of it will fall more in line with the new Constellation.

That's quite a responsibility. People will argue forever what the best ship is or what their favorite ship is, but there's no question that the Aurora is the most numerous ship.

For an overwhelming majority of our players, the Aurora will be their first experience with Star Citizen. So that's a very important ship.

I definitely feel the pressure, I have to say. There's a lot going on with that ship. I redid the animations for the landing gears and the ladder and all that. We're essentially rebuilding it. I mean, it's not just a quick little update. It's taking quite a bit of time.

Next concept ship, the next one you're going to see anyway, is the Hurricane. And I can say nothing more about it yet. I will say we've been working hard. I say we, but I mean other people working really hard on that stuff. The UK ship team, who are just amazing, talented people. But I think just yesterday we got back some of the images that we're going to use in the brochure, and it's looking cool.

Can we give a shout out to the artists working on that? So that's actually Justin Wentz who's doing the concept art for the Hurricane. And he actually sits right behind me. So I get to turn around and see what he's doing on a daily basis, and it is looking really nice.

We got a fun idea for the booklet, and it's going to be a good one. But we have any number of ships. I think there's five that are in different stages of concept right now. So there's going to be more stuff to see later in the year.

Well, actually we have a pretty integrated work environment where we're working alongside the developers and designers as they're coming up with the system. So there's plenty of times when somebody will be working on something new and they'll call us over and say, "Hey, can you check this out? Is this intuitive? Does this seem like it's cool?" And we're able to give our input just right there while they're working on it. And sometimes even see them make changes at the same time: "Okay, well, what if I changed it to this? Can you try it now?" So we're in the trenches with them, which is a great thing for us, particularly coming from... I worked in publisher QA, where there was a big wall between developers and QA and you were pretty much just there to generate bug reports. We're right there with them. And it's kind of rewarding to actually be able to see, "Hey, I did that. I told them to do that" sort of situation.

That's one of the fantastic things about Star Citizen in general: there's this respect for everybody's thoughts. I'll watch Skype and I'll see Toast having suggestions for things, and there's not another game company in the world where your lawyer both cares and has good ideas.

Well, we kind of already hit on it, because like I said, I was publisher-side QA. So there's kind of this wall between publisher QA and then the internal dev QA. And you're pretty much just checking stuff, making sure things could go to code and pass submission for Xbox and Sony and stuff like that. So it is totally different to be there, like I said, in the trenches the whole time, being able to just walk up to people and talk to them, as opposed to, "Oh, I got to send an email to a producer," and then the producer sends the email to the actual developer's producer, and then eventually, three months later, you may or may not get a response. I actually kind of have a bad reputation here because I will just walk up to any developer, no matter what they're talking about, and I'll just interrupt and say, "Hey, what's going on with this thing? What's going on with that?" I just like getting my nose in other people's business sometimes when it comes to what they're working on, because I know I'm going to have to look at it in a little bit, and I'd rather get ahead of the game when it comes to certain things as opposed to waiting until it's dropped in my lap.

Well, pretty much everybody touches everything, but we're really big proponents of a specialist system where you find a niche, something that you like. Like, I came to this company for spaceships. I was five years old, dreamed of flying an X-Wing, and so I was like, this is what I wanted to do, I wanted to work with the spaceships. So that's kind of what became my focus when I first started here. Other people have different interests, the first-person shooter aspect. So it's like, "Oh, hey, you really like FPSs? Well, you can become one of our Star Marine guys." Other people have expertise when it comes to server creation, monitoring bandwidth and all that other type of stuff, helping with the netcode. So we really encourage testers to find something that they like, something that they're interested in working with, and the developers that they have fun working with, and take it and run with it. Right now I'm working primarily on Item 2.0, which is really cool because I get to bother Mark Abent and collect his tears, as we like to say in QA, whenever his code doesn't quite work the way it's supposed to. But yeah, it's a lot of fun, and we definitely encourage specialization. So there are people who are focusing on Squadron 42, some people on Star Marine, other people on ship combat, other people on the persistent universe. And it works out really well, because that way you have an authority in every single studio who not only the QA team knows to go to, but the devs do too. So if a dev gets a Squadron 42 bug and they haven't been through what's going on, they're going to need a little help with how to get to the area where they need to reproduce the bug.

Not with the current updates. It's a one-for-one replacement for the ones we're working on now: the Cutlass, the Aurora, the Constellation. In the future, we absolutely want to have ships that age. So there would be the 2948, 2949, 2950 over time. So we're kind of looking ahead to that. But right now, the idea of updating ships isn't just, "Oh, it's cool to do this." It's totally essential to where we're going with the game. So the old ship just would no longer be functional.

As we update ship systems and the way that we build the ships.

Yeah, I mean, it comes down partially to a gameplay reason. Components need to be supported, or ship items need to be supported on these ships, and not all of the old ones do, which is part of the reason why we have to update it. And then damage is a big part of it. The way we do our damage is completely different than the way the old models were. And at a certain point, you kind of have to just cut off the way we used to do it and bring everything in line.

I think the one exception is the Constellation, which in the fiction, there is a Mark III Constellation that's the old design, but we don't actually have it in the game. A lot of people see this and they go, "Why are you throwing out this work?" But that's not actually how it works. You just normally don't see all the iterations a model or a system goes through in game development. So this is a completely normal practice in that regard.

Man, that was a long time. It was many months. It was me, Daniel, and Jin, and also Justin, who's concepting the Hurricane now. He was helping us out with fleshing that out. He actually did quite a bit of work on that. Yeah, it was many months of just hunkering down on this one massive asset and seeing progress very, very slowly, until finally it just came to fruition and it all sort of came together at the last minute.

It's such a cool looking ship though, and I am so happy that you guys did such a good job and that you did it all, because if I look back through my email I must have hundreds and hundreds of "Where's the Caterpillar?" from back then.

We're happy to have put it out and that people like it. Obviously, when I look at it, I wish I had more time. That's always the way I feel at the end of each one of these pieces: I just wish I had more time to polish it even further, because there are plenty of things I would go in there and improve. But I'm just really happy that as you walk through that ship, it really does feel like the original intent when we first started production. It really does feel claustrophobic. It does feel dank. It feels dangerous. And those doors, man, that's one of my favorite things. I love that they can all open and that people actually can fly Merlins through it. That's pretty hilarious.

I saw so many different pitches for what to do with those over the years, and you guys totally nailed it.

And not only do we like it, Jim Martin, the original concept artist for the Caterpillar, was actually in the office yesterday, and we were showing it to him, and he's thrilled. He's absolutely thrilled with the work that you've done on it.

One of my favorites is definitely during CitizenCon, the Homestead demo. We had a lot of problems getting the rover and the Connie working, and there was one where it basically looked like the Connie was giving birth to it, and it was a troubled pregnancy, obviously. That one got a few laughs. What else? I mean, a lot of them are just annoying, such as the aforementioned Mustang bug that we always refer to. We definitely want to see a lot of those get fixed eventually, but we've definitely had some funny ones. Anything with IK is always hilarious, because you get guys with twisted limbs trying to get into their seats. I don't even know what it stands for. That's what I was trying to avoid.

Inverse kinematics. So essentially what it does is it will figure out the best solution for moving a joint. So you'll give it a target, and then it'll figure out how to rotate the two different bones in order to give you a sensible looking motion. I guess it's an animation thing.

Concept to greybox. So I'm going to assume until we're done with greybox?

The space between concept and greybox, that's a scheduling thing. But when it comes time, they're like, "Okay, it's time to start building the ship." What's your timeline on that now?

So it really depends, exactly as you said, on the size of the ship. To give you an example, on the Caterpillar we spent about a month, maybe a month and a half, getting one of the rooms from concept to final, basically finished. But on the bigger ships, what we tend to do is build hero rooms first, and then we'll move on to building all of the rest of the rooms using pieces from what we've already built, because it'll make production faster and faster. So every new room you build goes faster than the previous room. So we got to the point on some spaces in the Caterpillar that we would get them done in like three or four days. But that was after a long time of building out a kit. Smaller ships like the Aurora or the Buccaneer, it typically takes about, I would say, two months to get to the point where you're basically done with greybox. And from there, you're finalizing all of your materials and textures and POMs, and then you start doing all of your damage work, and everything that's required for the game to actually use it as a ship in the game. So proxies for collision, shields, all that stuff.

And it's totally amazing, at least from my perspective, watching a ship like the Buccaneer come together so quickly compared to what it took in 2013 to get some of the first ships online. The process they have is just so streamlined.

Yeah, it's gotten a lot better. Much, much faster. We really did get the Buccaneer up and running... I mean, from nothing to greybox, I think it was about a month and a half.

And for some of the even smaller ones, it seems instant. I had that experience with the Dragonfly. I was like, "Oh, and it works now."

Well, those smaller ships, it's a lot less work. So the really tiny ones can get done much faster. But it's a little deceiving, because there is a point at which it doesn't matter how much smaller you go, it's still going to cost you. Getting smaller than a Dragonfly, for example, is probably not going to save you much time, because you still need to set it up for animation and all the interactables and all that stuff. And that will all still take the same amount of time.

So don't look for a space Segway or a space surfboard anytime soon.

You probably mean the Dragonfly. And that is a TBD, largely. For the larger ships, we think about it, but we don't promise it. Best way to put it.

But they fit in the Caterpillar. They definitely do. In fact, the very front of the Caterpillar was designed to make sure you can hold at least two of those facing forward. Now, whether game design decides that that's one too many, that's up to them to decide for balance reasons. But it can hold up to two. And if you really want, probably three.

We've already seen videos of people cramming Merlins into every single bay of the Caterpillar. There's always our intention, and then there's what you guys will do with it.

Honestly, I was really surprised to see that with the Merlin, because for a small ship, it's a pretty long ship, and I did not expect people to get that thing in there at all.

I think everybody was surprised by that one video where they had the Merlins on the open doors and it went to quantum, and it wasn't supposed to work that way.

I don't work on the sound or volume at all. But I will say that when I'm working, especially when I'm doing animations, I'm typically hearing sounds in my mind for how they might actually sound as it plays. And that helps me add a little bit more character to the movements. Honestly, I don't want to speak for the sound team, but that probably really depends on a couple of things. One, how big a ship is, obviously. Two, what corporation, because I'm assuming that different corporations have different build qualities. So the sound of a landing gear on a Caterpillar would be very different from the sound of a landing gear on an Origin ship, for example.

Yeah, I can imagine Origin tries to have it as quiet as possible. It's a civilian ship, whereas Anvil will be like a ship on an aircraft carrier: you'd better wear headphones.

The Caterpillar has a number of landing gear. How many does it have, actually?

I believe it's 12. 12 landing gears.

It's like the legs of a caterpillar.