Star Citizen: Bugsmashers! - Caterpillar Doors

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:06

   [Music] hey everyone welcome to bug Smashers I'm your host Mark gabin I'm a gameplay programmer here at CAG Los Angeles and I'm here to show you behind the scenes of some bugs and how I smash them let's take a look box bashes everyone we're here inside of the caterpillar and we have a bug um where these fun cargo doors sometimes don't open or they open incorrectly and these doors are a little bit special because there's an interior part and exterior

2. 00:00:53

   part so you can think of the Interior here and the exterior here and when you open it they're supposed to be coincide when you close it they supposed to go together however when you look away from the door the exterior opens but the interior remains where it was until you look at it and then it may start animating or it just gets stuck so if we open it up we could see it everything looks fine um if I close it and look away it'll take a bit bam oh we can see the exterior door closed but the interior which it should show this like metal um stuff with Drake on it and all that panels is not closed so the interior we could actually fly

3. 00:01:42

   out the exterior closed the interior has not uh so if I run over here and hit close you can see it snapped to the close position and now it works correctly so what's going on well there's a bit of code that says hey hey if this thing is visible we could fire off on the animations uh the idea that some kind of optimization so if there's a ship way up there I don't have to animate it because why take up all those CPU Cycles but unfortunately when we're inside the ship the exterior knows that we're potentially visible so it animates but the interior when we switch this way that CGA in the back is not owned by any entity it's just there and because of that that it doesn't animate correctly

4. 00:02:32

   um even though it's attached to the animation of the ship it's just called out because it's like well it's not visible I shouldn't have to worry about it um so uh have this bit of code in Manakin if I enable it what this will do is it checks to see if this entity has a parent which is going to be the ship and if this door the interior has is enslaved to the exterior and the exterior is visible then we allow it to animate even though you can't see it the idea is if you can see the exterior then you should potentially see the interior when the door opens and closes uh so what we do is if the owner entity which is going to be the vehicle

5. 00:03:25

   which is going to be the exterior door is active but the interior one is not we're going to force it to be active uh same thing down here so we're forcing The Entity to be active and we're forcing the skeleton to be active what that will do is this will allow um The Entity to do an update call to tell the animation system hey I'm active so go process my animations and this will allow the skeleton to actually function so two updates we have to do anyy system way to say hey animation I'm ready and the animation system will go yep I'm ready to So in theory this should allow if the outer door is ready the inner door will be forced to be ready so they could open and close together so let's

6. 00:04:13

   the recode button and take a look at what happens all right recode is done let's SP back up the game all right so we're back in the level and let's close the door Magic Door close we won't look at it Wham it's closed as you would expect all right let's open it again let's not look at it not look at it and it's open so we're now getting the interior to update when the exterior is updating so if I close this go into another room open that door go to the other room it's closed correctly and this room

7. 00:05:03

   should be opened correctly so if the interior is um not updating but the exterior is we say hey you should be because we're updating both and then they both play the animation everything works well and you can open and close your doors just by not looking at it well hope you guys enjoyed till next time woo so as you guys saw we had the caterpillar and it's just gigantic long ship and it has all these bay doors in it and you're supposed to be able to hit one or open one up and brings down the bay door and it's a little bit of complicated geometry in this setup because we have an exterior mesh with a door and interior mesh so there's two doors at the same time that open and close and what was happening is when you

8. 00:05:51

   were looking at one of the doors it opened correctly however if you looked that way when the doors opened one of the doors would open but the other would stay intact and it would usually be the exterior door that open and the interior door when you're inside wouldn't open until you looked at it and then it would start animating but by then it would be too late and it' be stuck open or stuck closed and you know you could go around hitting all the buttons and it wouldn't move until you looked at it um it was a simple fix we just made sure that if the exterior animates then we force the interior animate at the same time so the doors would open and close even if you looked the opposite way hope you guys enjoyed until next time thank you for watching so if you want to keep it with the latest and greatest and Star Citizen of Squadron 42's development please

9. 00:06:38

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