Hey Citizens!  This is the transcript for Around the ‘Verse – Episode 5.  Thanks to /u/Shadow703793 for giving us access to his collection of transcripts.

Weekly Review

• 200,000 backers now have access to Arena Commander multiplayer
• Patch 12.5 will add a new Vanduul enemy
• 10FTC logo competition still continues. One week left.
• Gamescom tickets are almost sold out

Customer Service Report

• Personalized Star Citizen dogtags
• Star Citizen playing cards
• Towels!!!!!!!!
• Jukebox in hangar tomorrow

News from Around the Verse

Arena Commander Team

• Bug fixes. Team is working hard on fixing the multiplayer lag and issues.
• Patch 12.5 should hopefully address most of these issues
• UK team is working issues with issues related to AMD CPUs and other graphics glitches
• Work continues on New Horizons game mode
• Damagestates for the Cutlass is in progress
• The Mustang is being modeled in engine
• Vanduul Swarm update with 12.5

Squadron 42 Team

• Finished script review for mission 4
• Working on the tech for more advanced and complex missions
• Also reviewing new technology for character customization and working with Warhorse
• Shuin Mining base interior is now being worked on

Persistent Universe Team

• Tony Zurovec is visiting the team in Canada organizing the next push for PU development
• Team in Austin is drilling down on v2.0 of the game development and design documentation that will cover missions, mining system, contraband, economy, etc.
• Created miniature star systems to simulate the first 5 systems

Ship Development

• UK team has been working on an armada of ships, including the Gladiator, Gladius, Javelin and other UEE military ships that’ll be used in SQ42
• Began concept work on F8- Lighting and new ground vehicle we’ll see soon
• Austin and Behavior is working on 3D concept work for 890 JUMP, Carrack, Herald, Caterpillar, and Vanduul Collector
• Working on bringing Constellation and Cutlass variants in to CryEngine

Platform Team

• Turbulent is working on online store and leaderboard

Bug Smashers

Bug with the Freelancer display model (hangar item flair) flickering when LOD changes were made because the LOD was getting calculated twice in separate places and interfering with the rendering

Dan Tracy (Lead Technical Designer) Interview

Can you shed some light on the challenges of getting the multicrew ships in to the DFM?

Dan says that a lot of the things range from multiplayer aspect of getting people to the ship to the physics aspect. With the larger ships, the physics is a problem in relation to network delay which can cause things to not all render at the same time. To solve this, CIG will be using a separate interior physics grid for each individual ship. The larger world physics grid will then handle the ships, asteroids, etc in the universe. Another problem is the implementation of the various state machines needed to carry out actions within the ship. For example, the state machine will have to check if a door is locked or not before it opens the door when you press the door open button. Since a lot of people will be doing lots of different actions in the ships, the game has to make sure that they don’t conflict with each other.

PS: This was my question; glad it got asked :D

I’m interested in the technology that will allow us to walk around our ships as they are flying without the game physics causing the ships to run us over. Can you explain how this works, and how it’s coming along?

This was answered as part of the previous question in regards to how the interior physics grid will be separate from the world physics grid.

How do you plan to realize the initial (without player control) landing sequence from orbit down to planet with regards to loading the surface, visibility of the surface, weather? Will we always have cloudy weather on every planet?

Dan says one of the ideas is that streaming in assets as you get closer to the planet. Think of this as LOD in game time.

In regards to massive objects like planets, moons, massive asteroids, and stars in particular, what kind of scale can we expect to see in the final game? Is the planet from “Broken Moon” AC map a good measure? Also, is there any news on the subject of planetary orbits (ie. Will planets/moons etc. orbit it’s systems star or will they be static).

Dan says that the size of the planets still isn’t completely determined yet. The move to 64bit will help with increasing size of the systems and other items. However, even with the 64bit system in place, the real world scale still can’t be replicated so the systems in the game will be scaled down. As for planetary orbits, the biggest worry is what happens when you change from orbital and space physics to planet physics. This is a problem CIG is working on.

Surprise Announcement:  Gladius will be available in the ship viewer and on sale for a week.

Nehkara

Founder

Writer and inhabitant of the Star Citizen subreddit.