It's that time again
Engines on, let's go
Welcome back, everyone
This is The Hull Truth episode 19 for the week of 10 February 2014
The place to get your Star Citizen news fix, and a little bit of extra.
Let's do the website recap
There's a new poll on the website that asks is you would attend a special
Star Citizen event at PAX East. The event would take place on April 10th
and would not require admission to PAX East.
It's not looking too good for the event, the current results are showing 64% vote no.
I imagine this is a travel and/or money thing for the most part. I know that it would be for me.
Star Citizen hit another milestone this week by reaching a $38 million crowdfunding goal, and in the Letter from the Chairman
we unlocked the Cano system. What is in the Cano system you might ask?
One inhabited planet named Carteyna, and Carteyna is a water world!
We voted and it came true. I hope my Avenger nicknamed "The Gentleman Guppy" is submersible.
The final Star Citizen poll ended up being so close that they're going to give us both systems. The Tevarin Ghost World
and The Lost Human Colony. We'll go over the Kabal and Oretani systems when we hit that stretch goal.
We also got some awesome concept art from the Banu Merchantman ship, showing how it will land and function.
This is still by far my favorite ship concept. They really have created an obvious dichotomy between
the human ships and the alien ships, that add to the feel of the game. I hope that continues with the new ships.
The letter ends with the cryptic messagepromising that the next revealed stretch goal will help
chart the course for the future of Star Citizen in a different way, and Chris says it's one that he's personally
very excited about. That's foreshadowing.
It makes me think we might end up with some sort of a starmap system outside of the game.
There's a new lore post called, Observist Dark: Olympus, Ashana, and Nul. This is apparently a traveller's guide
type of company that details interesting destinations including those of the 'dark' veriety. This guide deals with the Nul
system and how it was discovered. The system was empty for centuries because none of the planets could be terraformed.
The planet, Ashana, has an inordinately high gravity and that lead to creation of the planet's landing zone. "Olympus" a carrier ship
that crashed on the surface of Ashana, supposingly killing everyone on board. It wasn't long before the refugees used the ship's systems to make a livable space.
This ship is now the landing pad for the planet and features a mechanic, an armory, a general store, and an ex "hitter" know as Nescus that runs the place.
It's quite interesting and if you want to check out more of the in-game lore go and read that.
An issue of PC Games magazine released in Germany with a bunch of new concept art that we hadn't seen yet. The kind folks at CIG
have put those on the website for all of us and they're really cool.
One of the more interesting discoveries in this picture set is a an image of a ship, with the filename "Vanduul Harvester."
It looks huge, notice those little people on the side. Very insectoid-like. I wonder just what exactly it will harvest.
There's also an image of a more industrial-looking facility with the filename "Shubin mining station." Is this one of the giant mining platform
ships or is it an actual space station that moves around mining stuff?
I guess that would make it about the same thing.
And Dateline Sesen part II is out. I really enjoyed the first one, and this one did not disappoint me.
Dateline Sesen is about a behind-the-lines journalist named Ulla Yadav who's investigating big companies that may or may not be
hijacking ships for profit, while posing as pirates to lay blame elsewhere. In this installment, Yadev finally gets some footage
in a very exciting firefight. I won't give away the details or spoil it for you.
Don't miss out on this one unless you just absolutely hate reading, or fan fiction, or sci-fi, or Star Citizen and if you hate those things
why are you here? Go read it.
Now we recap Wingman's Hangar.
This week, Wingman was at the Star Citizen summit, all the different office teams working on Star Citizen flew to Austin this week to
week-long planning session. We met a lot of folks and mostly just hear some reiteration about the systems that everyone is working on.
There was a statement about other modules that they won't talk about now, and no new info was presented.
The MVP of the week goes to Czar for his forum thread "Operation Pitchfork; a Forker's Tale
This is a fictional narrative with an Operation Pitchfork participant. If you haven't heard of Operation Pitchfork yet, it's a player
made event to invade Vanduul systems at the end of the beta, which will most likely be a suicide mission for everyone involved.
You can check out both of these on the official forums.
The CIG fan focus this week goes to ShaderCool for his hangar sleeping quarters concepts.
Very cool, ShaderCool, thanks for making those and uh... I love the bathroom design.
Let's do some forum feedback
This week we have Wingman and Rob answering the questions and most of the questions are related to the summit
due to the new themed Q&A format that they're going to be using.
There's very little information in here that's actually related to anything new in the game, so I will be highly paraphrasing some
of these although I will put text closer to what they said on the screen.
"Do you have a roadmap that you can share about the general sequence of development?"
Rob said, "we have all these different modules going in parallel. The summit was a chance to mix the teams together
to see the big picture. We're doing FPS, dogfighting, PU, and the hangar in parallel."
Anything new that you can talk about from the summit?
Rob said, "Not really anything new. Chris wanted us to each have our own sense of ownership of these different systems we're working on."
What was the most beneficial part of the summit in terms of moving toward the goal of release?
Rob said, "Certainly face time. We have people on Skype and email all the time suddenly become faces and people
and that makes a big difference. It's about everyone sharing vision at the same time.
Eric said, "When you're meeting on Skype and sending out emails, there's a barrier there. Maybe they take things personally when that wasn't the intent.
This allows you to become friends, and get to know the person you're talking to. In those instances you can be a little more critical or direct
and they understand."
How do you guys sort out conflicting thoughts about what awesomeness really means in the 'verse?
Rob and Eric both said basically Chris Roberts decides that.
Has a decision been made about when SQ42 will be released?
Rob said, "One thing we did determine is that there really isn't a good reason on a single-player game, to release alpha
content. The current development plan is to release the content episodically for our backers.
You will get to see a piece at a time. Each one is not going to be just like it's own mini-story though, it's still a Chris Roberts style
adventure that spans multiple episodes.
How do you keep in touch with so many different things?
Rob said, "We had the summit. We're going to do those every 3 months and some big ones too. Day-to-day we email constantly, and use Skype and also use a bunch of collaboration tools."
What kind of stuff do you do for fun when all the teams got together?
Rob said, "We had interdiscipline/intercompany dinners each night, lunches too. Friday night we had a wrap party.. and some of us might have had
a little more fun than others."
[video with drunk rambling]
That's it for forum feedback. Unfortunately there was no Ten for the Chairman this week but we sure do have
some other news.
In other news this week we got two games to talk about. The first up is Unclaimed World:
The Lost Explorers. This one comes from Refactored Games, consisting of three programmers and one artist and recently got
our first gameplay trailer.
This is a story-based RTS simulation game about mankind's first attempts at stellar travel, and subsequently colonization.
Earth has experienced a catastrophe and a starship with 2100 humans aboard is sent on a mission to find a suitable new home world in the
Tau Ceti system. The Lost Explorers is technically episode 1 in a series of releases for the game. The devs plan to
add new game features and an expanding storyline, that takes place over in-game years of time for each
new episode released. From the trailer, we can tell that there are systems for hunting, gathering, defenses, building, and general survival.
Each character seems to have their own statistics and equipment as well. One important note that makes me quite interested is that the devs
say that the game eschews god-game tropes by playing out the player's role as a part of the community, not a commander.
The characters are free individuals with their own ideas and motivations. The game was just green-lit on Steam on Feb 6.
I love games like this and I hope it turns out to be a good one.
I also wanted to point out another game, that's technically been playable for a while but just officially released
on Steam, and it's called Horizon. I played this game the first time when it was still in beta
and was quite surprised by how enjoyable it was. Horizon is a turn-based strategy game of galactic
exploration and conquest where you are in control of humanity's destiny.
This is really cool and it's set apart from other turn-based space games in that it's not necessarily just a 4x-
There's a galaxy storyline with open ended missions on top of the 4x part of it and it has a very sandbox feel to it
It has all your typical 4x mechanics but adds in tactical ship controls where you manage the movement of the ship and weapons.
You can board other ships, and attack from orbital/planetary defenses as well.
The alien races you run into are all fleshed-out with their own storylines too.
I really enjoyed this one and am nowhere near done with it. If you're looking for
more sci-fi games to play and you like 4x, you should give this one a try. But if you're looking for a really hardcore 4x
you should skip this one.
Let's do the r/starcitizen post of the week.
This week it goes to Xerowun for his Origin 350R lego build. I've seen a lot of lego builds out there
for different ships but this is by far the best one I've seen. Excellent work on that Xerowun
I salute your efforts in sourcing the pieces and getting this together.
One quick update for everybody, I'm currently doing my first recap video
for The Next Great Starship. It will be very brief and concise, the videos
of the entrants, and that will be up sometime this week so keep an eye out for that
if you haven't subscribed, go ahead and do that so you'll be aware when it drops.
Once again we've reached the end of another episode
Thanks again for all of your support, I would not be doing this if not for the community.
Until next Monday, fly low and shoot straight.
Goodbye.