CITIZEN SPOTLIGHT: STANTON SPACE BARN
by pokinatchapunx and Agathorn
Welcome back to Citizen Spotlight. This time we’ll be
speaking with Agathorn, a grand admiral, community
elder and the man behind the Stanton Space Barn
(https://www.stantonspacebarn.com/). We’ll talk to
him about the barn and pick his brain about a couple
of community hot topics.
PULSE: Thanks for taking time to do this interview.
Tell us a bit about yourself. What do you do? How did
you get into gaming?
AGATHORN: I’ve bounced around a lot over the years.
I served in the US Air Force when I was younger, then
after getting out I went back to school to start a new
career in Visual Effects which is where I am now. For
those familiar with the industry I work as a Pipeline/
Compositing TD. For those who aren’t, it is basically
a job that bridges the roles of artist and software
developer.
I can’t really say how I got into gaming because I can’t
remember a time when I wasn’t gaming! Early on it
was Ataris and Commodores, then PC gaming. Mixed
in with more hands on tabletops and paper and pencil
RPGs. I’ve been PC gaming since the TRS-80 days,
and while I do own a PS3, I mostly use it for watching
Amazon video and BluRays :)
PULSE: Tell us a bit about your pet project for Star
Citizen, Stanton Space Barn. What is it now? What is
your vision for it in the future?
AGATHORN: The Stanton Space Barn, or SSB, just
grew out of a wild inspiration one day. I was looking at
one of the ship brochures, looking at the schematics
they put in there, and thinking wouldn’t it be cool if it
was interactive. It grew out of that original idea. As
someone who works an office job, and spends a lot
of time working, I always like to have some way of
interacting with the game outside of the game itself,
like websites and what not. Right now SSB provides
a way to load up a ship, see its hardpoints, and equip
weapons and items to that ship, and save that out
as a saved variant that you can share with others. It
works off actual gamedata scraped from the Hangar
Module, so it’s always up to date with the game. You
can always view raw item and vehicle stats in a sort
of databanks browser.
Right now my focus is on maintaining current
functionality as the game changes. Since we are
so early in the game’s development, things are in a
constant state of flux and that requires my code
to constantly change just to maintain my current
feature set. In the future I want to expand the website
to provide more computed and simulation based data
to help player’s make decisions on what to equip
on their ships. For example things like simulating
heat generation and cooling, power flow, or DPS
calculations. Essentially a one stop shop for ship
customization and knowledge.
PULSE: The Stanton Space Barn is a pretty big
undertaking. How many hours do you have in to it so
far? How much work is it really?
AGATHORN: A lot! The initial prototype was
hammered out over a period of about 3 or 4 months
during which all my free time went into it. There
was work, SSB, and sleep in that order of priority.
I probably s V