Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Level Design

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:15

   hello and welcome to around the verse our weekly look at the development of star citizen i'm sandi gardiner and since chris roberts is busy as our manchester office I'm joined by lead technical designer Tim a thanks for being with us here today Kirk it's awesome be here sandy our community team is at it again following up their appearance last week at PAX East with a visit to South by Southwest this week and this Saturday the austin studio will be hosting a panel as part of the festival the team will share details about the avocado testing group the importance of the issue council and more so if you're attending South by Southwest you should definitely stop by later in the show the design team will reveal what goes into the modular designs for levels and layouts in star citizen but first let's head out to Aaron Roberts in

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   the UK for our studio update so let's take a look hi everyone I'm Aaron Robert I had a global production iCloud improving games I manage our European studios and based here in our foundry 42 Winslow office which is about 10 miles south of Manchester in the northwest of England we are now at 201 people in this office and we have a further nine employees after our new small Derby studio in East Midlands which focuses on mainly facial animations but also some body animation for squadron 42 and star citizen already this year we've hired 20 new staff and for a bit of fun we worked out the combined game design experience of everyone in foundry 42 UK which comes to 1510 years we've just finished work on the expansion of the first floor of Freedom House in Winslow which has given us back some badly needed space as everyone was crammed into just two

3. 00:01:51

   floors for the last three months and it wasn't great the new floor is definitely a breath of fresh air and has given us 76 new desk bases two conference rooms mein retribution and Gladius and a great new break area called fortunes cross some of these names you know others you'll be introduced to as star citizen growth we've got a pretty big update for you guys so let's get to some of the about what we've been up to things this last month on the programming side we've been working on a number of systems to really push the quality and immersion of both squadron 42 and the persistent universe we've completed sprint two of the plane interaction system which improves how the play interacts with items or picks up objects using the new highlighting and inner fork system this will allow a much more intuitive and accessible UI experience for players

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   clearly identifying what they can interact with as well as a clean smooth experience while doing so the new system or the new mission system is is moving really well we are now on Sprint free and designer using the new tools to set up the missions in the PU the old flow graph missions which were not scalable to the need of our dynamic universe of going away to be replaced with a tool which can create diverse and systemic missions giving the player an abundance of different and diverse mission types also time to this the design team here is now also using the new Frankfort developed system editor tool known as solid to visually put together our system maps for star citizen both of these tools will really increase the productivity of our design teams we've completed two locomotion sprints the

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   first to blend the walk into full run and back to walk animation set to create a much more realistic feeling for player inertia whilst using the keyboard the second sprint was to vastly improve AI cuff followings of characters traverse closed spaces and blend between animations in a much smoother manner our graphics team has been busily working improving and optimizing the lighting in the game one major part of this work is a major upgrade to the quality and accuracy of rectangular lights which is a feature the artists have been requesting due to prevalence of these types of lights in science fiction films typically gain support to the rectangular lights is very limited due to their very high cost which is why we spend a lot of time optimizing our shaders to make them viable the diffuse lighting and the reflections are now

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   much closer to real-world behavior and the difference this makes to our character lighting is absolutely huge on the networking side the team is finishing up the serialized variable which will reduce Network Bank network bandwidth pee-yew they finished a new message queue to make the sending and receiving of packets more stable and a finishing after new multiplayer mega map so players can quickly traverse to different game modes without the long load times of the past animation has been very busy also where to reload firing hand pose and collect and deselect work has been worked on for the p4a are pfft PHA are debited shotgun railgun gallant an arrow head previous work has been done for the oxygen and stamina sprint as well as feedback on the female rig so we can lock down final pose in other work includes a no weapon locomotion path update stock sprint update and the prone combat animation

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   path our facial animators in our derby studio have been focusing a lot of s42 work to bring our characters and story to life as well as work on the ps4 3.0 support fixes bartenders shopkeepers and general population wild lines the concept team's work is ongoing on the aegis reclaimer interiors the team has worked on a second pass on weapons to improve reload visuals and add detail where needed and work has been ongoing on uShip weapons also there has also been a lot of contact work for both our PU and squadron 42 environments to give us a strong direction on our planetary landscapes habitations and landing locations but also for our space environments and space stations and it is looking really cool [Music] moving on to the environment team has

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   lots of ongoing work with squadron 42 but has also started early work on the truckstop exteriors including the interior modularity to show the variety of locations we'll be able to place in the PU the team has been working to keep the art style consistent while also accommodating all the functionality required by design the planks with service outposts are just finishing their initial art sprint and the base building set is complete the team have all the elements needed to create small outposts in multiple configurations which are being set up so that they can be distributed across different landscapes now we have our building blocks we can start adding the details which give them flavor and detail also with the surface outpost the team is developing how our shaders are going to react when we placed these architectural elements in various biomes we are looking into a system which will help give us believable systemic integration

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   without having to invest lots of bespoke art time lastly the environment team has been investing time in creating the visual targets for our space look and feel not only do we want to add lots of detail to our locations moons and planets but also we want space itself to be exciting and interesting to explore whether traveling through anything from a nebula or dense asteroid field to a space storm or an anomaly the visual effects team has been

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    focusing a lot of planning to support our new planetary environments including atmospheric flight effects and modular procedurally generated surface basis work has been done on thruster and damage effects for the constellation Aquila high-tech damage effects library updates building on last month's explosion template and also further polish to ballistic SMG weapons the UI team has been working incredibly hard over the last month's put together what you guys have already seen with the new front end interfaces from 2.6 and are still strongly plowing ahead with the needs of both the PU and s 42 this month's work has progressed on our new kiosk shopping interface proving out by our prototype which allows us to make sure it works in all our locations and shop types also with continuing on

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    improving all our in-game heard UI whether walking round or on a ship the audio team has always are supporting all the sprints and tie into and support most of the work the other teams do this month the standout tasks included fixing up performance issues until improvements audio for new ships including the dragonfly Connie ocular prospector and Buccaneer work on the music composition for both work squadron 42 and the PU speech processing fixes the weapon audio and finally fully work so the right noises can be heard from differing material types anyway that's it from the UK office this month I hope you all enjoyed

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    the update and it gave you some insight to how much is going on not only in this office but all for our TIG as a lot of these features we talked about our collaboration between team spanning sometimes all five of our Studios hope you get an interesting glimpse of why the team is working so hard to create a universe and level of immersion never seen in a computer game before this is truly why star citizen will be the best damn space sim ever once again I'd like to thank all our subscribers for helping us put together these updates together and of course everyone community for your incredible support you are all pairing us on to make this groundbreaking universe and dream come alive it's really appreciated by everyone here at cloud Imperium games thank you all and I'll see you in the verse thanks Aaron it's wonderful to see all the ways the Manchester office works

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    with other Studios to improve the persistent universe yeah I can't wait to experience all the definitions and locations that will be available at the PU grows a lot on the topic of expanding pu designing levels and layouts for first citizen has done like a little designing for any other game while most games only want to take a players from point A to point B star system needs to feel like a livable place so traditional game design techniques don't always work which is why we sat down with the game director todd papy and lead level designer andreas johansson up next they'll share how their level design process is unique to star citizen so today we kind of want to talk about our level design process and and so in particular towards the persistent universe and how that differs from what we consider traditional level

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    level design processes both of us can come from a very traditional level design process which is you're building everything very bespoke you start with where where the level what the level goal is where it starts where it ends and then everything getting from the start to end is tailor-made and the path is is is completely chosen and tweaked and tunes by the designer as well as the artists Intel the product ships with all of the challenges that we need to build and solar systems that we need to build in s 42 or in s 42 as well as persistent universe we couldn't use our traditional

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    experience from there so we started talking about in a modular system and what that will allow us to do is basically build archetypes of things in in from there go through and start switching out different modular pieces so one of you kind of runs through like a blob or our greatest challenge is like how do we populate the universe what is the size of our game with enough content to get through the library we have a hundred solar systems in the game we might have safety Michael hundred Space Station's if you have a hundred Space Station's we're looking at 10,000 locations we should have to build and with this whole thing we have four level designers who taken about 650 years to build up the traditional way which was it's totally achievable in our lifetime I I mean it's

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    a long term job right okay so I mean the only way we can will do that is like pub sides like with a modular system we do build applications with the tall sets which is small pieces of walls and corners and doors that we put together into rooms but this is still not fast enough we have to find a quicker way to do this so the way we can approach this is to looking into grouping these smaller tasks into bigger bigger entities rooms we have kitchens we have toilets we have locker rooms we have lobbies we have everything that you can imagine that you need on a space station to to make it feel believable yeah exactly exactly so instead of instead of building every every location unique we build these rooms we populate a big library of assets and then we use these assets to put together the station itself in a much quicker way correct but even then when

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    we're talking about like a base level of an archetype or something like that we're talking about a very neutral feel and look to to that so that when we start adding these modular pieces in a hub section or something like that said you don't really notice you know if those base assets are in that neutral set then you really start noticing the repetition and everything so I mean we when we build things from builds everything using a template palette which is a complete list as opposed to like a neutral neutral that's no textures hangers-on special on it and then we build out the basic shapes and we define the purpose of the room and then we can convert it into many different types of seeds low-tech high-tech all the things we have but we

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    also have another level on top of that which is the content of the room itself so when I do a game let it MMO or all MMOs use some kind of modular system or some kind of tile set to build their locations you will always see repetition at some points you will go into locations say well you know I've been in this room before and we want to get away from this so we gone through many iterations of the modular system we try to figure out how can we alleviate this in the best way possible how can we make sure that even if it is the first time you go through this very room it still feels different and we have a couple of different ways of doing that like Andrea said we have the the tile sets so what we would consider low-tech alpha Bravo Charlie as well as high-tech and then we have super modernism and a few other pile sets that will still need to be built and and

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    worked on then from there we have wear and tear associated with that so there's dirt passes you know how pristine is this is this truck stop is it in the middle of crusader so therefore there's a lot of money that's around that one so that one will be in very pristine condition versus something that is out in the middle of nowhere and it's super rundown and it feels more like a mom-and-pop or route 66 kind of truck stop or something like that then from there we've got like what he was talking about with the with the actual props that go inside there and then we also have the different levels of power piping that that can go in there and so we can make it feel more

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    like a derelict or it's it's up and running and it's got a certain amount of hustle and bustle associated with it based off the AI or or or what is happening in the solar system at that time yeah so if you go back to for example the props that Todd mentioned that is something that is it's a very useful tool for us to change up the feeling of a location so the way we can I'm moving right now is that we won't actually create let's say a bathroom and fill it with all the props that it needs what we will do is we'll create the shape of a bathroom and we'll fill it with area shapes and volumes which can spawn in assets in different confirmations and that means that you might go into exactly the same bathroom in one station and it looks one way you do into the same bathroom another station and there's a different amount

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    of tonnage there's a different man to think there's the mirrors or in a different place it looks different so by using these kind of systems we can get a great amount of variation from our from our smaller component rooms and make the station's feel unique and different even though we actually playing through the similar similar room which is seen before in the process in us building this I I think we really started on this maybe I want to say about a year and a half ago and at that point it was just in Andreasen and another level designer that was really focused on on this and now now we have the other resources really coming in meaning art is coming in and working on how do we do this from an internal perspective but also from an

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    external perspective on the space stations and and how do we make these things have unique silhouettes as associated with them so that when you're coming up to it you get a very clear read of what your into the size of it and you know what is it meant to be is it meant to be a very large space station or is it meant to be a small little space station out in the middle of nowhere and then from there we also have a tech artist slash kotor that is working with us to build our modular systems so that this will allow us to run this just this tool which will allow us to take these different shapes and combine them together with unique points of interests in those and then basically kind of randomize it run through it play

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    it see what it feels like randomized again and then this will allow us to generate the stations that as quick as we possibly can because we do have a lot of content that we need to fill it's just building up these tools and building up these these rooms and the pipeline you know to actually flip the switch and really pump these things out yeah I mean one of the processes we're looking into is we won't actually build we won't have a level designer sitting and dragging rooms in a construction or space station that's how we're going to build it because we have the libraries of all the rooms that we can use in a space station we have all the procedural generation of the props that exist in the rooms the way we're going to bilities are we going to create

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    a basic flow chart of the station which indicates where rooms are supposed to be start with a hub but you come from elevator you go into hub you might move into another corridor that has like a local room as a diner attached to it and we build this flow in scripting tool and then from that slope we can generate a seed and we generate a location basically the eggs will generate a location based on that flow so taking the seed we can generate many many different space stations with the same flow that will look completely different because it gets different types of bathrooms we specified needs a bathroom the Malaysian has a small one another one has a me one different stores different stores it has different props in the rooms when you go in into the location so a space they should always look the same but you

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    can have another space station based on the same seed that looks completely different so it might have the same hub but they actually feel different because they have different problems we have a different layout those of doors and collectors so with that a level design it could technically throw out 2030 space stations in a day but of course we have to go in and double-check all that information we can't just generate ship to to the persistent universe made like John Stone you know that doesn't work like that we have to go in and verify that the layout even though we can generate a large amount of seeds and a large amount of different stations we still have to do the proper work you have to go through check the consistency of everything see that'll work see that we don't smoke in the room and it's going to space and everyone has a very bad day we don't know exactly how this will play out I mean we have our ideas

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    and I think once we're fully through the R&D phase and and it can actually generate you know 15 20 different truck stops we start seeing where the repetition happens and and then at that point you'll be trying to work out how can we cut down that repetition and then the other thing is since we'll have so many different archetypes will be you know ideally in players not running into this area over and over and over again you know we're still very early in the process where we're in white-box phase and and this is really the artists have has started to come in now and are breaking down these tile sets for the satellites for the planetary outpost as well as for the truck stop those are kind of the three main ones that we're

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    focusing on right now and each one of them you know require kind of their own unique thought process on kind of the modularity and how those things work the overall idea is still the same it's just how do those things connect together is very different there's one each I've been running shipping 50 space stations per day that's what yes it's the possibility of generating the layouts that they go quite a bit longer because you still have to make sure that everything exists everything works so with this modular system this is really to build out what we would consider are our lower or even mid tier space stations we will still have very bespoke layouts so for example if you think about grim hacks or

28. 00:22:26

    you think about Hurston or airy eighteen these are very bespoke layouts that we go through and do handcraft in the future we I think all of us would like to see if this system would work in in actually building a city and and doing it procedurally but this is really to build up the other 95% of the content that is in the universe besides just these these big bespoke landing areas the way it work has evolved over time from being not on a level of fineness with Moore's kind of spatial architects where when in a traditional game when you build a level you have to think about the gameplay you have to think about covers and slow and where the

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    enemy's going to spawn and all this kind of thing so this is not really what we're doing when we're building our locations because we want this to feel real once want to feel believable it should be a place where people live and work for months at a time so when we build these locations we have to think about how those rooms connect together what is the flow how would people actually build this it's much more thinking about the space as as kind of a living area for people instead of a gameplay space and that is why the role of the designer especially the level designer in this has kind of evolved into being a little bit more than just kind of gameplay oriented it's less about path from point interest and point of interest to a point of interest to a point of interest this is this is and it's more about making sure that these

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    areas feel absolutely believable and that you know you understand that there was a thought process behind creating this also being a space game against this little bit extra because if we would go to space in the future at the human we would build things modular modularity don't even say the word signal where could I look so it is not that that strange of an approach to take you know you would you would need things to function between different stations for repairs and for expansion of other things so you might end up going to a location in space and it's a pirate base but you can clearly see that this at some point was an old mining outpost that after the war ran out it got transitioned over to a nightclub for mercenaries and then it got taken over

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    by pirates and now we have this which is basically what grim axe is pretty much in you know it's old parking area this is actually where we're at in the level design process and I know it's it's taking us a long time to get to this point but there's a lot of one research and development that have gone into the the process and and how these areas are constructed and it definitely hasn't been a simple task Misha twice-cooked was right exactly I appreciate the amount of detail they put into designing each truck stop and space station especially with the assistance of the modular system I agree and it's really going to help the PU feel authentic and that's it for this episode of a TV but before we go we'd

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    like to thank all of our subscribers whose contributions allow us to make shells like this citizens of the Stars bug smashers and lawmakers if you're not a subscriber and are interested in learning more click on the link in the description below of course star citizen would exist without our backers so big thank you for everything we wouldn't be here without you no we wouldn't and please join us tomorrow at 12:00 Pacific four star Suzanne happy hour jared huckaby tyler witkin and community streamer grits spitter will be playing star marine with fans in alpha two point six point one thanks for watching and we'll see you around the verse oh wait did I mention the UK make ships too I hope you enjoy

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    and thank you for watching so if you want to

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    keep it with the latest and greatest in the star citizen and squadron 42 development please follow us on our social media channels see you soon