Inside Star Citizen: Further Underground | Fall 2022

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   hello my name is John Griffiths I'm a lead environment artist here at Star Citizen at Cloud inferior I'll do that again hi my name is John Griffiths and I'm a lead environment artist at Cloud impairing games I'm heading up EU sandbox 2 and we're working on the revamped underground facilities which you saw at citizencon this is also my first ISC episode and it's also the first in-hour lovely new office so I hope you enjoy foreign so after we've gone through that kind of concept development phase where we're just flashing our ideas it's time to kind of think about what actually the underground facilities were going to be how much time is the player going to be

2. 00:00:48

   spending there what are they going to be doing there um how many they're going to be what kind of themes they're going to be all that jazz we need to think about and we also need to plan out how we're going to do it so when we're in the stage of very early on in development it's about kind of iterating quickly getting into the editor getting feedback on what we're doing playing the location as a complete thing as fast as possible because only when we see things in context of what they're going to be can we really make actual great decisions on what it is we're making and this is a collaboration between Art and Design Mission content the directors are involved it's um just molding the Beast into something tangible which we can then take into our planning stage to iron out what it is we

3. 00:01:39

   need to create and how we're going to create them [Music] so we've come out of pre-production we now need to get a plan together so that the team can start working so at the moment we can see all these boxes all the ones on the top are rooms all the ones underneath are overlays so overlays give us our variety when the team looks at this they don't have to come to me to ask does the surface structure medium need work doing to it or not um they can read it for themselves here this is great because it gives us a big overview of what's required for the location and it also means that we can break it down into kind of content packs so our tier zero is everything that we would need to release this into the universe with some variation I tip our tears after that kind of our

4. 00:02:28

   additional content which might flesh out some of the ugfs or give it a new theme or that kind of thing so some of the rooms that are in production at the moment let's just skip over to them so this looks like um one whole thing it's actually two things so it's the surface structure which is this little this guy in the middle and this kind of surrounding Hangar you know how do you actually get there we've also got our physical elevator spaces so if we go from the top this is where you trundle down into the ugf on a lovely diagonal elevator we've got the Elevator Shaft components himself so you might have really long elevator eyes you might have really short ones and then the where you end up at the bottom of the elevator ride you know this room is currently in progress as well this is a more refined plant to

5. 00:03:16

   begin with but we still need to get into the actual numbers of how much time this will actually take to make so then we come to our trusty Microsoft Excel and in here this is um just really just putting estimates on how long we think things will take so for us that's um in this next phase which is white boxing we want to block the rooms out we want to add content we want to get the gameplay in there we want to split things into overlays test it with our proc gen tool and get all that done so we estimate this like this and we cut in all of those rooms that we called out before we've got all the room types it can be and how big or small the thing is so using this kind of grid we

6. 00:04:04

   can call out while there's a one room that's got a re-theme there's a two rooms a medium or large that needs to be done and this calculates how much time is required so you can look at it from room type you can do the time that way or you can look at how many medium rooms well it will take you know we can do it that way as well this calculates it all puts into a lovely little um table and then we can also call out how many artists there are how many designers um how many days per artist how many total days for a Sprint blah blah blah get all that done and that gives us our kind of ballpark figure to to go with to begin with um I think I might have to retake this at what point do we ignore at what point

7. 00:04:53

   do we ignore all this okay so it's all great having all of this and it gives us a really good plan to begin with going forward but as you probably know game development isn't really a concrete process you can have all the numbers in the world but you'll still have things that kind of crop up out of nowhere that is what game development really is so from this point now we can get back into the editor we can start fleshing out these rooms we can start doing these overlays we can start finding the variety and I'm really bringing these new underground facilities to life the new underground facilities first seen at this year's citizen gun showcase have already moved into production with designers and artists alike building out the currently specced out 93 different rooms and 196 overlay variations

8. 00:05:43

   necessary to place them throughout the existing Stanton and upcoming pyro star system but while that's still many months away yet let's go ahead and turn our attention to something coming in this December's Alpha 318. the eminent arrival of the next exciting parts of our new gen 12 renderer now bringing with it our Collective hopes for improved performance let's go now to Sylvan in our Frankfurt Studio who's got an update for us on the current progress hey everyone I'm silver I'm an engine programmer here at Chu working on gen 12 for the past years and I'm incredibly excited to share with all of you the latest progress we've made on gen 12. but first um let's get everyone on the same page

9. 00:06:31

   real quick and explain which involve is what it's not and what's trying to solve this will just stretch the surface though um for deeper look I highly recommend watching our last year's citizencon progress update on gen 12 and Vulcan so gen 12 in a nutshell is our new renderer and we came up with this name as a natural step forward from DirectX 11 with Star Citizen right now pretty much all of you are using when playing the game dard X11 is a graphics API which our engine interacts to make use of the GPU and renders all of Star citizens Beauty how fast in game engine can feed the graphics API or the GPU with rendering commands is dependent on two factors

10. 00:07:21

    first the CPU performance and second the implementation of the rendering engine and the latter is what gen 12 is all about it is from the ground up a complete redesign of our old rendering architecture which decreases CPU submission time massively the end goal of gen 12 however is to make use of a new graphics API called Vulcan which will boost performance even more and also allows us to add new cool features like AI scaling Ray tracing efficient multi-fue rendering for VR and Linux support and more this meant however we had to rewrite every single Graphics feature and ensure

11. 00:08:10

    that it's running smoothly and as expected on this new architecture a daunting task which takes years in a game like Star Citizen with its hundreds of different shaders thousands of materials and dozens of features actively used in production you've seen our first Milestone mid-last year 2021 with patch 3.14 only had a few post-processing effects running on gen 12 by default this proved that our new rendering architecture was working as intended and we could start heavily focusing on the scene object rendering which is the biggest and the most time consuming task for gen12

12. 00:08:57

    almost a year later with 3.17 we hit our next big milestone and could turn on gen 12 for all our static geometry including all scattered terrain objects that was also the time when a lot of people saw an actual meaningful performance Improvement in Star Citizen although to be fair that patch gen 12 was just one of many optimizations we employed there the thing is since then the engine is running in a sort of mixed mode which means most of the code is running through Legacy and just calls into gen 12 which is ported and works at the moment this actually adds an additional overhead and is the reason why I didn't expect

13. 00:09:46

    anything of a big performance Improvement um the last patch and we didn't show anything or didn't announce anything but I'm happy to announce and very proud that we're nearly done with porting absolutely everything to gen12 and not just the scene object rendering but also our new path Centric rendering system as we speak we're fixing the last few things to get it fully ready for 3.18 this is not a promise but we're working hard to make it possible also keep in mind that this first version of gen12 is just a it just works version we haven't even started optimizing it yet at all and you can expect huge improvements the following patches up

14. 00:10:34

    until we can finally start making use of Falcon enough talking let's hop into the engine and take a look at a couple scenes while I'm explaining a few things to set reasonable expectations keep in mind that all of these tests are done in debug builds with one set of hardware and can result in a totally different experience on a different machine also note that gen 12 primarily boosts CPU performance so if you have a weak GPU or playing very high resolutions which is really demanding for gpus your game is probably GPU bound and you won't see much of a benefit okay so let's take a look at the scene here in Orson which is one known to be one of the most expensive cities in game right now before we start please do me one favor

15. 00:11:22

    and don't look at the FPS because this is a highly unoptimized build with highly unoptimized code and very expensive debug tracking so any discussion about FPS here is completely meaningless all right so on the right side we have this g3d API call info window which tells us precisely how many draw calls and how many API calls we do every frame this is the work the engine has to do to send commands to the graphics driver which determines how fast the CPU can fit the GPU with commands to render our frame this is pure legacy mode we have 47 000 API calls and let's switch it to channel

16. 00:12:13

    12. so this is Gen 12th mode the API calls drop to about 33 000. which is quite significant for literally rendering the same scene okay let's take a closer look behind the scenes well let's take a look at this optic capture from that scene and Orson alt is a very helpful tool for us developers to get a detailed understanding of what's going on in our engine this includes what every threat is doing and when it is doing it so let's take a look at the main and render thread which are relin for us in

17. 00:13:03

    this context let's zoom in and let's take a look at one of those frames here so at the top we've got the main thread the main thread is what you could say the heart of the whole engine it pretty much orchestrates everything like when it when entities get updated when physics get calculated when do we render and so forth one of the main tasks is to figure out which objects are in our view system and which objects you want to render this is what the main thread does

18. 00:13:50

    on top of here once we figure that out all that work is pushed into a queue to be processed by the arena thread at the bottom we've got the render thread and this is a very CPU intensive task which is why it is leveraged by a completely dedicated threat so what we can see here is that during the thread takes an immense amount of time to process one frame in fact it's so long that it even surpasses the work the main thread has to do in this context it means we are Renault thread bound which means if we optimize the render

19. 00:14:39

    if we get it to run faster we will see more FPS on the screen as long as we are not GPU out so let's take a look at the gen12 frame so here we've got the 10th wall frame now the opposite is the case the render thread 2 runs faster than the main thread which is indicated by this red bar here at the end this means the internet thread has to wait for the main thread to finish and and in reality bound scenarios as long as we're not bound by the GPU we will see an FPS increase

20. 00:15:29

    and if we zoom out here we can see that every frame the random thread is quite faster than the main thread yeah weights up to 20 milliseconds on some frames where's the Legacy yeah the opposite is the case and the Matrix has to wait to summarize with the current central of renderer we saw a tremendous amount of API call reduction than before and depending on the C 50 to 100 percent faster in the third performance let me emphasize again that all these numbers are not final and we haven't been optimizing gen 12 at all yet and you can expect more improvements in the future it also depends highly on the hardware

21. 00:16:19

    you're running at so once it hits live and you're using it let me know how it's working for you so what's coming next you may ask well once we're fully done with gen12 and we can actually run Vulcan there's still a lot of optimizations we have to do like actually completely getting rid of the Arena thread employ a fully multi-threading rendering approach doing async compute and so much more this guy is the limit here and since we're developing Vulcan in parallel at the moment it is to be expected that once gen 12 is fully working it won't take long for you to have it in your hands too but more about that in the future when it's actually ready

22. 00:17:06

    last but not least a big shout out to everyone involved in getting gen 12 ready so far and yeah I hope you like this little sneak peek into the future of Star Citizen schweinering engine and feel free to drop any questions spectrum and I'll gladly do my best to answer them thanks so what do we learn this week well we learned that resource planning is an essential step to ensuring our artists and designers are working efficiently to deliver locations like the new underground facilities quicker than ever before that the new underground facilities themselves are already in production and you can bet we'll be following along with their progress ahead of their scheduled release next year and that the New Gen 12 renderer looks to relieve much of the current CPU bottleneck in the persisting universe

23. 00:17:53

    and that work will still continue after the next major milestone in the upcoming Alpha 318. now don't forget that this year's day of the Vara Halloween festivities are going on right now you can check out all the details on the robertspace industries.com website and if you're looking at what this new SAT and wondering what the heck's going on maybe you should check out this year citizencon 2952 full broadcast which is available now on both our twitch and YouTube channels for inside Star Citizen I'm Jared Huckabee broadcasting from inside the only constant we'll see you back here next week