Practice English Speaking&Listening with: Around the Verse: Episode 2.19

Closed Captioning provided by the Imperial News Network.

Sandi Gardiner (SG): Hey everybody, welcome to Around the Verse Im Sandi Gardiner.

Ben Lesnick (BL): Im Ben Lesnick.

SG: This week in the ATV Interview, Jared sits down with Senior Art Manager Adrian Banninga

to discuss art sourcing on Star Citizen.

BL: And in this week's ATV Behind the Scenes the bug smasher himself, Mark Abent returns

to talk about Dataforge, the new tool were using to improve Star Citizen.

SG: But first, everyone wants to know what is happening with 2.2, Ben, tell us the deal

with 2.2

BL: 2.2 is almost there. Were getting ready for a PTU release, we have a number of candidates

in process. As soon as internal QA signs off well be able to put it online. We dont

have a release date to give out yet, but it is in the not too distant future. Keep checking

the Comm Link for updates and we will have it out as soon as we can

SG: And with patch 2.2 comes our dedicated Squadron 42 packages amongst other things

BL: Yes the much valued packaged split has happened. The Squadron 42 package will launch

alongside 2.2. So if you want to pick up just the base Star Citizen thats available now

and you can pick up the Squadron 42 addon for that. As soon as 2.2 goes live we will

make Squadron 42 based packages available as well.

SG: This weekend Star Citizen was featured on the BBC series: Click. With footage

shot in the LA and UK offices. I received emails from cousins in Australia, friends

in Ho Chi Minh. It was quite exciting

BL: I heard from people all over the place too. It was a very fair report, I thought

it gave a good picture of Star Citizen and what were really doing here. And I got

to fly the Hornet from Wing Commander that you see where hes blowing up Kilrathi ships

so Im very proud of that

SG: And Hennessy was very happy that they spelled his name correctly. It was good, check

out the version.

[Video]

Marc Cieslak: A crowdfunded title thats raised well, an enormous amount of money.

They decided to do something quite unusual. They have their very own television studio

here.

A small team here produce online videos almost daily. Filling in the audience on how the

game developments going.

Jared Huckaby: Crowdfunding can be a scary thing. Crowdfunding is still a relatively

new frontier and were pretty much at the front of it

Tom Hennessy: Everything is geared towards the idea that were pulling back the curtain

and were letting you get the inside look on everything.

SG: And the week before that we had our first official Bar Citizen in Montreal, which was

very cool with our friends from Turbulent and Behavior.

BL: Yeah if you arent in Frankfurt, Austin, Manchester, or Los Angeles, Montreal is the

place to be to meet Star Citizen Developers. It sounds like they had a good event. Jared

and I actually got to go in via Skype and answer questions so thanks for having us and

hope you all have a good time.

SG: Now let's check in with our studios around the world in this weeks News From Around The

Verse.

News From Around The Verse

Los Angeles

Eric K. Davis (EKD): Hey everybody and welcome back to LA im Eric Kieron Davis with

Adrian Banninga (AB): Adrian Banninga.

ED: And thank you for joining us this week.

AB: Youre welcome.

ED: We asked Adrian to come up for many reasons, some well cover right now other will be

covered in a longer Around the Verse piece you did this week right?

AB: Yes.

EKD: You got to get a long chat with those guys.

AB: I know, I know.

EKD: They snagged you in the office, in the studio and talked to you.

AB: Yeah.

EKD: Awesome. so we got a few updates for you. A couple of things around the studio.

One were working hard on the Caterpillar concepts. There were some additional concepts

we need to do for the CAterpillar. Weve talked about this in the past. Gurmukh has

been working feverishly on this. Theyre coming together really, really well.

On the design side were also working on the Design Doc. We talked about shields, I

think last week, were still working on shields, Chad has been working heavily on

that. Weve also got some folks working on some of the character work. Weve got

some character concepts happening as well as some BPUs and some other character work

with our Concept Artist Jeremiah and Omah.

I was out I decided to break my hand last Friday so..

AB: Always a wise decision!

EKD: Yeah, I thought it was a good idea to break my hand. But now that im back in

the office were digging some of that stuff up and getting to work on a couple of them,

so thats it from LA. Again Im Eric.

AB: And Im Adrian.

Austin & Foundry 42 UK

Tom Johnson: Howdy yall welcome to the UK. For those of you who are a little bit

confused right now, Jakes actually visiting the office over here at the moment so we thought

it would be fun to bring him along and say hello, how are you doing?

Jake Ross: Hey guys! Welcome from sunny England! Im here visiting the UK all week and meeting

up with a few of the Producers out here. Its nice to meet everyone in person and, people

you see and hang out with over Skype all the time but you never actually get to meet in

person. So its a nice thing to get to see people face to face. Definitely a good thing.

Were talking a little bit about scheduling and stuff, with Tom and lots of interesting,

intriguing Microsoft project work. Im sure you are all very interested to hear about.

Then talking with the Live Production Team, talk about each, as we plan for each release

theres lots of production practices that go into that. Wed have to be really in

sync between the European time zones and the U.S. time zones. So theres lots that go

into that.

TJ: Yeah and those handovers!

JR: They take a while to put together, but theyre definitely important to know what

blockers are still, still existing and that kind of thing.

TJ: I think these kinds of meets where face to face you do find you get a lot more out

of it than you just being able to sit alongside each other and go over some stuff and that

JR: Yeah you think of things when youre wandering through the office and you see somebody

and youre like Oh yeah I need to talk to that guy. You dont get that visual

reminder when you work remotely, so its nice to have that.

TJ: So what else is going? Youre obviously still going over things you were chucking

in last

JR: Yeah right. So we got updates for persistence and shopping. So persistence were talking

with Turbulent now, talking about their part that they are going to play in that. So Jason

Elee our Lead Server Engineer is talking with those guys about creating a stateful communication

between the platform and the back end server, so thats what were..Talking through

that and coming up with a schedule coming up with estimates for that work. And for shopping

were settling on a pricing formula. So well have our clothing in Casaba Outlet

each item has to have a cost associated with it. So were creating a pricing formula

and then determining what exactly were going to be putting in that store when it

first releases. We have a few different clothing options plus variants for each of those for

each of those options.

TJ: You started the item and then you..

JR: Yeah you know, we got Zoot Suit, all that

TJ: Skeltons gold shirt

JR: Skeltons is a must have, I dont know if thats going to be in the first

release but its in the backlog!

TJ: Sounds good. Ok that just about wraps it up for us here in the UK, well see you

in the verse

JR: See you guys.

Frankfurt

Brian Chambers: Hey you guys Brian Chambers from the Frankfurt office. This week so far

were basically gathering all the information that we have from the meetings with Erin and

Chris and a few guys, last week. When they come out here and we have focused time with

them it really does pretty much involve all disciplines to some extent. If I read through

some of the meetings just to give you guys a little bit, some of the insider, some of

the stuff we discussed, but I cant tell you everything we discussed.

But we met with Cinematics going over their art schedule, the support now thats going

to go back and forth with the UK and Frankfurt looked at progress of certain blocked out

scenes, we talked about sign off process and protocol and how were going to do that

to get the sign off. Core engine, we looked at the general, the whole schedule for 2016.

Chris sat down with other TDs and really structured it out, put priority in what we

should focus on and what take a little bit less priority and so on.

A lot into the procedural tech with the planets and how were driving that, how we need

to build the art, what those standards are. Other stuff we cant talk about and yes

im reading through a list right now. Also some discussion on asteroids and some of stuff

we have going on there and how those are scalable. Thats going to be interesting once we get

that into players hands to beat that up.

AI, a lot of discussion on AI. The AI in the game is pretty thick and were really kind

of pushing boundaries on AI interactions. How you can play with the AI, how you can

converse with the AI, how they interact, positively and negatively. We have a lot of terminology

were throwing around internally, but I dont want to give it all away cause

im not quite sure what was put out there yet or not but lets just say there was

a lot of discussion that went over AI, characters, ships and really looking at the overall AI

architecture and clarifying what, for PU and what those needs are and Squadron 42 and what

those needs are, and what overlaps and whats the best most, way to build up these systems

that are mature that will be scalable.

Production I think we talked a little bit about over the last week, we went over the

head count or growth of what were going to be, where we see ourselves moving forward

in the next six months and in a year. Also looking at evaluating what disciplines we

have and how were staffed and where we may need more and son on. Design went over

a lot looking at mission systems. But based on Squadron 42 we also had Tony out here from

Austin so did a lot of digging in on PU. Looking at the pre-fab systems, the piping prototype.

Had Todd Pappy in here a few weeks ago talking about that. So that was far enough along to

be able to look at and get an understanding of whats going on there. Also dug in through

high level PU plans, FPS plans and so on. Reviewed effects that are currently going

along and how thats progressing and so on and so on and so on. So were getting

a lot of traction here, its been cool as the teams building up were kind of finding

out place a little bit more and getting some more structure, which is great cause it

adds clarity to the team and so on.

As always again thank you to all the backers, its been great here and good response about

the team we have here in Frankfurt cause we really dig what were doing and its

good to see people liking what we do as well. So globally this an awesome team between the

UK and AUstin and LA and everybodys really kind of coming together, which is really cool.

So thanks and see you next week.

Back to studio

SG: As always a big thank you to all of our studios from around the world.

BL: Next up Jared sat down with Senior Art Manager, Adrian Banninga, to talk about Star

Citizen.

SG: Take it away guys.

ATV Interview with Adrian Banninga

Jared Huckaby (JH): Thanks guys on this weeks ATV Interview were sitting down with Senior

Art Manager, Adrian Banninga. Adrian, how you doing man?

Adrian Banninga (AB): Hi, nice to meet you.

JH: Hi, good. I didnt slaughter that did I?

AB: No.

JH: Alright, thanks.

AB: Acceptable.

[both laugh]

JH: Now Adrian you are the Senior Art Manager?

AB: Yes.

JH: And you work out of the UK office?

AB: Yes.

JH: So start us off, just tell us real quickly what does the Senior Art Manager do?

AB: Basically the guy that helps the Art Director make sure the Art team is running smoothly,

and that the tasks that are being set for them are being done, and also that Production

doesnt try and kill them.

JH: [laughing] Okay. Weve had a few close calls over the years.

AB: Yeah.

JH: Its alright. What kind of things do we use art outsourcers for?

AB: It depends what our needs are basically. We use them for ship concepts, characters,

animations, creating some ships weve done the past as well: just whatever are art needs

are at the time.

JH: Okay. And for right now weve got art outsourcers working on the Esperia Prowler?

AB: Well the Prowler is not in the works right now, because thats kind of on hold. Weve

decided to go back and we needed to pick up where the Tevarin race was first.

JH: Okay.

AB: Get that concepted properly. You know weve adapted the ships pipeline so that

were doing things a little bit more structured than I think we were used to in the past.

So getting the race all figured out, getting their style guides done, is one of the first

things we need to do before concept a ship that they made. And from then on we just move

forward with more ships from that race.

JH: Gottcha. Whos working on the Tevarin now?

AB: Weve got Mark Skelton directing Chris Olivia to work on the initial Tevarin race

concepts. Thats happening right now.

JH: Gottcha.

AB: And then once we have a rough design down that will go Chris to obviously look at and

pick the ones that he likes. And then once we have that well take it further and refine

the shapes more.

JH: Gotcha. And then when were happy with the Tevarin, thats when we take the Prowler

and assign it to an art outsourcer?

AB: Well thats when well basically when the Tevarin race has been defined then our

Art Team, our Concept Team, will go and define the style guide for them. Like what kind of

clothing do they wear, what kind of designs do they have, what is the architectural structure

that they have in their civilisation based off the lore the writers come up with? And

then from that well go and design the ship. Yeah.

JH: Cool. And youre here visiting for the week, from the UK? What are you here in LA

to do?

AB: Go over the outsourcing that we currently have going, see how we can improve the process

that we have, keep up with the reviews that we need to do with the outsourcers that are

doing stuff for us, and also assess any future needs of outsourcing we have. See early on

what we might need done in a month or twos time and then how we can accommodate that.

JH: Ah, yeah, game development is iterative. So you are always trying to evaluate and reevaluate

your processes. Theres always a way to get things, to make things, better.

AB: Yep.

JH: So where did you come How long have you been with Cloud Imperium Games?

AB: I started here seven and a half months ago.

JH: And where did you come to before that? Where did you come to us from before that?

AB: A varied background. Well before that I was working on my own game. It was an indie

title called Darkout.

JH: Darkout?

AB: Yeah. Basically it was a little game based off Terraria, set more in sci-fi universe,

it had a light and dark mechanic to it. You could kill shadow creatures and hunt them

with lights that kind of thing. So we tried to do a different spin off from that the guys

did with Terraria. Sandbox games were very popular at the time I started it. It was a

longer process than I thought but working with people over the internet and not getting

paid and promise of royalties and so forth it makes it more difficult than having a fully

funded game.

JH: How long did you work on that?

AB: About three years.

JH: Is that available now or ?

AB: Yeah, it is available on Steam.

JH: Well cool. Darkout, available on Steam, if you guys are curious. Well see what

people say.

[both laugh]

JH: Sorry!

AB: Ive got good feedback on the visuals. I mean its a really good looking game.

So, yeah.

JH: Cool. Cool. Now, I wont keep you too much longer but we were talking earlier, you

mentioned that you sailed across the Atlantic Ocean when you were younger?

AB: Yeah.

JH: We were trading stories and I was like I went to space camp when I was ten!

And he was like Yeah I sailed across the Atlantic. So you sailed across the Atlantic

from Cape Town to the Caribbean you said?

AB: Yes.

JH: How long did that take?

AB: It took about three months.

JH: Why? Not why did it take three months but why did you do it?

AB: Well my parents got this crazy idea into their heads when I was about sixteen that

they wanted to build a boat and go sailing across the world. And I was all on board for

that. I mean who wants to go to school when you can go sailing? So we ended up building

our own boat in our yard and when I was nineteen we were finished and we went sailing. And

it took us three months to get from Cape Town to the Caribbean. We actually started off

with a nice Cape Town storm so that was an adventure on its own. And about the rest:

I wouldnt trade it for the world. It was an awesome adventure to go through.

JH: Theres something to be said for somebody whos built their own boat being involved

in our ship pipeline.

AB: Thats true. I hadnt thought about it that way.

JH: [laughing] I was just putting that together, its like thats cool you might have some

insights that others might not. So thats very cool. Adrian I wont take thanks

for taking the time to sit with us. I wont keep you any longer man.

AB: Youre welcome.

JH: Thanks a lot. Alright guys. Back to you everybody.

Back to studio

BL: Thanks guys. Did you hear that Adrian once sailed across the Atlantic from Cape

Town to the Caribbean?

SG: No, why would I know that?

BL: I dont know. I dont know why its in the script.

[both laugh and look at the script]

JH: [off camera] Because it took three months!

SG: It took three months! Apparently.

[off camera golf clap]

BL: Yeah.

SG: Yes.

BL: Put this whole thing in. I want to see this whole segment, including this part, in

the episode. So people understand what we have to deal with.

SG: See I just read. I just read what my line says. Thats all I do.

BL: People think Oh theyre getting trolled and theyre fighting with people on the

internet and theres problems with Star Citizen. No! Jareds script is the problem

with Star Citizen.

SG: I know.

[Jared peers round the side of the camera]

[laughter from Tom Hennessy off camera]

SG: Coming up next Mark Abent returns to Around the Verse with a look at Dataforge. The new

tool we are using to make Star Citizen even better in this weeks ATV Behind the Scenes.

BL: And here I thought Dataforge was what Dr Soong used to make his androids.

ATV Behind the Scenes: Dataforge

JH: Thanks guys on this weeks ATV Behind the Scenes were sitting down with Gameplay

Programmer Mr. Mark Abent. He is going to take us through a brief tour of a new tool

that were using here at Cloud Imperium Games called Dataforge. So Mark how you doing

man? Welcome back to Around The Verse.

MA: Good to be on Well I dont think I dont think ive been on Around The

Verse in a long time!

JH: Not since you went rogue and started your own show! Its good to have you back. Now,

Dataforge lets just start at the beginning. What is Dataforge?

MA: Well one thing I noticed...Do I look at you or do I look at

JH: You got to look at me

MA: Ok. sorry about that. I just wasnt sure where I should be looking. Cause I

noticed the cameras are all here and Im looking this way!

JH: Thats alright well use this. Well just wait on you

MA: Oh. Oh what was the question again?

JH: Alright.

MA: You see what he has to do with all the..

JH: So start us off at the beginning. Were just leaving all this in by the way. What

is Dataforge?

MA: Alright. So Dataforge is essentially our answer to solving all of our saved data or

metadata through XML through actually its just XML at the moment! Trying to get rid

of having all these XMLs that get parsed every which way throughout the engine and

just have one central location where all of our data gets set modified and stored.

JH: Ok. Now CryEngine uses XML by default, which is why weve been using XML.

MA: Yes.

JH: Why is it important to us to move away from that and centralise the data?

MA: So XML is very error prone. I could modify one thing and now that whole thing is broken.

This has happened quite a bit with our ship XMLs where you add an extra comment cause

I dont like this but CryEngines way of parsing comments, you cant have a comment

within a comment. If you do that XML just breaks.

So you could have simple things as that or double quote or wrong thing here and now youre

ship is vanished and its like Oh no what did I just do? And especially becomes

error prone, when you have: guy over here working on something, guy over here working

on something, they both commit and merge and it just becomes a mess.

JH: Gotcha. And of course the game were making a is a bit bigger than what the scope

of CryEngine was originally designed for. So I think were moving into an area now

where XML just isnt robust enough

MA: Yeah it was fine in the beginning when you had one person like Calix working on it.

But now we have studios, we have a dozen studios all working on the same thing. It just becomes

a nightmare!

JH: Four internal studios and outsourcers guys. We didnt expand to a dozen studios

last night and not tell anybody. Therell be a threat, therell be a threat! Now ive

forgotten what I was to go with now, oh well. CryEngine was, its an inhouse tool created

by Ashley?

MA: It was created by Ashley Cunning, Canning. Also I think it was David Gill. Ash is the

main guy working on it but David also helps support some of the features here and there,

from what im told!

JH: And Ash started on this almost a year ago? A year and a half ago?

MA: I came on the project about two years ago. Right around the time when UK office

just started up. He wasnt originally planned to work on this, he was, I think it was going

to be a Gameplay Programmer, and then about a couple months after he got in, we needed

a solution like this and Dataforge was the answer, we didnt know what it was going

to be, but we needed someone to work on it and Ash was like Ill do it!.

JH: Why dont you take us through. Show us an XML and then show us what Dataforge

can do for us

MA: Sure. So let me pull over a simple XML. Move to and so. Here we have a twenty millimetre

round of ammo that I think, Im not sure what gun. I think the gatlings use this. And

its actually split in two. We have the Design view and then we also have the group

called the interface, which is the graphics view.

We had problems where Designers and Artists wanted to modify things that would stomp over

each others work so we ended up splitting it with this interface system where this is

the design stuff and this is all the visual stuff. Lights, lasers, graphics.

JH: So even something as simple as a bullet had two different XMLs?

MA: It had two different things.

JH: Alright!

MA: The other reason why they had two was we used to use something called a Script Monkey.

It was something I wrote where in Excel you basically had the names of the projectiles

and then some properties and it would auto generate the XML.

Now when people go in there and just start modifying things without using that script,

when someone re-runs that script all those settings would be lost. And the Artists didnt

know about that thing at the time and it was never set up. So Artists would go in, add

some particles, change the like colour and then the designer would rerun the script,

it would flush all of the changes and be like What happened to my changes? Oh no..

JH: Artists man

MA: So we wanted to keep the design being able to use that batch scripting so they can

go on an XML and change all the design damage and stuff like that so they wouldnt have

to go through every single XML, but we also still want the Artists to change the XMLs

because thats the way they want to do it so we came up with this two way split system

and unfortunately we now have double the XMLs or theres a design version, the graphics

version and it still gets broken because people interchange things ones in here. We actually

stopped using Script Monkey because it just became horrible to maintain. One Excel vs

XML, everyone would skip the excel and straight to the XML, till this day theres still

some fun conflicts.

JH: Alright, now show us what Dataforge can do for us then.

MA: So with projectiles, actually moved them over to Dataforge and were not long using

XML, this is the old old old system. Instead were using Dataforge. Dataforge is a nifty,

it basically stores all of our data for gamemodes, for conversation systems, to characters like

clothing. Were going to move into here. Specifically for our projectiles, we have

this what we call a template.

So we create this template and it has all the properties we want of this particular

bullet, so we set it up to be. Heres a bullet, we set it up so that it has damage,

it has lifetime, it has some sounds and effects and then were going to have a bunch of

bullets that are going to shoot at same properties, but we dont need to copy all the information

over and over again. So Ash came up with this system called the Variance system. You

can literally right click and create a variant which for all intents and purposes, it copies

the master and lets you change things here and there. You could create this template,

create a variant like these guys and change damage.

JH: Gotcha

MA: But thats still tedious to designers and they love XML so we extended it even more.

In the spirit of Script Monkey, you can define variants and you can define certain properties

and these properties can be imported into each of the templates. So my master template,

as you can see I can define my size, my lifetime, my speed and these are all variables that

are defined in that excel sheet. So I can literally create new ones or remove them.

But the beauty of this too is an Artist doesnt necessarily use this particular excel sheet

to change the effects. They could go into the required variant and they can start modifying

and adding particles in that specific for that variant. Its kind of the best of both

world.

JH: Mkay

MA: It will get tricky, Well actually the one good thing too is if a designer decides

this is gone, it will be removed and now the Artist will notice its gone so he doesnt

have to add the effect anymore because it doesnt exist

JH: Gotcha

MA: We also locked the file so one person can modify this at a time.

JH: It should be noted. Weve got a list here of all these different things like physical

damage and speed and what not. These are not final values. This was setup for the demonstration,

dont get too excited.

MA: Ive literally ran a script to auto generate these properties. When I converted

over the system, none of these are the actual values, theyre going to get passed off

the designers to fill in the real values.

JH: Somebody will still screenshot it and post it like theyre real things.

MA: Yeah

JH: So besides bullets, besides ammo rather, weve got all kinds of things. We got the

conversation system, I see game levels in there.

MA: We have properties for game levels, certain things. If we have to add a certain flag to

disable something like I dont know, you can't shoot in racer, we had a pool entity

here and then we update all of our fun little scripts.

JH: Now Dataforge isnt just a fancy tool for creating XMLs, its actually were

storing the data differently that XMLs now right?

MA: Yes. So on the very first phase everything got stored out as just XMLs. Thats just

the save information. This is only on the designers, or I should say on the developers

side. When it finally gets out into the public it gets stored into a binary blob.

JH: Okay.

MA: So what that means is when were actually in the game and everyones playing we dont

have to parse an XML every time we spawn a projectile, every time we spawn a ship. Instead

we have that information somewhere already in memory and we just grab it. Its so quick.

JH: Because I mean, were talking milliseconds here but when youre talking about hundreds

of thousands of people playing a game and whatnot, milliseconds matter.

MA: Oh they matter tremendously. I mean we have dozens of people. Dozens, good word,

I can use that now! Right? Dozens?

JH: Dozens?

MA: Yeah dozens! [laughs]

JH: Yes, if all things go right. If all things go right.

MA: Yeah, if we have dozens of people and they have a gatling gun and it shoots like

nine hundred rounds a minute. You know youre going to be parsing a bunch of XMLs, which

we dont want. Well if we have the binary blob all those projectiles go to that one

source of information, pull it and then theyre good to go.

JH: Okay. And so we store those blobs up on a server.

MA: Right now they are all stored on our dedicated servers. But some time in the future we could

have a centralised server where all the other servers could pull that information. And with

Dataforge we actually have the ability to hot load. So we could change our binary

blob to some other binary blob and it would reflect all the changes. We have that now

and Ill show an example later. But some time in the future, yeah, well probably

have a central server where all the other servers could pull it from. We could, you

know, balance things on the fly. [laughs]

JH: Is binary blob the official term?

MA: It is used everywhere internally so I think thats what were calling it. [laughs]

JH: Now changes made here will parse out into the game right?

MA: Yes.

JH: So can we see an example of that?

MA: Sure.

JH: Maybe can we alter a projectile or something?

MA: Yeah.

JH: Oh look, you have a gun already here.

MA: I have a gun already here.

JH: Its like this was planned.

MA: Oh gee, I wonder. I wonder if I hit this button [presses a key]. Oh look at that! It

shoots!

[both laugh]

JH: Set it going a couple of times. Alright.

MA: [presses the key repeatedly] I have a little, quick gun here that shoots a couple

of projectiles when I tap the button. And this particular projectile Im using, the

20mm ammo, and the speed is kind of insane. And what I could do here is add a little decimal

point [adds a decimal point]; save the Excel sheet; I can drag Dataforge; tell it to refresh;

and now it shoots a little bit slower. [presses the key repeatedly] Pew!

JH: Ahh!

MA: It kind of dips down but thats only because Im in a gravity box. Just to illustrate

it, so, yeah.

JH: Were all in a gravity box at some point.

MA: Exactly.

JH: Right, I want to throw you and audible here. Slowing down is fine. Can we change

the projectile to something completely different like a ship maybe?

MA: Yeah! I think I know what ship we could change that too.

JH: Alright.

MA: So lets go back to Dataforge. And lets change our geometry. So Im going to get

rid of this material because that changes our colours. Our projectiles they all share

from this solenoid so what I can do is change this guy out. Change it to say an M50. Save

that guy out. And now [presses key repeatedly] Im shooting M50s!

[both laugh]

JH: Justin add some sound effects! Lets see what sound an M50 makes when it shoots.

[sound effects play on pew, I mean, cue]

JH: Alright lets change that back before I get in trouble.

MA: I think we can keep it.

JH: Well Mark, thanks so much for giving us a brief tour of Dataforge. This is an incredibly

important tool. A year and a half in the making now. Its going to store all of our data

for ships and weapons and our game levels. And its exciting to be able to shave off

those milliseconds from having to parse stuff and to store everything on dedicated servers.

So thank you so much man.

MA: No problem. Thank you guys.

JH: Back to you. Seriously fix the, fix the ship!

Back to studio

SG: I want a gun that shoots M50s.

BL: You changed that back?

Thomas Hennessy (TH:) Yes No [Laughs]

SG: Our very own Gurmukh Bhasin recently finished teaching a 3D concept class and created a

single seater fighter ship as a class project.

BL: I like that theres a world theres such a thing as spaceship class by the way,

but Gurmukh is really proud the work his students did. Its all heavily inspired by his work

in Star Citizen of course so we offered to share some of the designs on the show, these

are not ships for Star Citizen, but who can turn down a cool space ship no matter where

its from.

SG: Check them out.

Gurmukh Bhasin (GB): Hey everyone this is Gurmukh Bhasin Here, so the purpose of the

class was to get people comfortable with exploring concepts in 3D. One of the unique things here

that I do here on Star Citizen is design ships in full 3D concept and I wanted to share my

technique with people who are interested and get people excited about exploration and trying

things out in 3D. So the purpose of this course was to do a single seater fighter ship similar

to the Gladius. I wanted it to be for Aegis since thats one of our beautiful manufactures

in the game and I wanted the single seat fighter because its a little bit easier to do.

The course was 10 weeks long and most of these students, actually all the students had never

done 3D concept before. So this was their first time, even for some of them first time

using 3D and the first time creating something of their own in 3D, but overall the purpose

of this was to get comfortable with designing a Star Citizen esc ship in 3D from scratch

and I think everyone who turned in a final project did a really great job.

MVP

SG: And now it is time for this week's MVP.

Ben the envelope please!

BL: [Makes sounds]

SG: MVP award goes to Ghost! Yay!

BL: Ah! A ghost!

SG: For his video, What is Star Citizen, the full explanation.

BL: Its pretty much impossible to boil Star Citizen down to 18 minutes or so I would

have thought, but Ghost does a pretty good job. Heres a clip

Ghost: Chris Roberts started a company called Cloud Imperium Games and he announced that

they were working on the space sim called Star Citizen. They started a kickstarter for

it with the goal to raise 4 million dollars. By the end of 2012 they reached all stretch

goals and raised 6.2 million dollars in crowdfunding alone which broke all crowdfunding record

for a game at the time.

SG: Congratulations Ghost, you are this week's MVP.

BL: Ahh, Raise the roof.

Sneak peek

SG: And Now heres your art Sneak peek.

[Misc Reliant Greybox of Pilot Chair]

Outro

BL: Be sure to turn in to Reverse the Verse tomorrow at 11 am Pacific on Twitch. Well

be answering your questions about Star Citizen. Well be talking about that Art Sneak Peek

and well be telling you what we had for lunch.

SG: Or what we didnt have for lunch.

BL: yes, check it out Tomorrow

SG [Laughs]. And of course thank you to all of our subscribers for making this show possible.

We will see you next week on Around the Verse.

BL: Around the Verse.

SG: Its a low carb diet.