In this episode of Star Citizen Live, Jared hosts six members of the Cloud Imperium to talk about ships: John, Dave, Corey, Ben, Mark, and Henri, all members of one of the teams working for the “ships” pillar led by John Crewe himself. This pillar includes between 80 and 90 peopleand works in parallel on 6 or 7 ships or vehicles.
On the form, the episode presents itself as a new format with very free discussions. The developers give their different points of view on general questions, which gives a good overview and detailed explanations.
Merchantman
The ship is under active development. The interior is in white box. The exterior is progressing well in the phase of greybox. A few decisions are pending due to other priority ships. It is one of the most complicated ships to make because it is an alien capital ship, with the particularity of having few reusable parts inside.
Spirit
The Cutter team will begin production of the Spirit, starting with the bomber version. The VIP version will be studied closely because it is the one that presents the most risk due to the limited space.
Lynx
The vehicle is still at the start of the recovery phase. white box.
SRV
The ship is progressing well and is in final art.
vulnerability
The ship is ready with some minor adjustments.
Hull-C
It is almost finished artistically. Its integration into the persistent universe depends on other developments like freighter redesigns or economy tweaks, as it is very different in scale from other ships.
gold standard
The team that completes the Corsair will switch to the Gold standard upgrade for Squadron 42 ships.
Recycling
Implementing recycling requires upgrading the entire damage system of all ships. This is work that could take several years to complete. They will not delay recycling, however. On the other hand, there will be some graphical imperfections on some ships.
Resource management
So far, they’ve made a pass on the zone system for air management, but haven’t yet implemented energy management.
What makes a good ship?
The developers consider that a good ship is a balance between its internal organization (if it has an interior), its performance and its appearance.
For internal organizationeverything must fit in and make sense, and you must be able to move about and find your way around easily.
The performance is not important for everyone and is not only that in combat. It is above all the fact of effectively fulfilling its function. The 890 Jump delivers on the luxury front.
The appearance must not only look good (even if it does not please everyone) but also coincide with the function and convey the style of the manufacturer.
Motivation
The team takes a lot of pride when a ship is produced because it’s a huge job.
A great satisfaction when all the elements come together. and even more when backers start using it and posting videos and images.
Ship creation process
In English “Vehicle Pipeline”, the process of creating vessels is broken down into six phases: initial design, concept, whitebox, greybox, LOD zero and final art.
Initially, the ship team receives a command as a general one-sentence concept. Example: a space food truck produced by Drake.
Then, during the phase of concept, developers work iteratively on the interior and exterior. Indeed, it is not a question of ending up with beautiful concept images, it is also necessary to anticipate all the complexity of the interior, the circulation, the functionalities… The position of the thrusters is also studied so that the ship is controllable. . During this phase, an artist can easily redraw plans, whereas in later phases, a whole team is working on the ship with different skills, and it is more expensive to reorient them.
During phase ‘white box‘, they quickly implement the different parts of the ship in the game engine to ensure that the layout and volumes are functional from a gameplay perspective. They also set up the thrusters, the doors, and make sure that all the parts of the ship are well attached to each other.
At the end of this phase, there is a review to verify that the ship is functional and to validate the transition to the next phase.
The stage of “greybox” set up the visuals.
The sentence “final art” is huge. It involves many teams. It was therefore divided in two, with an intermediate point called Zero LODs.
Indeed, the geometry of the ship must be adapted according to the distance of vision (LOD) in such a way that the more one looks at it from afar, the less it is complex and detailed, and therefore the less it uses resources. The ship is therefore produced at its maximum level of detail (zero LOD) then declined at different distances.
Continuous improvement
Vehicle feature and technology teams regularly take the time to create tools to improve the process. For example, they recently implemented the Thruster Group Debugger which makes it possible to verify that all thrusters have been implemented correctly, which saves a lot of time in the event of an investigation.
Last month, Mark and Corey worked on an update to the ship creation process, with a focus on the planning phase.
Prior to production, the team meets to estimate the complexity of the tasks. They use numbered cards. Everyone must estimate the time to do each of the tasks, such as the outside in white box. When there is no consensus, the session leader can question the extremes by inviting them to explain their estimate.
In the past, directors estimated work based on the size of the ship. As technologies and tools evolve, and new features are constantly added to ships, this estimate has proven to be unreliable. With the new process, the estimates are much more accurate.
They only completely produced one ship with the new process. It will be revealed soon. They also produced a variation of an existing ship. The Cutter was not completely made with this new process.
Realism
For a ship to be realistic from a thruster point of view, you need a big main thruster, back thrusters in opposition, and maneuvering thrusters well distributed around it. The Hornet is a good example of a ship that is realistic in this regard, while the Gladius is less so. To prevent all the ships from looking the same, there is therefore a slight tolerance for the placement of thrusters.
The fact that the inside of the ship actually fits outside is quite unique in the world of video games as in cinema.
Difficulties
Producing Star Citizen ships presents several challenges, of which the developers present give us a few examples.
First of all it is complicated to have an overview of all the tasks and all the elements of a large ship, as the complexity is great.
When snapping objects to each other, there can be orientation issues that are hard to detect before going through the game engine.
Ships that have unique features require specific work that is difficult to assess: the Scorpius turret, Redeemer thrusters, Hull series animation, are examples.