The developers cover ship production order (Carrack before Banu Merchantman, then Reclaimer, Buccaneer, Dragonfly, Polaris) and what ships in 2.4 (base Reliant only, new keymap). They also discuss persistence, differential patching, Evocati testing, dog tags and the Shubin contest.
It will end up being the folks in the UK. They're going to be doing all our larger ships, but it doesn't have a person right now. It's on the longer term schedule. You guys probably saw we did the Starfarer and then the Constellation and the Caterpillar, and now we're moving on to the Carrack, and then after that the Merchantman and the Orion and the Reclaimer and so on.
Well, I mean, repair is part of the piping system, especially for ships, where the idea is the ship is a functional entity, and if some aspect of it becomes damaged, you send an engineer back and there's a repair process. So it's a possibility to do it for bases and so on, but we need to ask somebody who makes more than we do for that one.
But yeah, that piping system video was pretty cool. It's all prototyping, guys, so you notice the UI wasn't done. It's just exploring different mechanics and ideas that we can include in Squadron 42 and Star Citizen.
No, just the core Reliant, just the base Reliant at this point. With a number of notable exceptions, we are attempting to build out all the base versions first before we move on to variants.
Although we are at the point where the variants are getting their look. In fact, that was one of the meetings I had this week, to talk about the Aurora and the 300.
We are currently in production with the Squadron ones that we sold a few months ago. We usually bring those back like once a year, so we'd probably do them again in the fall, I'd say. Because it takes a couple months for production, and so it takes longer than people expect, I guess. But yes, we always bring those back.
I really like the Squadron 42 dog tag. I think Squadron 42 lends itself to dog tags better than Star Citizen. So it was very cool to see the prototype with the Squadron logo.
Absolutely. Every single thing about the game will evolve as development progresses. And persistence, I mean, this is our beachhead into persistence. We now are looking at how do we do this and this and this and this? In fact, I was on the call this morning and Chris was talking about object persistence for abandoned ships and how he wants to have them last longer and how the game can track that, and components and so on.
We will do more once... Basically all of our cinematic assets are on Squadron right now, because that's the biggest challenge, to get the Squadron cinematics up to snuff. We trained a lot of folks early on on the ship commercials and now they are all over in Europe making Squadron look amazing. But once we have those assets freed up, we would love to make ship commercials 24/7 because they're so much fun.
And so the Retaliator commercial is not forgotten. We know folks voted for that. We had hoped to slot that in before the mocap shoot way back when. Didn't work out that way. But roll with the punches.
I'll say we can't tell you when 2.4 is going live because we don't know. Anybody here would love to be able to tell you every release date we have. I'd hold it over your heads. It's a matter of going through the PTU process, and you guys are going to be able to watch that happen now that there's more players in there.
Yes, it's one of the things that we've been discussing. We had one, and then as part of development, with the feedback from Evocati and stuff, we started changing some keys, so when we're confident in what 2.4's key map will eventually be, there should be some new graphics for you.
Actually, they are already in progress. The folks over in the UK have not just created a new graphic for us. They've done this whole long design post about here's why we made this change, here's why we made this change. It was great because we didn't even ask for it, but it's going to be in the 2.4 live post when that goes out sometime.
Yeah, we were getting the specs up to snuff. Actually, I think we agreed that it did not need a full concept artist assigned to it because we think the current Trapper Keeper one is so cool. The work it needs is how do you get two people out, because it's side by side.
Yeah, if I knew when the game was absolutely going to be done, I could tell you. But I guess what I can say is that we will continue developing ships until we are old and gray, or we're already there. We will continue developing ships forever. The only change will be how we get them to you.
I was just talking to Ahmed about this the other night. It's something they're actively working on. Differential patching is in our future. It's not today, it's not tomorrow, but it is in active development. And that will help things a lot. A differential patching system will bring our patches down from 24 gigs to megabytes. Maybe a gigabyte. But that's really important. We want it just as bad as you do. I promise.
TL;DRThe Evocati testing went very well, with quick feedback, though they admit they explained it poorly and say it exists for future secrecy needs, not to end PTUs.
Yeah, they got great feedback very quickly with the Evocati. One of the big things this time around, I was posting to Reddit about this yesterday, I think, we do feel bad that this was not explained so well when it started, because we don't really get involved until something's live. We like to let the game support folks run the test stuff. In retrospect, we should have explained more about the Evocati. And it's not so much that in this particular case we want to keep 2.4 super, super secret. In fact, I think that the day we started the Evocati, we had an ATV where we told everybody what was in the patch. It's more that we are building this group for times in the future when we absolutely will need to keep something a secret so it's a surprise, or to avoid spoiling Squadron. We were testing the existence of the Evocati in the same way as we were testing the game itself, and both, as far as I can tell, went very, very well.
Like I said earlier, we're not just developing the game, we're developing the processes of testing the game, we're developing the processes of communicating these things to you.
But I think a lot of people got scared that we weren't going to do PTUs anymore, that we weren't going to show our work, and that was never the intention.
TL;DRBen Lesnick only gives broad direction on how a ship should feel, technical designers implement it, and flight feel is tuned last through testing since paper designs never work immediately.
Not entirely. I'm very broad: this ship should be this way, and then it goes to our actual technical designers to turn my vague feelings into how it actually works.
That certainly is the last thing, because that can change at any time. Once the look is locked down, once the animations are working, the ship can go from being a tugboat to a super maneuverable ultra fighter with a couple of changes to a database. So we get to play them in many different ways until we find out what... Because one of the things about game design is what you have on paper will never work immediately in the game. I think the exception to that is the original Wing Commander, which Chris said was designed because Jeff George did all the missions and the specs on paper and they worked perfectly. That was back when you got your game designer from the pen and paper industry. And these days there's a lot more variables.
TL;DRThe Dragonfly is coming in the not-too-distant future, but finding a visual concept is art and unpredictable, as another ship needed weeks of iterations.
You never know how long it's going to take to find a visual concept. It's art. We're talking art. It's what Chris likes. It's what you like. It's what the developers like, the designers like. So you can't just sit there and say, oh, we're only spending two weeks, and then whatever we have is what we're going with.
Yeah, in fact, we're doing a bunch of ships that we have not talked about yet right now. One of them is the Polaris corvette, and a corvette takes a lot more time because you plan the interiors and it's a large ship, but our artists nailed the look almost immediately. It was one pass. Whereas we have another ship right now, we went through a couple iterations, and it was weeks and weeks and weeks. We go, okay, this one looks really cool. And then someone's like, yeah, it looks really cool because it looks just like the ship from Elite Dangerous. We went back and changed, then we did another pass, and it's different now.
There's just no predicting how long something's going to take to find a look that you're happy with. And everybody's got their idea of what a space motorcycle should look like.
I'm trying to remember. Calix showed me a fully stocked module with cargo, and honestly, I can't remember. I thought I might remember when I was reading the question. So sorry. That was on me.
Well, there is an answer for that, which is because we have the Aegis stuff all done already. So it's the natural next one. It's also our most popular ship. There are more Carrack pilots than any of the other add-on ships, and it needs a little bit of concept work, and then it can go immediately to the people who are already working with the Anvil art. So it's just the best use of resources. Banu Merchantman, still coming. In fact, we were talking about Banu stuff just a couple days ago. But it requires not just building the ship, but also building the kit that goes with it that will let us build other Banu ships afterwards. So once we get there, you guys are going to be so tired of the Banu.
Yes, as we mentioned in ATV yesterday, I'm going to spend this weekend going through entries with Tyler's help and with Ben. We're going to pick our five and hopefully we'll announce them on next week's show.
Let's see, it's on the schedule. I think it's a little bit later this year, not Q2, but after that. It should be a quicker one, because, again, Drake is one where we have all the design language down, we have the kits to build from. We'll build this stuff out with the Caterpillar. In fact, Caterpillar and the Herald. I think the Herald built the initial bits and pieces that they've been using on everything. And we'll do the Cutlass update and the Buccaneer and the motorcycle.