You guys have focused a lot on the ship pipeline in the past. I was wondering if non-artistic elements of the PU undergo such rigor? For instance, storylines and mission generation: is there a pipeline of writers -> gameplay designers -> programmers for such assets or is it more typically ad hoc?asked by KinShadow

So first off the ship pipeline is not just art. The majority of it is art because that is what tends to take the most time but that includes everything from 'I have an idea for a ship' to in your game working in Arena Commander and eventually the full Star Citizen game. So the tricky thing with ships is: ships are going to permeate the entire game so we have to have the PU director weigh in, we have to have everyone who touches every module weigh in to make sure that the way we are doing ships now is going to work with everything that they have in mind for their chunk of the game. For that reason I think it requires a lot more checks and balances for ships, however, everything has it's own pipeline. A pipeline is a fancy way to say process of how things get done.

Or assembly line.

Yeah, so there is a pipeline for everything whether or not it has been formalized and it consists of people passing off different kinds of work and stopping and making sure the appropriate people are reviewing along the way.

A good example of that is we have a character pipeline, we have an animation pipeline. What we like to do between each phase – for example we'll use the ship one – is after we are done with the whitebox or before it goes to graybox or any tech set up there is a series of checklists that we have to go through, did we do this? Did we complete this? Did this person look at this? Is the lead or supervisor getting ready to sign off on it? Does production sign off on it? To mention Lisa's checks and balances there are a series of protocols in place to make sure certain aspects are touched upon. Same thing with the character pipeline. Same thing with the Arena Commander pipeline. Anything design or engineering related. If it's code then we have our code leads peer review the code before it gets checked into the game. So there are processes in place for all these and all the pipeline is, like Lisa said, is a process from start to finish. What does it look like? What steps are we going through? and is it going to be the same thing every single time we design that same feature? So every ship will go through that ship pipeline, every character will go through that character pipeline.

And the more areas something touches or the more modules it touches, the bigger it gets. There's a lot of talk about the ship pipeline, so many people review it and it touches so many things, that is why we talk about it so much. There is a little more to talk about than certain other pipelines but everything has a pipeline.