The developers cover the upcoming Endeavor sale, its modules, and the Caterpillar's swappable modules and detachable command cab. They also discuss the Crucible repair ship, the Starfarer, capital ships, the Arena Commander 2.0 versus "baby PU" distinction, and the new CCU system. Also covered: customer service backlog, skins, and upcoming livestreams.
Yeah, there are.
There are. And a lot of that's actually built into CryEngine, so it's easy for us to do down the road.
So look forward to that at some point.
Yeah, actually, I do. He and I are working on that. It won't be this week. It probably won't be next week. It's a pretty in-depth subject, but we're going to have something for you soon.
That reminds me, Pete Mackey asked to be involved in that.
That's part of why it's been delayed. So we want to get Pete, we want to get everybody, we want to make sure everybody's views are taken in and whatnot. So it takes a while to go around and get everybody's ideas.
I don't think so. I think the attach points are pretty different. Especially because the Endeavor modules are going to require you to be able to... they're all manned modules. You have to be able to walk in and get in them. I don't think they're interchangeable.
They're both MISC ships.
They're both MISC ships and similar styling. They are all manned modules. Hull Series are not designed to meet the power requirements of the modules. It's the difference between a station wagon and a supercarrier. That's a terrible analogy. I'm sorry.
It was supposed to be the Endeavor sale post, which we are still working on. Maybe today, maybe Monday. We'll let you know.
Yes, the Starfarer is very far along. Sandy's actually seen it because she was involved in the Starfarer for some of her Squadron 42 stuff. I would say it'll probably be the first of the really big ships to get into the game unless there's some sort of explosion that somehow destroys all the work we've already done. Yes, the Starfarer's coming.
It can't fix a broken heart. We'll be showing you the Crucible in the not too distant future. It looks like a bug. It's a detachable bay that is the size for Anvil single-seater ships. So you can take a Hornet or a Gladiator. It's sized to fit a Gladiator or smaller into the back bay so you can do work on the ship right there. For other ships, they can dock outside it and be repaired with an arm similar to the Canadarm on the shuttle. So it can fix a little bit of everything. It's specifically designed to repair military fighters. But also I know that the bay is detachable, so we're imagining situations where, oh, you don't want the repair bay, you want a mobile workshop or something that you attach to a capital ship, so you'll have different options.
We're probably going to run it through the start of CitizenCon, because we give folks notice late this time. We'll run a little extra time, because some folks want to budget for this sort of thing. So we'll run it through the 9th or 10th of October.
No updates. You'll see that with Multicrew, though, so it's not too distant future.
No, in the future all birds are extinct. Space bird flu? No, I'm sure there will be some degree of birds. Actually, that would be a good one for if you're a subscriber. We're currently taking suggestions for subscriber flair. I think a space bird would be pretty good. I will note that it is a lot easier if you come up with a space bird that doesn't move much.
There's a thread in which forum is it?
In the Subscriber's Den. I actually met with Behaviour yesterday, and they were liking some of the suggestions, and we have a few that we're going to go forward with. So keep adding to it. We'll keep looking.
I did like the idea of that Vandal mousepad. We have talked about it. Somebody said that in the subscriber livestream, which I thought was pretty cool. That'd be a Vandal mousepad or an alien ship mousepad.
Want me to work one up?
Yeah, we can do that.
Okay. We'll work up a Vandal mousepad. No promises. Just going to explore it. Check it out. See if it's cool.
There are many modules planned for the Caterpillar.
You'll be learning more about our Caterplans in the very near future. Randy will be Caterpilling it up in a future ATV segment.
On Ship Shape yesterday, you saw Lisa talk a little bit about just a small portion of the modules for the Caterpillar. There are quite a few more. I'm not going to say two, three, one, there's more. I don't know the number off the top of my head right now, but there are more.
Bigger, haven't you seen the Idris? I think a lot of the cap ship stuff will come along once the Idris is ready to go.
Yeah, in fact, I think Chris was talking about this on the livestream the other day. About how now that tech issues have been resolved, you'll see more capital ship stuff. And they're all huge.
TL;DRThey are separate things: the large-world baby PU comes first, while Arena Commander 2.0 comes later as a refined mini-game and is described as no longer especially significant.
Really what you need to know is that they're different things. Large world is what we're calling the baby PU or the exoverse; it has a couple different names. They haven't settled on one perfect one yet. Arena Commander, Star Marine, we specifically built them into the world so they're games within a game. The baby PU is more of a giant stage for us to play with stuff. All of Star Citizen's parts are supposed to go in there and you'll watch them break and be fixed in real time. Whereas Arena Commander 2.0 will come a little bit once we've perfected the multi-crew stuff in the exoverse or whatever we end up calling it; it can then be, okay, well this is the mini-game in the Star Citizen universe where you use it. So I would say AC 2.0 is not especially significant anymore, it's just something that we will refine from the baby PU. But the great thing about the baby PU is it lets us do things like, okay, here's our mining mechanic, let's chuck that into the live server and see how it works. Here's our salvage, here's our exploration. Whereas that wouldn't necessarily make sense in Arena Commander, which is supposed to be an arena shooter.
So short version, you will see the baby PU large world map before you see Arena Commander 2.0. So you'll get to fly around in that before Arena Commander 2.0 comes out. They're now separate things. Similar, but separate. Related.
Yes. I believe in fact that was part of the original subscriber promise.
It's already in the game.
A version of it. It'll be like the news, like proper news in bars is what we hope.
I hadn't even thought, we're going to need to shoot some new Empire Reports soon.
Yes, we are running out of our pre-recorded Empire Reports. For those of you who are curious how that all works, we shoot all the Empire Reports at once. This isn't a thing where we shoot it week after week after week. That's why Sandy's wearing the same clothes and has the same hair and Alan is also the same.
Not yet. But obviously we'll either expand the hangar or you'll go to a separate area to access the ship.
No. It's just that it's in the works.
That's basically the answer to most of those update questions, guys. That's why I skipped most of them.
Honestly, if you see a ship right now, it's done. If you don't, it's in the works. And that'll probably always be the case. We'll try to let you know when they're in white boxing, gray boxing, tech setup.
We don't sit on a whole lot of anything. When it's ready to go, we push it out to you guys.
No, the only stuff we really keep behind the black curtain is Squadron 42.
But CitizenCon, maybe peek behind the curtain a little bit.
It's when the answers are available to give. It's not like we have the information, we're just not giving it to you. They're still working on figuring out most of designing the game. When we have the answers, believe me, we'll share it with you. So that's why we can't give you a time frame on when you're going to get stuff.
It basically was going through the different modules, making sure that the modules will be all set up and swapped. So there's tons of plans, tons of ideas for different functionalities. And basically, I was reading through a lot of the posts that everybody had on the Caterpillar forums and everything, to make sure that we're trying to give you guys everything that you've asked for functionality-wise. But right now, we've actually been solidifying exactly what we see the Caterpillar doing, and then working with Ben and working with a lot of the people that have had their eyes on the Caterpillar for a little bit. Hopefully soon I can actually show you guys more details, kind of like what we did with the Starliner. So I hope you guys enjoy.
I didn't get to participate in it, but I heard it went well. We're doing more.
There was one this afternoon, I believe.
That's right. So the testing continues.
Because that's awesome.
Well, besides it being amazingly awesome, think of it as kind of a safety feature where, oh man, we're getting attacked, we need to go down, and then that thing just detaches and breaks away, kind of like the tail of a lizard or something like that. But it's more of a safety feature.
We have a few, very few.
A few, some of the commercials are in 4K. I don't think anyone wants to see my face in 4K, so we'll probably stick with the lower resolution cameras we have now.
They still do 1080p. It's still high quality.
We actually have talked about switching to a Blackmagic camera setup. Hennessey is pursuing that.
But even then, we would film in 4K and then downsize to 2K.
The anniversary livestream on November 19, and then a Christmas livestream, I think, December 16. Those dates aren't quite locked, but there will be livestreams.
We get our tickets to Force Awakens.
We have to wait for the pre-sale to go out first, and then we'll decide when we're doing our livestream.
I cannot. I don't know if anyone here knows, but I don't.
Yeah, I don't know the answer to that either.
My guess would be that you take off in your ship and enter the baby PU versus using the Arena Commander.
Give me some time to ask around. Check back next week. We'll see if we can have an answer for you. Because I'd like to know. And so would you.
No, I think it's any ship that is available for sale at the time. So during a sale like the concept sale, you'll have all those options. It should help everybody all around.
So if you can buy the ship at that time, you can CCU to it.
Now we may have a thing where you can't prevent yourself from having a valid package. So if you only have an Aurora, you can't upgrade it to an Idris.
And that's part of the continuing work on the CCU system. We have to make sure that you can't accidentally destroy your packages through it.
So the difference between them and the more limited skins like the Aurora skins we've gotten is they have to apply to all the ships. So we've been waiting for the tech to be available on all the ships. So we're still waiting. But a skin is actually a pretty easy thing. It takes about a day of developer time. So once we get to the point where we can do those skins, it's just scheduled. Not happening yet.
We're coming up on a weekend, so if you write in over the weekend, it'll maybe be Tuesday when you hear back.
But we can say that the great customer service backup has been soundly defeated, thanks largely in part to Ms. Gardner here.
2,000 tickets.
She got so fed up with it that she spent her entire weekend, the weekend before last, just doing tickets.
And sending us emails over the weekend. For the parts that we can comment on or whatnot, she killed it that weekend. The UK comes in before us, and their Monday starts nine hours before ours does, and CS got in that day, and I was still up at night, and Henry messaged me and goes, what happened to the queue? And I'm like, Sandy happened to the queue.
So some of the Caterpillar questions I've been seeing go by. The Caterpillar modules, each individual module will have its own function. And then based on what functions you actually want for your ship and the modules you swap out, it will change the functionality of the entire ship. So that way you can have whatever type of ship you want, within reason. But basically we're just trying to give you guys a lot of customization and just have fun with it. Hopefully next week, or whenever we actually get a chance to show you guys some more stuff on the Caterpillar, we'll be able to actually see more of what's planned for it.
Yes. It's all in the plan.
Not couches. We hate couches.
It's a limited ship, so we only bring it back for special events. At the pace we're going, we'll probably have a Caterpillar variant/module sale at some point. But the base ship itself, look for the anniversary, that sort of thing. By the way, it's still asymmetrical. There's been some intense internal debate about that.
The individual parts of it are symmetrical, and then when they're together, it becomes asymmetrical, because it's necessary for thruster placements.
The cab is still off to the side. That's the important part for me.
I didn't want to lose the profile at all. It's one of my favorite profiles.
I don't believe so, no.
Please don't inundate us, but yes, we could do a couple of those.
It's especially hard when they come at the time of an event. That really impacts our response time.
It's not a formal system. Please don't abuse the system. It's something nice that we can do for you guys. It's one of the many things that separates our customer service from standard customer service, and I'm totally thrilled that we do it.
By the way, shout out to the amazing CS team out there in the UK dealing with all this. Allie, Patrick, Michael, Henry, Amanda, you guys.
They're pretty awesome. I was talking to them this morning and we're looking at hiring some new CS folks there. So I was interviewing people early this morning because it's lunch time for them.