Vehicle Pipeline

The Vehicle Pipeline (also known as Ship Pipeline) is the process employed by Cloud Imperium Games to create and update vehicles. The main stages of the Vehicle Pipeline are design, concept phase, whitebox, greybox, final phase and flight preparation, although the last part is sometimes further subdivided. The details of this process have been discussed in an Around The Verse development video in 2017. It is a continuous revolving process.



Stages
Vehicles work through the vehicle pipeline process from concept to flight ready.

Flight ready
The vehicle can fly with full operations including physics, interactions, systems, fuel, cargo, and more.

Gold standard
Gold standard pass means to rework the vehicle to a level of completion that includes all possible and relevant vehicle features thus far implemented. For example:
 * Cockpit button placements and animations
 * Updated metrics passes on characters and items
 * Physicalized and accessible vehicle components
 * Lighting passes
 * Material passes

Hangar ready
The vehicle loads for display and interactions.

Active production
Development, designers, and QA work from start to finish on the vehicle.

Long term production
Development work is planned and added to the Roadmap.

In concept
Artists and designers determine the concept look, 3D renders, and functional design for a vehicle.