Is it difficult to do hangar ready designs for concepts that are not fully fleshed out yet? I would constantly second guess myself with interface design on stuff like EWAR consoles.asked by Zodiac Medicae

Yes and no! While it is difficult to design interfaces for components that haven't been fleshed out yet, the happy answers for us is we don't need to. What we do is determine the actual physical sizes of the screen that are going to serve as the bed for the actual interaction. Then the team that is responsible for doing this interaction such as eWar or other things such as ship power management in any of the stations that we have, they have to work actually designing the systems and the interface along with the UI team for how it's going to work.We basically have a big blank canvas that we just need to position and make useful within the ship, so that part of it is rather easy, we design the space so the player can take that station and then the magic of the design system once it comes online simply shows up on that screen and the player is able to interact with that. So kind of roundabout answer to your question but I hope that serves to describe how we do our ship interior design when we're in the white box phase.

The two ships that I've worked on so far were the Starliner which had a whole other host of interior designs and layouts so we when through all those iterations, which you guys have hopefully seen; and then the next I'll hopefully be able to show them all the interior designs and layouts for the Caterpillar. All the interiors are crazy and I'm making sure they fit within the FPS metrics and I'm making sure that they are fitting for the hull of the ship, the exterior, making sure it just matches with the ship itself. It is a blank canvas. It sometimes gets a little overwhelming especially at starting: like what can I do with this?

There's going to be systems that we haven't designed yet because of the particular type of x the character's going to have but we know that we need to make a station for say doing cargo management. We know that we have a 16:9 space that we need to fill the screen with when the player is manning that station so we design that space. And when that particular gameplay is fleshed with its UI it will magically overlay onto that space that we've set aside for that particular mechanic.

Some of the stuff we talked about with multi-crew and everything and then working with the designers in the UK and working with Zane and everything for all the different screens, the seats, the functions of those seats, what each one does: all that stuff is really coming on board so hopefully when you guys actually get to play with more of the multi-crew stuff then you'll be able to see a lot more of the designs come alive and we'll keep pushing the envelope of what we want from intention of what Star Citizen is.

Good plug. When I say UI I really mean Zane!