OOH SO MUCH FUN! Can I play? In the spirit of good fun of course. Transcript edit ahoy! =]
20:13 - Ships suck: The RSI Constellation
Jared Huckaby - JH: Thanks Marvin. On this episode of Soon(TM), were sitting down with janitor Chris Smith, and intern Josh Generic Last Name to discuss the upcoming delay of the constellation. Chris, why don't you tell us when the constellation will be flyable?
Chris Smith - CS: Hey, how’s it going Jared?
JH: ....Now, you’ve been working on the constellation for quite some time now.
CS: Yeah, we’ve working on the interior lighting for a little while since February 2013 to be exact.
JH: Mmmkay. Coming up with Alpha 2.0 we’ll get to see the fruits of your labours
CS: Right, maybe.
JH: [Laughs] Maybe.. Now you’re going to take us through a tour of the inside of the constellation and later on we'll get whoever we can find in here and they’ll take us through the external. Now this is still work in progress, and also the Caterpillar is still nowhere near flyable yet, but Chris I leave the constellation to you!
CS: Alright. So yes it’s still a work in progress but we are very far into it, we’re very close to being done with it. Honest this time! (winks wink) I’ll just swoop into the interior(system crashes, hold for editing) and walk you guys through it. Here we have the first unfinished area and so the main difference that we did right away when we started retwerking the constellation was to separate it out into modular sections so that we have a nose section and a neck section and a body section and an ass section. Because we heard your like nose and ass sections so we added a nose to the ass section so you can nose section while you body section.
That counts for the interiors and as well for the exterior and that helps us see the future. We are future people. Always have been. So, instead of building a whole new ship we can just swap out a piece and it becomes a new ship. They did it in Star Trek. Since we are doing that, we can half ass our new builds and do more interviews.
Here is the nose bulkhead and the immediate change was to add a bulkhead to this area which didn’t exist in the previous concept sale. There will be another if you want this bulkhead. There was actually no door or ceiling here and so everything was left open to the vacuum of space, a design oversight of epic proportions and beyond this door there’s OMG an airlock. Before, if someone wanted to EVA out, the whole cockpit would be essentially sucked out into space and we couldn't pass it off as a feature so we added this bulkhead here which I think adds beauty and makes it a hot segment and a lovely cockpit area; really I just want to stay on the purpose of this ship and the area but I can't. I <3 bulkhead!
See here we have the seats, and the pilot seat. Six months of work right there. As you can see too we got a lot of small detail and brought it up to the same visual standards of Duke Nukem Forever when it was made so everything is super high detail and fidelity compared to Freelancer. Whoops, i’m like climbing up on the chair now. (Literally. Lando sprays him down)
JH: Chris gets down, Get down!
CS: [Giggles flirtatiously]. This also represents a first lighting pass of the inferior lighting of this ship; as you can see it’s sort got a little fog in there, some happy trees and atmosphere and everything. The fog IS modular but It’s still not done yet. There’s still some work to be done and we'll have another pass on the lighting but it’s going back to concept. You know you can see the details like the lighting through the bulkhead here which is cool and I like stuff like that. Go Packers!
Another big change to the front was the turret entrance and the previous version, the entrance was actually on the other side so you essentially had to walk over here and face this way to get into the turret but now all you have to do is just walk straight and you will glitch into any turret you see directly. So that was a big deal I think, requested fixed too by the fans’ over the times that we’ve had the old connie out. There were tons of remodels and remakes done by fans, but we didn't pay attention to any of them. A lot of those requests we heard and passively dismissed on the forums.
JH: I'm still here, so I’m gonna throw you a tough question here. One of those most common requests is the inverted bottom turret.
CS: (Crickets)
JH: I noticed we don’t have the inverted bottom turret in there. Can you talk about why we haven’t done the inverted bottom turret.
CS: So you’re saying a request was actually to have it flipped? I never heard of this even though it's been repeated on the forums for months. (Nervously)
JH: Basically you go down the tube
CS: Like the retaliator?
JH: Exactly like the retaliator so they get the same view as the guy up top. Giggity.
CS: I've got a book reading at 10AM so there is no way I can do this. When we spent 8 months on this ship and in the last 2 months working really hard just to get the toilet in and we're still not even done with half the concept ships. You need years to add new mechanics and stuff like that and adds even more time and how about that Star Marine, remember that?
The Retaliator turret is broken; that is sort of progress we have made and there is a debate about it. We were sort of already sort of past that part, sort of we didn’t want to go back and then sort of have to redo it sort of so we sort of kept it the way it is, in this case. Although I will say sort of-
JH: Field of view is much better than it was just looking at the CitizenCon demo.
CS: Thanks! Bout damn time you saved me. I like rocking chairs. Anyway another thing was we were concerned about the playability of the inverted turret. I’m not sure if the fans like the inverted turret(WTF!?). Ya know, even though they love it on the retaliator and I realized that earlier, my opinion has changed since then to back up my not wanting to do this.
JH: Everybody talks about lots of things, But until you get in there and play with it you never know whether it will work or not. I'm talking about the game itself.
CS: It was a concern you know that it might even be confusing to small children and the elderly to have an inverted turret so I guess maybe the jury is still out on that. Again, I don't read the forums.
JH: I guess we'll find out with the Retaliator actually.
CS: Shhh. Time constraints and also I don’t think every turret has to be a flip turret.
JH: You're not going to stop defending this point of view are you?
CS: It was sort of like, we will rework the constellation but keep it with the original style of the Constellation. See what I did there?
JH: Not all ships are supposed to be all things.
CS: Yeah you can’t have everything… or can you? Well maybe you can… [chuckles].
JH: You're a bad person.
CS: We’ll see, hey! You know maybe in the future we'll have a flip down turret version of the constellation that I said just a few minutes ago we wouldn't have. So here we are at the neck component of the ship. This will be the living quarters so my intent when I redid the interior of the constellation was to really have a distinctive feel when we show you the progress at Citizencon 2016.
You know you’re in a different room so not everything looks for the same. That's what different rooms are, see Jared? It's brighter in here because this is where people live. So right here we have the bench where you can wait for the Constellation to be finished and there’s a retractable table and shelves, knives, slap-chop, stuff like that. Here’s OMG the airlock which was in the original model which was also coincidentally an airlock. I made it a polygonal shape because actually with this ship we can now fit all the crew members on at once and get them to break the physics model. The other one was a bit smaller it didn’t cause enough BSODing.
JH: That’s the beautiful thing about game development, it’s iterative. You try things, some things work and some things don’t
CS: Yeah you found out right? Quickly
JH: [Laughs] I'm dead inside
CS: And here we have the bathroom at CIG which is actually… In the.. I doubt it works at this point but I’m not going to risk it.
(The true end of the interview is here)