The team covers which ships are in development across offices (Caterpillar, Bengal, Reliant, Starfarer, Xi'an Scout) and the Redeemer's rework. They also discuss Free Fly balancing, HOTAS prototype status, Vulkan and VR plans, Gamescom plans, hoodies and star map shipping.
I know this isn't a question portion, but I saw somebody ask about the star maps. We originally listed them as folded for the standalone ones. They're going to be rolled, because we had so many people saying, can't you send them rolled? So yes, we can, and we're going to do that.
The next step for the Redeemer is going to be a bunch of interior work. We need to build out the bays for the ores and so on. I'm thinking the Reclaimer, not the Redeemer. No, the Redeemer just needs a rework for the more modern ship system.
We've revised the ship pipeline since it was created in The Next Great Starship, and we have to revise it for the ship components.
Think of the Aurora, the 300, the Hornet: the legacy ships need another look. The Redeemer's essentially in that group, it just never got as far as they did.
No, I'm not. I'm still part of the production team under senior producer Eric Davis, while we are still looking for a marketing and community coordinator or manager.
We may be very close to a community manager, but Darian is a producer.
I'm just more here giving some support and helping them out, taking some of the load on stuff that's been piling up a bit.
Yes. We will roll that out very soon, actually. It's done, and in the next few weeks, I would say, we'll have an announcement when it happens.
TL;DRNo Gamescom schedule yet, but it is hoped soon; instead of one big presentation there will be several events spread over the whole show.
They're working out venues and travel schedules and whatever else goes into that, booth setups. We hope soon. I know they've been signing contracts seemingly every couple days. As soon as we have the schedule, we'll give it to you. But we're spacing things out over the whole event, so there will be something for you no matter when you choose to attend. And it should be good. I know people were confused because we're not doing the same giant event; that is more to do with where we want the game to be then than anything else. Normally we get to six weeks out and we focus on some particular feature set that we want to show off because it's exemplary of everything we're doing. This time we're just doing ordinary production all the way up to it, and we're going to show you where the game is on the floor and at some private events with our backers.
So instead of one big party, we're going to have several smaller parties.
We say smaller, but probably just as big as the other party.
It just won't be a big presentation.
The only difference is we're not the ones setting up the stage and putting Chris Roberts on it. He'll be doing stuff at Gamescom, but he will be at all these parties talking. We're all going to be there. Are you going to be at Gamescom? I don't know if production sends people or not.
I don't know. I haven't heard anything. If production is going to be out there, it's probably going to be Eric, or someone from the UK office probably. Many of us will be there.
I believe it's just the base version for the Reliant. It is just the base version for the Reliant. In fact, we're shooting an interview about that later today, aren't we?
We are attempting to put together a new Ship Shape series, a seven-part series detailing the building of the Reliant throughout the entire ship pipeline. So if I can pull it off, it'll be cool. And if I can't, it'll be less cool.
We are discussing that. We'll do something. It's just a little too early to figure out the logistics for that yet.
I will say one of the dumbest things we did on Star Citizen was the first CitizenCon, where we scheduled several hundred people to have tours throughout the day of the event.
I think it was like 60 or 70, and we had them in groups, and the Austin office was so tiny at that point; it was really just a basement that was like four small rooms. So we just had a constant line.
Meanwhile, everybody else is crunching to get the demo done.
TL;DRSeveral ships are in development at once across the different offices, with specific ships named per office at various stages, but no single "next" ship is identified.
We actually work on more than one ship at a time.
Yes, there's seven or eight in development at the same time right now, depending on which office you're at.
So can we share which offices are working on which ships right now?
Well, that's what we did last week. No, we can. The Caterpillar is going on here: Gurmukh is concepting some interior stuff, and they're working on some design issues on that, Gurmukh and Calix. The Bengal is in active development over in the UK right now. That's taking a whole lot of resources. We've got the Reliant getting flight and hangar ready, here in LA. The Starfarer just finished up. In fact, that's another thing I did this week I forgot about: we did Starfarer tours. The UK was very proud of that. The Crucible is very, very, very early. I know they're doing the repair mechanics stuff, but I didn't know if they were actually doing the Crucible itself. I'm trying to think what else. The Xi'an Scout is finishing up its flight trials.
I saw some images. Chris Smith was working on the decals and the dirt overlays and stuff to make the skin of it much more textured. It looks very cool.
Austin has started back up on the Herald, I believe. And then a whole bunch of stuff in the UK, a lot of Squadron stuff. They're working on the Vanduul ships, the Scout. The constant edits to the Idris. We did see, last week on Friday, we do an internal studio show and tell where all the different teams submit their coolest stuff from the previous month, and our producer gets up and shows it all off, and Justin puts together a video. And so we saw some of the footage from the first multiplayer test theaters, and it looks really, really fun. It's just a huge moving FPS level. It is beautiful. And we're not trying to keep that stuff from you. In fact, we're trying to get clearance to release as many of those videos as we can. A lot of times it's cutscenes from Squadron and stuff we can't share. But there was some fun stuff in this one that I think Chris will let us show.
We already discussed that earlier.
We will go back to Where's My Spaceship. This week, there was no real change in who was doing what, so we did a little office tour instead. We'll change the topic occasionally when we have something else to talk about.
Basically, we don't want to do 10 minutes every single week saying the exact same thing. These statuses don't change on a week-to-week basis, guys. It takes longer than that to build a spaceship, even a virtual one.
I would say so. We're constantly tweaking and changing. All sorts of changes there. Like we said before, they like to make global changes to everything: slow down combat, speed up combat. It's all part of the game development, to see how things work.
I think that's one of the reasons for this Free Fly going on right now: we're going to get balancing information. If you take 10,000 players and give them access to every ship, you'll pretty quickly notice which ones they gravitate towards. And it's good information.
I don't have anything. That's one of those ones we give to Turbulent, and they have 900 other things to do before it. Sometimes these things are not as easy as they sound. I would love to have that button right now, but I don't know for sure; I imagine it's some sort of database rework or something they don't like. But we'll get an update for you.
I can, but I'm not going to. You'll see it when it's ready. It's going to be a surprise. It'll be worth it, though.
The Loremaker's Guide to the Galaxy will return. It's a segment for the entire lore team, though. That's Cherie, that's Will, that's Adam, that's Dave, that's Ben. So you'll see it return with a rotating cast of hosts. Cherie was fantastic on it. Her knowledge of lore and science really made this segment, so we're very happy.
We've done segments in the past where we had to tape what the person was saying to the front of the camera because they had no idea, but no, she knows her stuff.
I think it's not playing music right now. It's bugged. If Ben knows about it, then it means it's already been bugged.
It's part of our tech debt, which is the bugs your crew makes when making changes, but that don't break the game.
Something else that's super close to hangar ready: the Xi'an Scout is the other one that's very close. Well, it's in the hangar right now. Along with some of the Squadron stuff, the Argo, and some stuff that people aren't as excited about.
Yes, we all had a fantastic time, so we will do it again for sure.
It was really fun. I had a really good time.
I don't have any thoughts. I have seen the support. I know that's one of those things Chris will look at and decide, totally outside my area. It's tech stuff, which is largely over our heads. Every time there's a cool piece of technology out there, you can believe that Chris Roberts is on it.
Basically, guys, it's important to remember we are the community team. Questions about Vulkan, questions about DirectX 12, questions about VR, stuff like that, that's for the programmers and the technicians and the designers and engineers to work out. So things like 10 for the Chairman, things like 10 for the Developers, that's the place for those kinds of questions. And we included the question about Vulkan in the most recent 10 for the Chairman. It's because we're not the folks for that.
Because the answer will be just like the Vulkan one.
No change to the plan for VR. It is a thing. It will happen. But it's not going to happen today. You guys saw we did an initial implementation of the Oculus dev kit way back in the early hangar. And just the process of making the game, and the fact that VR is constantly changing, made that implementation break pretty quickly. And the question becomes: we love VR, we will have VR in the final game, but do we want to devote resources to fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it, instead of just waiting to the end and saying, okay, here's the final implementation? VR is something we're confident in; it's not a technical challenge, we just need to do it at the right time.
Nope, we are waiting for our prototype. We all followed that stuff with Saitek a couple weeks ago, and everybody thought the company was going out of business. It turned out they weren't at all. But we took away from that. We said, okay, we're not going to sell it until we have gotten the production prototypes here and we have given them the thumbs up. So once we get to play what you will play, then we'll kick off the pre-sale.
Yes. Actually, Sandy and I are working on that right now. We have a request in with our manufacturer to source the same kind of fabric, because we love the fabric. So, yeah, we're looking at doing a Squadron version of that.
That'll make more sense than Drake.
And we're also working on some ship manufacturer patches. Each of them will have a subscriber-exclusive patch.
I have heard that Chris Roberts hates insectoid races. I don't know.
No formal presence at PAX East, but some of our devs may be there. Not for Star Citizen.
I thought that was in the most recent patch. Did that get broken again?
I thought they fixed that.
Yeah, that was actually in 2.2. Maybe it broke again. But I actually saw a video of somebody demonstrating it: 'Look, Ma, I can walk.' That was the name of the video.
See, in Star Citizen, you don't need to walk before you can run.
I was in Florida. I came out here to go back to school for games and character art at Gnomon. And then I came here.
I've been doing a lot of work with the concept art company One Pixel Brush for the past few years. I've been around in LA for the past few years. Before that, I worked as a matte painter for a little while at The Mill, was in VFX, some other freelance work. But yeah, sunny SoCal, I've been here for a little while and I like it quite a bit.
Anything anybody would have seen?
I've been doing a lot of work for Activision the past few years, so Call of Duty titles, things like that.
Secret stuff. I don't know if I'm allowed to say what I've been working on. I would love to talk more about it, but I don't know yet. I should have prepared to see if I could talk about it before I came in here.
He's been working on Squadron 42 stuff. One of the things you've been working on is that Mark Hamill flight suit that was on the cover of that magazine, right?
Yes. That was completed. Maybe I'll go back for a little bit more revisions now that we changed the material system. So that's going to look a lot better and should actually run in the game a lot smoother. We've been working on a lot of memory issues and that kind of stuff, making everything as optimal as possible.
Character stuff. Well, I guess Shane's working on just a casual jumpsuit that's going to be used for the Navy. I guess the deck crew could have already been released, but we're switching up some of their outfits to be more of a jumpsuit-variant related thing. I don't know what Justin's working on.
I have no idea if it's a thing. We just started.
They just started this week. So we wanted to throw them to the wolves and just say hi.