Star Citizen: Reverse the Verse LIVE - The Shape of Ships

So a rework is pretty much you take what you have and you put it all in the bin and you start from scratch again. You keep the style, and probably the only thing we keep are the animation templates. So how the person gets into the ship and how they sit down in the seat, if it's a ship you directly enter the cockpit. And then we rebuild everything else around that. In terms of improvements, that's usually focused to one specific area. So it might just be completely redoing the interior of the cockpit, but keeping the external shell of the ship the same. Maybe the cockpit screens are too small, they're in the wrong place, it doesn't have enough buttons. That would be an improvement. For other ships, it could be another room, or something that we have to do on a lot of ships is go back and physicalize where the components are in there, because when we built the ship, we went, yep, there are these components. They need to go in the ship here. There's enough space in the walls, but don't worry about making hatches for them at this point because it may all change, and invariably it does. And now we're at the point where those components aren't changing in size. The amount the ship has isn't changing very much. We can go, right, now's the time to go back, take that generic wall panel you made and make a hatch in there for a cooler component. And that would be an improvement rather than a rework.

Yep. So, obviously, we said a rework was everything goes in the bin. For the Vanguard, we don't want to do that. So what we're doing little-tweaks-wise is we're starting with the interior central pod room and we're completely redoing that to make better use of the space of the ship. I know there's a lot of complaints that the ship didn't seem to fill all the space available inside it.

The Warden has the master bathroom, doesn't it?

Yeah. It's a bathroom larger than some other ships. So we're sorting that room out first for the Warden, because that knocks on to doing the other variants. And then as we go from there, we're adjusting the turret. That moves on to adjusting the, not the nose, the neck section, because that's where the majority of the components are going to go, in that neck section, which explains why it exists, which a lot of people thought, oh, it's just completely dead space. And also the tail section for putting components in. And then after that, obviously making that pod wider has knock-ons to the exterior. And we're not 100% locked down on what changes we're going to do to the exterior, but we're going to fix the interior first and then sit down and review what changes we can do to the exterior at the time.

No. For me personally, as a developer, if I wasn't in the position I'm in and I had no influence, I would want them to be two separate things. But that is not an official change we're doing at this time. I would like to have an interceptor ship and a racing ship.

Yeah, I remember when Capture the Core was out there, the M50 being able to fly around and take the core all over the place was as intended, but the fact that it could also draw a bead on people and kill people, it was a bit OP.

Yeah. Whilst it's one of those great things on paper, the way our ships are distributed, you have the people that go, yeah, that'd be great for me, because I get something out of it. And then you've got the other half who have that ship and go, oh no, you've taken it all away from me. And if we wanted to do something like that, we need to do it in a way that both sides are happy with.

And just to reiterate, in case it gets lost in the conversation there, that was John speaking of something that he would like to do, but no plans have been made. No decisions are made in a vacuum here. Lots of developers have lots of opinions about the things that they like, and we have to reach an internal consensus before we do much of anything. So John saying that he'd like to build some separation is not the same as us saying that we are going to do separation. That has not been decided.

I have lots of bosses that need to sign off on things like that.

There's nothing planned at this time. I know there's quite a few concerns with the layout of it. Again, going back to: no one would build a ship this way. It doesn't make sense. It's just a figure of eight, but with holes cut out of it. There are no current plans to do anything with it. Without really changing the ship massively, there's not a lot you can do with that, because it is a long, thin ship with two huge voids that are swappable and a bit in the middle where you get in. Without changing it from what it is, there's not a great amount. There's no plans to add another bed for the seventh person. Captain goes down with the ship.

Now, I do want to stress that no plans to do that now is not the same as we will never. It just means that right now there's no plans to do it.

And quickly to touch on the improvement side of it, some people have noticed that the Retaliator actually had that pass done on it a patch or two ago, in that all the hatches for the components were cut out. They're not the real components put in there, but they are ones of the same size and shape and type to simulate that. So that is a great in-game example. If you look at the Retaliator in 2.0 versus 3.3 or 3.3.7, whatever it is on at the moment, you will see the differences there, and those corridors and the component hatches.

Not everyone hates the Redeemer. I'm sure there's someone who likes it.

Talk to me about the Redeemer.

It's a weird ship. Obviously it came out of the Next Great Starship series and we hired some of the developers on it. And at one point it was used in Squadron quite a lot. So it was all there, ready to go. And just as the pipeline progressed, we sort of found more and more problems with it as a ship that we didn't catch in the original pass on it, partly because those metrics or systems didn't exist. So it's no fault of the people that did it that they didn't account for future designs. And you get to a point with some ships where you're just nibbling away at doing them, going, I need to do a bit here, I need to do a bit there, where it becomes uneconomical to spend the time just patching them up. And you go, right, this needs to be completely redone from scratch. It doesn't fit metrics. It doesn't fit all the gameplay that's supposed to go in here. It's not an optimal-for-performance layout. And it's a weird gunship, dropship hybrid. It was in Squadron because of the dropship aspect, not the gunship aspect. But it only could carry six people, I think, which isn't a great dropship. So when we came to the realization that, right, we need to do this from scratch, it was a case of, if we're doing it from scratch, it needs to be better than this. But are there other things we could do? And that's where the Vanguard Hoplite came from, because we had that chassis built and it was relatively quick to get the interior of that stripped out and put a new one in. It was the same dimensions. It just slotted in. And then over time, we sort of went, actually, it would be great if it could carry more than the Vanguard Hoplite carries. And that's where the Valkyrie came from.

So the Valkyrie has taken its place inside Squadron 42.

Yeah, the Valkyrie has taken its place as the dropship inside Squadron 42, and when we redo the Redeemer, it will be coming back as a proper gunship.

So you've got the three variants. You've got the, I can never remember the names of which one does which, but you've got the science research one, the news van one, the Tana, and the combat one.

The Sen, the Tana, and the Mako. And the one that's out there is the Kore.

Yeah, so they're primarily loadout and skin changes. Externally, internally as well. Externally, the big differences are livery changes, loadout changes. Internally, it's really that rear section, which is why we're spending the time this quarter on, I think what the community calls, embiggening the back of it. Again, it's an improvement, not a rework, purely for time constraints. The majority of the improvements are done on that back section, to make it suitable for someone to stand up with comfort and to fit all the gear that's going to go in the back of those variants. So I saw a few people complaining the other day on the forums and on Reddit, going, oh, why are they only making it have this much more SCU, it's not as good as insert ship here. Why didn't they just completely redo the ship? We're happy with the rest of the ship. It was just that rear area.

In 3.4, no, you won't be able to do that. But in 3.5, in fact, this week, Dave Coulson started, he's working on the IFCS improvements. He's started on a very rough version of the first vehicle state machine, which allows you to decouple vehicle animation states from flight states. So you'll be able to have your ships with VTOL engines do their VTOL stuff without putting their landing gears out, like the Sabre and Vanguard put their wings out without being in landed mode, and the same for the Reliant.

That's huge. We've been waiting for an update to the vehicle state stuff for a while now.

Yeah, it's going to be a big change. I don't want to commit to every single ship having all their animations done, because obviously at the moment, to get that to work, we've had to bake the animations for every ship's landing gear and vehicle parts. And there's a lot of ships that have had that done. So we'll try and do as many as we can for 3.5, but not all of them might hit day one.

But eventually, when that vehicle state machine is up and running, we'll be able to rotate the Reliant without having to go into landing mode. And then the big one, VTOL, being able to rotate the engines without having to go into landing mode and stuff.

And it also is one of the blockers for a ship we'll talk about later.

They're not specifically of the Vanguard variants after all this, but they're of the changes to the base Vanguard. So this is where we're at as of yesterday with the small tweaks to the base Vanguard pod. So this, if you imagine yourself stood at the top of the rear ramp looking towards the front of the ship, you can see that we've extended the pod out wider. So this was the dimensions of the pod before. We've done that for a few reasons. One, to make use of space. Two, to allow the turret to come down and not completely block access through the rest of the ship whilst that's happening.

Right, one of the original concept ideas was that that turret was retractable.

Yep, and we're still looking at whether we can do that, but that's an exterior change, so we'll be looking at that once we're happy with the interior. But this is for getting in and out of the turrets, the mechanism. The bathroom is no longer the size of a small ship. The beds are the same as they are, and on the other side will be the normal Warden amenities. As you can see, slightly smaller bathroom now, without its frosted glass door. And next to it, we have lockers for storing your clothes and suits and helmets, whatever. So this is a big thing that we're going back through the ships adding, just like people have seen we've added weapon racks to some ships. Chris and Tony and Todd are very keen on having a physicalized inventory. So you have what's on yourself and you have what's stored on your ship or in your hab. And then there's your global inventory that you can send stuff to and retrieve it from different locations, but there's all sorts of others. Yeah, it's a lovely rack. There's two of them as well. So we're probably not going to put two on the Warden, because we've got space to move one of these elsewhere, but for the Sentinel and Harbinger, where the other side is completely taken up with torpedoes or the computer stations, we're going to double stack the things here so both crew can store their items on board. This is looking back: big change, double door on the back. When we started this process, we had a good look at the Hoplite and the Warden and realized the two externally had diverged quite a lot more than we thought. They're actually two completely separate exterior meshes, which means whenever we have a bug to fix on one of them, we have to fix it on both of them. So as part of this, we're going to be unifying the base mesh for all the Vanguards. And one of the good things of the Hoplite is the larger rear ramp and the larger rear door. So we thought, let's put that on all of them, because it just helps getting in and out. This side is still being fleshed out, but this is where your mini galley, food kitchen area is. And this is where currently the engineer station sits in the Vanguard. Moving on to the nose or neck section, the cockpit remains pretty much unchanged at this point. You can see we've put in these component hatches. So this sweet little GIF, depending on where you come from on the internet, shows how they all unfold, fold out, so you have access to the items. These are size two items, so they're not removable by hand, but what you will be able to interact with them on is opening them up and having subcomponents inside. And these are your sort of booster consumable items that you can customize per item to improve the gameplay of that specific item. So on small ships where they're size one items, you can pick them up. Size zero items, you can pick them up and change them out yourself. Two and three, you need to go to a repair station, because they are too big to handle by yourself. You might be able to have a little mini tractor beam to get them out, but chances are they're not going to get out of the ship. You have to go to a repair station. Size four capital items, they're permanently a fixture of the ship. So you have to go somewhere specific to get them repaired. And this is just looking towards the nose of the ship. I don't have a GIF of it here, but these steps actually now retract into here. And this opens up and another component comes out of the floor, because we actually ran out of space. Even with all the space around it, we were still struggling to fit everything that we had said in it, because the Vanguard has essentially double of all the core components, which is not a common thing. That's all I have for the Vanguard variants. It's not particularly variant-specific, but this is improvements to the base Vanguard that we're doing first, to enable us to not waste time with the variants.

Harbinger, very little has changed with it. If anything, it will be getting more missiles or more torpedoes. I think it only was scheduled to have three in that interior bay, but you can probably try and fit a few more in. They're size five, so they're big, but they're not Retaliator- or Eclipse-sized. And depending on how far we go with the exterior, I know the original concept had retractable or hidden missile launchers, which, if we were to do that, would go across all of them, and then the Harbinger would have more like underslung missile racks, but nothing confirmed there. Sentinel-wise, the Sentinel had the rocket pods on the turret, I believe. That's still planned. What probably would change on the Sentinel is it will have less of the greebly TV antennas and satellite dishes stuck to the outside of it in odd places. We plan on doing something externally for it to give the same effect, but it's probably not going to be... if you look at the concepts, they're a bit awkward looking. So we'll have something on there to reflect its scanning and e-warfare that's in line with the visuals of the ship. Internally, it has a station and it has extra computing power, and the computers are actually front and center in that pod as a sort of feature piece.

They're still removed, but that's not to say they were a waste and people have got things that they can't use. We're still going to be giving you the same contents. The pod, still swappable. The external items will still be swappable. The paint job is still swappable. So instead of having this, I'm not even sure how...

Yeah, instead of a bespoke item, instead of some item that you'll just attach and it'll swap everything out, we're just going to give you the collection of items.

Yeah, you'll have the collection of what it was going to be anyway.

So people are still getting what they pledged for. It'll just operate slightly differently.

Yeah, rather than just having one drop, I've upgraded this from this to this. Instead of clicking once, you might have to click three times.

So it'll be a turret. It'll be a livery. It'll be an internal room.

Which I believe you still could have done with the BUKs anyway, because there was talk about taking the turret off the Harbinger, putting it on the body of the Warden with the Sentinel paint job. So it's still the same in that regard. It's just a different name. All the same raw functionality. The stuff that people really should care about is all the same.

Time for the Hull C saga. Everyone pull up a chair. So art-wise, it's not 100% done. It's not 100% final art. We're probably 80% of the way there, 90% of the way, of the final, what we call LOD zero art. So that is the absolute high-poly in-game asset that you see close up. What it doesn't have are all the LODs, which is what we need to do to make it run at an acceptable frame rate. And we don't have any artwork for any bits that deal with the contraction and expansion of that central section. So whilst we do have something in there, it is not final art, because we simply don't know the technical setup at this point. We can't give an artist a task, go set it up this way, because that's not actually how we may end up doing it, and that would just be wasted work. So art-wise, it's in final art. It's not finished. It doesn't have its landing gears fully done. So people have only seen it in its expanded-out flight state. It's not optimized, because we're waiting for all the codependencies to be done. And unlike other ships, where you could just release them without them, that's not an option with the Hull C, because it's a cargo ship. It's a cargo ship that has to be expanded to carry its cargo, which means it cannot land, which is our current in-game only way of being able to sell that cargo and load that cargo onto your ship. So we could release it as it is, permanently expanded, but you would never be able to load cargo onto it or sell cargo from it, which is kind of pointless in many areas. And also there's nowhere to spawn it, because you can spawn on a landing pad, because those have gravity, and now that spindly ship is going to fall out of the sky and land on it and probably explode. So there's a few really big co-tasks that we need to do. One, the vehicle state machine, which we talked about earlier, to be able to drive extra states outside of landing gear, because we could set it up in the old way with landing gear, but then you've only got those two states, where you actually need sort of landing gear in, out, and expanded as this third state. That's in progress. From a performance side, it carries, I think, 4096 SCU of cargo. We currently only have the one SCU cargo boxes. So all the great work the network guys and code guys have done to streamline entities and object containers would just be obliterated when this one ship and 4096 other entities turn up on it. So what we need to do is have the supersized cargo or the enhanced cargo functionality, and that will benefit the entire game. So if you order 16 SCU of cargo, it's not going to fill your crate or your cargo bay necessarily with 16 individual boxes. It might just do one box, and that would actually give you more of the raw materials, because you're not dealing with all the dividing walls. So we need that for performance reasons. And then from a pure technical setup reason, we have the way to trigger it, but we have these things called local grids, which is what essentially gives the localized gravity to the parts of the ship and allows the ship to spin around in space and you to be walking around inside it normally. Those are static at the moment, and obviously the Hull C is not a static ship. So we need a way to have the front section, the back section, and a bit in the middle that either stretches or animates out to join the two. So the animating part we can't do at the moment. It's scheduled with the German engine guys. They know how they want to do it. They just need to get around to doing it. Object container streaming has been a big sort of delay on a lot of those things. So not only is it transforming physics grids, but it's also having moving ones as well, because whichever way you set it up, either the front or the back is going to have to move, and we don't support that in a single ship. Again, known about, on the backlog, will be fixed. And then the last piece is sort of tied in, but it's more for the visual side of it. So we have things called vis areas and portals, and they essentially clip lighting to certain areas, and if you're inside a vis area and there's no portals, you can't see out. So you may have seen on some ships when things go wrong, like the Avenger, you open the back door and it's just a blank void. That's the vis area or the portal not working correctly. As soon as you go in, and there's nothing physically to stop you, you see everything as normal. Those, again, are static, and we need that central section to be able to morph with it. Otherwise, if we do everything else aside from that, you'll look at the Hull C and it will expand out, and then there'll be this section that is the length of the contracted version that is perfectly lit, and then it'll just be black, with a portal to another realm just halfway down the corridor, and everything beyond it will be completely unlit, and it will probably also affect the outside. So you'll have half of the ship lit correctly and the other half will be just pure black.

So a lot of technical dependencies for a ship like the Hull. And you didn't even mention docking.

Yep, lastly is docking. So a way of spawning it somewhere that isn't on landing gear. Not only do we not have the ability to do that yet, that's planned, because we need it for the Connie and the Merlin. So the first step will be ship-to-station docking, because that only relies on one thing moving. The stations don't move. Relatively, they don't move. And that's a simpler task than doing ship-to-ship, which will come after. And that will unblock the Connie and Merlin, and the Caterpillar command module coming off the Caterpillar. And also, we need a location to spawn that, because obviously Olisar doesn't have a docking jetty or something for you to spawn on. So the larger truck stops we have in game, and there's even larger ones coming, have that built into them. So unlike some ships, where you can release it without the gameplay, or some you can release with some of it, the Hull C is this perfect storm of, we need all these pieces to come in in one quarter, and then have the art time to finish it off. And for a variety of reasons, no one department's fault, they just have not been able to be scheduled to come in at the same time.

But still on its way.

Still on its way. It's probably the one ship that Chris asks me about the most. It's like, when am I getting the Hull C?

So the Polaris is not in active development. There is no one physically working on the ship. But that doesn't mean the ship's not coming along, because like a lot of our ships, we build the style guide and we build up. So the work for the Carrack, which we'll talk about, has been helped by doing the Valkyrie, which was helped by doing the Terrapin. So we built up slowly. This is what an Anvil fighter looks like. Here's a small multi-crew. Here's a medium multi-crew. Here's a large multi-crew. And we're sort of doing the reverse. Well, we're doing both sides of it with the Polaris. So we've got the Connies, that have set sort of one style of RSI. And then we have the Bengal, which we're fleshing out pretty well for Squadron, on the other end. And the Polaris sort of fits in between the two. The actual concept used a lot of the Bengal design and it used a lot of the Constellation design and just sort of fused them into one ship. So the developments on each side of it are helping streamline that ship for when we get to actually having some artists on it and building it. They're not going to have to spend time sort of noodling around trying to figure out what the style guide for this ship is, because they'll have all these pieces to pull from. But there is no one physically working on it directly, and it's not in the near term scheduled to have anyone start work on it. But that's all, I'm afraid.

So yeah, we do have ship armor in the game, but as you say, because we're a hit point system at the moment, armor is just really a sort of multiplier on that. It doesn't have its own health pool, it doesn't degrade the more you shoot it. It's just completely flat per damage type. So physical damage will be reduced by this amount, energy will be reduced by this amount, and then it lets the rest through to the hull. So that's not where we want it to be. And neither is the hit point system. So Chris is very keen for us to do the whole physically-based damage stuff. It's not a simple, we're going to change from hit points to doing it physically. It's an ongoing thing that's going to take a lot of time and effort to do. But it will make everything more systemic and move away from just, I'm going to add 10 points here to do this, I'm going to do 100 points here. It's based off the geometry of the ship. The armor itself will then be not visually physicalized, but it will be a stat that can degrade and actually have some real impact. And then we can perhaps look at a way of reflecting that on the ship, because at the moment it's very binary, and it does something or it doesn't do something, and it's not a great stat to put on the website. It has small armor. It has size one armor. It has size two armor. It doesn't fit in that section. And then in the technical specification section, it's, how am I going to describe this armor in one set of numbers? Does it just reduce by this amount? Sure, I could put that in, but it's not useful information without the rest of the information.

So it's not to say that it's not a stat that won't get added to the ship matrix at some point. It's just that doing it right now wouldn't be very effective.

No, it's almost like it would give you more useless information than it's worth to put on there.

So, as you say, final art complete is only probably about three quarters of the way through the actual pipeline, because we have the... it confuses some people. We have the final stage and then we have the release prep stage afterwards, because the final art stage essentially gives you the 100% complete intact model that needs all its optimization, and then needs all the other departments to make that go from something that's in 3ds Max to an actual in-game asset, to something that can be used as a ship and then looks great with lighting, audio, VFX, UI, all that stuff that comes on. Damage states. The rest of the other departments' final state is all of that. And then you have the release state, which is doing all the LODs, doing all the damage, doing all the bug testing. So when something's final art, it's not a week away from being released. Depending on the size of the ship, it could be months or even years from where it is. But for the Idris specifically, that missile room is still not done. So that is still there to be done. And part of it is Chris and Erin have talked to me a lot about, we want to save the Idris for Squadron. We want your first experience with it to be in Squadron, learning the crew and having that great experience. And for me, that's still the case. So part of that's the reason why it's not on the roadmap, because it will come out after Squadron is done, and our roadmap only covers the next few quarters. And I've also forgotten the other reason I was going to say... that there's still stuff changing because of Squadron. So you will have noticed in the livestream last year, we had these pilot ready rooms. They were a new thing last year that we reworked a chunk of the ship around. So there's still little bits going in.

It's like the hero asset of Squadron 42. It's your player's home. It's probably the location that you'll see more than most locations, I would imagine, if that's safe to say.

There's large bits of the story where it's about you learning the ship and learning the crew and exploring it as a pilot on board, whereas if you've been given it in the PU and you know that ship inside out because you've spent hundreds of thousands of hours running around it in the PU, it sort of takes away the charm of some of Squadron.

So I imagine we're going to be tweaking and adjusting and improving the Idris right up to the point where we have to push it out the door with Squadron, because it's such an important part of that game.

Yeah, and there's also bits that the PU needs that Squadron doesn't need. So once Squadron are happy with it, we can finish off the rest of the art pipeline. And then from there, we need to do all the extra bits that are behind the scenes for PU support.

A few reasons. One, a lot of those older ships, their concepts are very, I don't want to say crude, crude is the wrong word. They're not as in-depth as the modern concepts are. So when we do concepts now, we do full interior breakdowns, full item placement breakdowns. A lot of those older ships do not have that stuff. The Carrack being a great example: it had a load of great exterior shots, and the only shot of the interior you had was that cutaway, which showed the bridge. When we did the Carrack, we had to figure out the rest of the ship. So the time needed to do a big old ship is way more than doing a new ship of the same size. It's not because we're trying to bury some old ships because people don't like them. It's just the efficiency of time. The more we do, the quicker we get. And it also gives us time to get concept support from Paul and his guys and girls out there to help us block out the bits we don't know.

Right. When you have one artist coming free, you can sit there and say, we've got one artist. Obviously, having one guy start on something the size of the Merchantman, with the scale of work on the Merchantman, is not very efficient. But you can take the one guy and put him on the Reliant variants, for instance. And so those get moved up, because he is going to be free, because his work is cleared up quicker.

And like I said earlier about the Polaris having the Bengal and the Connies to pull from, and the Carrack having the Valkyrie and the Terrapin to pull from, the same is true for the Merchantman. We're doing the Defender now so we can solve a lot of the artistic and technical questions on a small scale before doing it large scale. The Endeavor, if we tried to do the Endeavor... I can't remember which came first, the Starfarer or the Endeavor?

The Starfarer.

If we tried to do the Endeavor soon after the Starfarer, we only really had that one big MISC ship. And I know a lot of people don't like the layout of it. And I like to think that we've learned a lot about interior layouts since then. So the Endeavor could have turned out quite differently if we'd just gone, this is next in the line, let's do it now.

I don't really have an answer to how I see it. In Star Citizen, it's going to be a modular ship. We're not planning on getting rid of modularity, as much as the conspiracy theories on the dark sides of the internet think we are. It's still going to have all the modules that you can swap in and out. It's still got the detachable front section to go off and explore somewhere and leave the workshop up in space. Nothing's progressed on it since the original concept pledge time. I know a lot of questions... probably the biggest question for the Endeavor is the hangar and what fits in the hangar. And I don't have an answer for that at this point. It's something for when we get to build it.

Because it was originally going to fit two Cutlasses, and then we remade the Cutlass and the Cutlass got so much bigger.

Yeah. I would be surprised if it still fits two of the current-size Cutlasses, but we'll know more when we get close to it. Again, like you said at the start, it's a way out, so no one's particularly thinking about it at this time.

So I see it as all one and the same. So you get modularity from the component system, being able to change in and out your power plants, your coolers, shields, whatever, all those things that can be done on any ship or vehicle. You can tailor that to your heart's content. The ships like the Endeavor with the modules, the Retaliator modules, the proposed Caterpillar, the Vanguard pods, those are really just items, or they will be items when they're made. And just like a component, you can swap them in or out. So it's just a scale thing. They're all physical items, and talking with Tony and Chris, they're a physical item you own, you have in your inventory. And we wanted at one point to have... they're going to take up space in your home base hangar. So if you'd got all the Endeavor modules, you're going to have this huge hangar, because they're physical things. You might not have them on your ship all the time. You're going to open this hangar door and there is all your Endeavor modules, arranged in this big warehouse, just there waiting. Maybe you've got all spare items and spare ships in there as well, but they're physical modular items that you can own. They persist, and you attach them to your ships just like any other item, whether it's a small little drinks-can-sized sub-item that goes in a shield generator, to a shield generator, to a Retaliator module, to an Endeavor module. It's all these things that can be swapped.

I'll spend one second on each, so everyone's going to have to go watch this back. So these are in a random order. This is on the lower deck of the 890 Jump, so this lift goes up to the bar area, but behind this door here is the 890 Jump's little medical bay, which a lot of people have been asking about: does it have one? What happens if I have a party-related accident and I break my leg or something? It does have onboard medical facilities, and that's behind that door. We're working on the corridors in the lower section, so these aren't as luxurious as the main guest areas, but guests do traverse through here, so they are quite a bit fancier than the engineering section. So this is wrapped around the back of the ship. It's the current state of the exterior, all 200 meters of it. So you see the back engines have changed quite a lot from the original concepts. These are more like the new Origin style guide for the 600i and what the 300 series is having. Luxurious features include a 25-meter swimming pool, and a steam room and sauna on that side. This is the atrium area. So we still have the lift that comes up the back between the engines. And this is your sort of main on-surface entrance to the ship. So you come into the atrium, into this area. Obviously in white box, staircases to the decks; the guest rooms are wrapped around the edge. This is engineering, down at the back. So the lift sort of goes behind the wall behind you here. This is where your cargo bay is, where your cargo is stored. Again, even though it's the dirty engineering bay area, it's an 890 Jump, so it's pretty shiny. The cargo area will be there, and that all just drops down. More of the engineering. Crew quarters. So they have these shared bathrooms around the place. The crew relaxation area. So they have their own bedroom pods that are all sealed off, unlike the 600i ones, where I know there were a lot of complaints that people didn't like the shared living aspect of it. So on the 890, they're all tucked away. So you've got your private area for your crew, and then you've got a communal eating area, desk, and the TV and couch. Chow lines to get your food from. That's it for the 890. That's back in production, because we paused the entire team that was working on that to work on the Kraken.

So that was either poorly said on my part or misinterpreted. As per the original brochure, the 890 Jump has capacity to hold two 85Xs. But it only comes with one as standard. So if you own an 890 Jump, you also own an 85X that comes with it, and that's what will be in there day one when you spawn that ship. If you have a second 85X that you've got separately, or stolen, if that's your thing, you'll be able to store that in the hangar as well. As I showed, the cargo bay there, there is more than enough space to have some X1s or ground vehicles on the cargo grid, in the cargo bay, in place of having some cargo. You could almost lift them up, move them off. There's enough storage there to store them, but it doesn't come with an X1. There isn't a specific X1 hangar. There is more than enough space for you to put one on there if you so wish.

Well, it's hard to talk about it without going into the history, but briefly, there were a lot of crossed wires from the development side, and we don't want to take away stuff that has been accidentally promised, but it was never supposed to be in there. But because we've said it's in there, what we're going to do is: you can have shielded cargo, and a lot of ships make use of that, but you can also have hidden cargo, and the two, whilst linked, are not the same thing. So shielded is, it's a known place. It can be found, but it takes extra effort to discover what's inside it via scanning. Hidden is, it's an unknown place, and if it's shielded as well, it requires extra effort. So the Phoenix cargo bay is shielded. If anyone knows the Phoenix, they're going to know there's probably cargo in there, but they're going to have to spend time doing it.

It's a big giant cargo bay in the same place as it is on every other Constellation.

Yeah. What's different with the Taurus, and where it was actually supposed to be from, is it lost that underside turret. And you have to do a bit of suspension of disbelief and not think, why is that turret missing? I wonder what could be there. But for NPC and AI behaviors, that is the shielded, hidden cargo bay. That thing is the really secret area, and we talked about this for the Star Runner cargo pocket. So it has its normal huge cargo bay, which is bigger than all the other ones, and then it has that secondary shielded and hidden area that you can put your... well, you can put whatever you want in there, but I presume it's not going to be good stuff.

So to just sum up, the Phoenix will have its cargo bay shielded. It's not a bespoke component. It's going to be like the materials that the cargo bay is made of will deflect sensors. It interferes with scanning. So it'll be harder to tell what's in the cargo bay of a Phoenix than it would be in a Freelancer or something like that. While the Taurus will have its hidden compartment where the bottom turret usually is on the Constellation, like intended. So NPCs won't know to look there.

Obviously, we can't do anything about players. Players are going to be players.

Yeah, so that video we did for the anniversary sale. So there's been a few weeks' worth of development since. I'll try and share something. So something I talked about in the anniversary sale that confused people is I said the Carrack got bigger, then it got smaller, but it's still bigger. So the original concept, I believe, was 123 meters. And when we worked on it last, about 18 months ago, the internals of it got to 170 meters, which is quite big for a six-person ship. The main consideration and implication of that is it changes the landing pad size, so it's available to be spawned in fewer locations. What we did is we had a look at how the interior layout is, and I'm sure everyone's grabbing screenshots of this right now to do some frame-by-frame analysis. This is how it was. Then when we started back on it again, we decided, let's try and get it back down to close to where it was, because our extra large landing pad size is a length of 128 meters. Above that, you go onto the same size landing pad as the Reclaimer and Idris, and those are not populous or well populated throughout the universe. So the smaller the ship can be, the easier it is to get in places. So we've got it down to 125.

Which is what it was in the original concept, wasn't it?

Two meters longer than it was in the original concept, with all the interior figured out, which was no small feat by the art guys. So we've got a side-by-side here, and you can see what we've done in a lot of the interior: we've taken out some of the connecting corridors and just directly connected rooms together.

So it'll take longer to run from one area to another now?

It'll be shorter, because this is the short one. It won't take longer. The engine room has got slightly shortened. The front half of the mid-deck is where the majority of the distance went. So this is all now much more tightly integrated together with everything.

So it's still got everything. We just cut out the hallways. It's still got absolutely everything that was promised.

We just shrunk the rooms down a little, shrunk the cargo bay. You can see it's still got those three modular detachable pods. It's just got everything, but at a slightly smaller scale and with slightly less air between it. So that's a quick overview of it. Some exterior shots, I think we used for the preview for this. One thing people noticed is we changed the landing gear. So if you're familiar with the original concept, the landing gear was sort of external and just dragged behind the ship like daddy long legs, legs flying through space. We weren't really a fan of the visuals of that. And more importantly, wherever possible on our ships, we try and cull the landing gear when they're retracted, because they are outside of the cockpit. It's one of the most expensive assets, because they've got all that animation and compression on them. So they're very highly detailed. And if we'd kept them as they are, there was a large proportion of the ship's budget just gone onto those landing gears. So they're now all integrated into the body of the ship.

That's probably better in case you lose a wing anyway.

Yeah. If you lose a wing now, it doesn't matter as much; you'll still be able to land. So it sits a bit lower to the ground. It's a bit more stable. It doesn't have these gangly-looking legs all over the place. The turrets are still there. I know some people were complaining that we got rid of the turrets. They're still there. And I'll quickly show off some interior shots. The bridge slightly changed from the concept. If you're familiar with the concept, there is a big charting table on there, but now we're looking at using a big 3D projected holo sphere, like you see on the Idris and Bengal, that seems to just fit the style better. So this is at the back of the bridge looking forward.

So we went from just a flat table to a whole three-dimensional sphere.

Yeah, so you'll be able to see... it's the same content, essentially, because the table would have been projecting something out on it anyway. But this is integrated into the ship. Downstairs on the bridge, it's still got the three hanging seats on the roller coaster tracks going towards the front of the ship, so you can look down. I know there were questions about the armored shutters on the exterior of the bridge. We're still trying to do that. There are technical performance issues that we're looking at with doing that, because of the shape of the... I don't know why I'm waving my hands, because you probably can't see me. The shape of the nose isn't conducive to having sort of armor panels slide over it without them being incredibly segmented, or like a roller shutter blind. So it's finding a way that we can do that. And obviously, if you do a roller shutter type like the concept, that is a lot of meshes, and a lot of animated meshes to deal with. So we're still trying to do it. We're just not quite sure how we're going to do it at this point.

It's not out or anything.

It's definitely on the list of stuff we want to put in it. We're just not quite sure how we're going to do it in engine. Living quarters, the break room. This is behind the bridge, off to the right side of here, I believe. I'm sure someone will correct me looking at the images, but there's these central corridors that go along the two main decks, coming off the middle of the room. So you've got the crew relaxation area. Upstairs you have the drone launcher room, immediately behind the bridge, which contains the drones, and they will get fired out the side of the ship. We've got a full med bay. This is going to be quite a high-tier medical bay, so you'll be able to do quite a lot in it, because you're going to be out for long periods of time. It's not going to be a bare-bones, just-keep-you-alive one. It will be able to do some form of surgery. Whether it can do the full, absolutely reconfiguring my character, probably not; that will still be restricted to land-based locations where they have the big hospitals. But this will be able to do as much as you need out exploring.

Do you know specifically what tier?

I do not know specifically what tier at this point. A very rough blockout of the... so this is on the opposite side to where the pool table was. And that's it for the interior at the moment. The video we showed at the start had some of engineering and the hangar bay.

Yeah, we don't just make things bigger for a laugh. It's generally for a reason. But on this occasion, we looked and went, actually, that's too big. We put all these things in and didn't think enough about the consequences of it. It was a hard battle to convince the artist to try and shrink it back down again. But gameplay-wise, it's significantly better.

I think there are going to be a lot of people that are very happy that we were able to keep it where it was supposed to be. So it still maintains the maneuverability, still maintains the performance, still maintains the crew complement, still maintains what they always expected of the ship.

I talked about the landing pad sizes. A lot of the ships we have in game, we try and get them into those landing pad sizes because of the complexities of spawning them in hangars. Like you see in Hurston and Lorville, we have specific hangars with a very specific size hole in the ceiling to get out of. When you're in landing mode, we need to fit into those sizes. When you're out of landing mode, you can go beyond it. So one of the things that was missing on that image was all the antennas and prongs sticking out the front, and some of the shielding on perhaps the back of the engines. We have to find interesting ways of getting the ship down into that volume for the landing state. Once you're out of that landing state, we can then bring those retractable prongs back out. Maybe the shielding on the engine can extend a little. Because I know some people were concerned that the back of the ship looked a bit squat because of the scaling we had to do. But that's purely to get it in that landing volume. And we might not do it. We may do it.

No, work on the Pisces starts next year in the current plan, given all the caveats that all things are subject to change. And it's purely in there because we know roughly what we want the Pisces to be, and the Merlin is a very close approximation to it. It's not going to be a big ship like a 300 series or a Cutlass or anything like that. It is the Carrack's snub ship. So it has some constraints on it. That bay on the top is designed for the Pisces. So a Pisces will fit in there. Nothing else is guaranteed to fit in there.

And then, of course, in the garage down below, an Ursa rover.

Yes.

And it's got the two ramps, the ramp on the front and the ramp in the back.

It's got the ramp on the front, and there will be another access point at the back.