With the recent remodel of the Constellation taking 8-9 months, can you discuss any process improvements that were made during that time and how long would a similar ship take now? Will any further iterations be made? I.E Bottom turret, bar in the middle of the view screen. Hint hint. Also how long would you imagine the process to build out the Constellation variants take?asked by Dazc

That's a good question. I think we learned a lot on the Constellation so this is I think this is V3 of the Constellation right? But we've talked about many other ship pipeline discussions. Every time you do this, you learn more about it, you get better at it, you build more to kitbash and build those faster, so I think this last one was great Josh coons and Chris Smith were leading the way on the Constellation and it looks gorgeous.We did a lot of work for it out here. Daniel Kaminsky did all that weeks and weeks of UV's that we needed, he did a great job and it made a really cool looking ship. I think we learned even more on this round that is going into the pipeline document that's massive and I think it may even be shared out at this point as it's a huge process. Then will iterations be made? We're making a game, this is creative world of course iterations will be made right? We're going to limit those iterations so we can keep making other content, but yeah you always want to go back and improve things and make things better right?

Right because I mean when we started and I was around when there were making the original constellation. The first time you build something, I mean that's almost your prototype, it's the first time you figure out how everything works. Then you kind of go and start improving it and figuring out well this doesn't work, well this works well and you start figuring out what your quality bar is and then you start getting all these assets and start figuring out in the game engine what your limitations are or how far you can actually push it.Then that's how you can really start defining your actual pipeline and defining okay, this is the quality that we can actually do, this is the amount of timeframe that we actually need to do this in and how can we improve the process to make sure that it fits a production schedule. So the remodel of the constellation to me is the first time it was actually done once we figured out how we wanted to build ships.

Yeah and I think the other part is the tech changes. The first prototype, that first one, tech was a certain way and may things may have not changed too much because the foundations there, but you improve. The same thing happens on the tech side as the art side. So when the tech changes then the art needs to change how that works and it's a constant back and forth.

and to answer the question, bottom turret, more in the middle of the screen. We learned a lot of things flying those ships. We learned it's really easy to make a cool looking cockpit, but then all of a sudden you don't have that field of view that you want. One thing that we realized right after those first set of ships is people want to be able to see space in their cockpit and the bigger the cockpit glass area, the better and that's one thing that was unanimous amongst fans. We were able to start removing things from the middle of the screen and started giving yourself a better view.

To speak forwardly from the Constellation when we were doing the concept for the Crucible. We talked about it because it had that bar across the middle and were like "Hey we've already done this," You know, let's find a better way...

And the character sits down you're like, bar is right in his view.

Yeah, it's right in my eyes and the thing is Tony Zurovec called that out and we all were like you're right and it's just those constant reminders of improving.

And then how long, process to build out Constellation variants. So one thing about our variant is and building the ships is we realized we wanted to keep things very modular and reuse things and so instead of building one giant mesh, we built lots of little meshes that we piece together and and then we have these kits that we can pull from. So if you have a weapon rack it's not just a custom rack in a ship, it's a separate asset that was made and then it's placed into the ship so our ships were starting to build them much more modular, a lot of which we found was a huge advantage.When we do constellation variants we ask ourselves okay, "How much of this ship is actually custom and what part of the ship is actually custom and what parts are already available". SO because it's made by the same manufacture we'll be able to use kits that we've already made for these variants so it won't be 8-9 months to build a variant right? Because we're going to have the majority of it built and now that it's modular we'll be able to be like, "Alright here's the head of the ship or here's the cockpit of the ship, lets swap that out." Which we've already seen with some of our ships we've been doing and have these different areas or variant will be different modular pieces that we've swapping in and out so the times are much faster.

Totally, as far as exact time frames, we necessarily can't tell you for each ship what the time frame for each of those, but it does dramatically get lower on variants, especially if there's less changes obviously right, less changes the faster we can get it done. They generally..

If they're custom.

The more custom, the more we have to do to it. So generally faster, but not always the case so yeah with the Phoenix and with those we definitely want to get those out as fast as we can and I think we learned on the connie and we can take that onto the next variants, fo sho.