Happy Hour Interview: Sean Tracy, Steve Bender, & Jake Ross
Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment
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[Music] and you know bother them because they left us here to do this alone uh but I'm joined by some fantastic guests we're going to be taking questions from Spectrum let me go around the table and uh let's introduce ourselves which direction you you first your direction hi everyone I'm uh Sean Tracy the technical director of content um yeah working on technically directing content do you have a lot of content
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that needs technically direct absolutely we have a lot of content that needs technical Direction uh within it um it's just basically explaining how things need to get done developing pipelines and working on tools uh with the guys to make all the crazy content that we uh we impl within Star Citizen Co who are you I'm Jake Ross I uh am a last minute addition to this uh lovely show yes I think we announced that Eric Eric Davis had been supposed to be on he was not available this morning so uh we wish him well and we'll have him in a future episode yeah and how did that go I'm just I'm just curious how Eric might have might have pitch that because there's there's there's a few people that would sit with stepen I in in any situation I think I think he asked me to come in and babysit is what he did he really say that he didn't say that guy he didn't say that that's a joke all
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right cool um I'm producer in the Austin Studio visiting La this week and can you say why you're yeah no can you tell us why are you visiting what I'm visiting this week um sinking up with with Eric Davis and the production team here I'm I'm here to discuss some some animation things with Steve and uh sync up with the the tech design team here in in La as well so it's been a very productive week Mr bender and I'm Steve Bender I'm the animation director and you've uh you've not been around for a while what uh what have you been up to I've been in Germany actually uh and in the UK doing meetings uh working with uh some of the uh Team members to sort of straighten
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out some of the uh goal teams and goal groups that we're working on things like that um yeah right well let's jump right into it uh we are going to be taking questions from the general chat in Spectrum we are not watching twitch chat so if you are uh spamming that that's your business but we're not going to be seeing it uh first up Sean can you describe a typical day working on Star Citizen what kinds of the things are you involved with uh wow I mean uh typical day working on Star Citizen what are the kind of things that I'm involved with um so the technical content team um and I sort of explained this in a in a studio or Eric actually explained it pretty well in a studio update it's actually made out of two separate teams um one is Tech art the other one is Tech
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animation and basically um the easiest way to describe the guys on my team um is a technical animator is an animator that is technical um basically it's a guy that has the ability to script make tools um and can basically go back and forth between animation and code and back to animation and code um and these are the perfect type of guys to support or to develop pipelines with animation uh and then the same thing on the uh technical art side where we have artists that are technical um and these guys again are developing the exact same sort of thing pipelines and processes uh for the general art teams as well as improving processes so dayto day um it it's a pretty uh hectic day because uh uh much of it is spread across the entirety of the company so uh
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I'm not just working on the ship pipeline I'm not just working on the character pipeline I'm not just working on the animation pipeline it's actually all of it at the same time so uh individuals will U on the team anyways are embedded within these teams and then uh it's a lot of feedback back and forth and uh what this game absolutely requires and because the content is to such a scale um is is an oversight across all those departments to ensure that we're all doing things the same way to ensure that we're not doubling up on work which is super easy to do especially when you've got uh a studio in the UK a studio in Frankfurt and then a studio over here and then another one in Austin so it's really easy to even get the uh uh different people that haven't necessarily talked to each other working on like identical stuff so you'll end up getting double work
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happening and and then that's a real frustrating thing for guys and as well as for uh the teams that are receiving tools and things from us uh on top of that I really enjoy doing a lot of little R&D projects or uh uh novel implementations of things that uh really haven't been done before I really I really enjoy working on that so I try to I try to do as much as that as possible um but of course uh depending on the day um there's there's more or less time uh for that kind of stuff and then on top of it is just bug fixing getting in there and U sorting out problems that are actually within the game dayto day so you're very much the glue that keeps this company together I like to think so but uh you know uh with with with anything um uh it's not um imperative uh that you have a tech artist within a feature team or within a
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within a process but it does uh uh um uh Force multiply that particular team um anytime you embed one of those guys in there they're going to make the process faster they're going to come up with solutions for things um and be able to again like develop content at the scale that we needed for Star Citizen uh but it's very much uh sort of like a a a a client um uh delivering tools to a client for example would' be delivering tools to Steve's team um and uh that can be sometimes easy sometimes not so easy right um so yeah yeah what kind of tools toes see deliver to your team well things like for instance as we're we're doing a tremendous amount of work uh on the story side with C uh cinematics peac
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app things like this and um when they shot the the performance capture they went in and they uh had an editor go in and do do edits like you would say in a movie or something like that um and what that create creates is like a multiple fbx files uh with different time codes that are associated with them um and that can actually be tricky and time consuming um to stitch those together properly in some cases this took half a day to a day to do on say one scene um Sean we talked to Sean's team and and they put together a edl importer that does the job in about 30
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seconds so so like we we were saying it's a force multiplication thing it's really to try to make these things faster cuz if if if uh the cinematics team continued to work that way uh we would take until uh I think you even scheduled it it was something like 2025 or so some ridiculous amount of time that if that was the way we were going to implement it this is how long this was going to actually the sun would burn out pretty much before we actually ship star citizens so and that's obviously unacceptable on on many angles um so yeah has there been any further development on the PVP slider since it was mentioned uh early on PVP slider I'm not exactly sure what you mean by PVP slider I'm not sure I just took the question and that's the uh the idea slip and slide in this game there's
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no slip and slide in this game that's at home for us real life just for us real life so we will update on that one in the future once we have the folks who are actually working on it uh let's is what we saw on ATV a couple weeks ago character creation or character customization and what's the difference uh uh sorry uh the the the difference between a character creation and character customization is that it okay so I've always made a distinction and uh this is really to preempt uh what we are doing for your character creation as a whole so the first step of character creation is literally just selecting objects for your character and that to me is is customization of your character and I mean really the term doesn't really matter it's it's you can use it generally oh oh what are you doing over
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there oh it's happy hour it is happy hour but it's it's afternoon I guess you're okay uh anyways sorry go back to go back into the actual uh the actual question so uh the terms tend to get used interchangeably to me uh it's a two-phased kind of approach again uh we want to give you all the selection of your your your character items first so you select a head a preset head you select a body a preset body you select your clothing you select your armor um and and you put your character together now the next step of that is actually customizing it or changing it right and we've shown some of the DNA system uh which um is something that you know we've been talking about and and developing uh we haven't developed the DNA system itself through this is coming
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from three lateral but we've been developing with that in mind so all of our heads are implemented with a very specific set of rig logic so that once that system was online that is exactly how we would actually be doing that thing so we knew two years well not quite two years ago about a year and a half ago that we would be moving this direction and that would be the end game uh for character uh creation and customization so to me the the creation of your character again is just putting the pieces together and then the customizing of the character is actually pulling it around and making your own version of that particular character um and coloring up your clothing for yourself customizing your character so creation customization kind of two stes stages and the first stage that you guys are going to get is the selection of of of the preset heads of the preset bodies um and and and putting the clothes and
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armor on and then the next level uh will be the actual uhu uh pulling around of uh different pieces of the face and and getting it all combined and one thing I did want to address within that and it was just based on some uh some of the Reddit threads that came out of uh that and and as well as even some uh some YouTube videos uh from three laterals presentation at at GDC um and a lot of people are like oh well cool on the on the face customization they're just combining blend shapes between a bunch of different faces and it is far more sophisticated than that there's no way that you could do this blend shaped sort of combination and still be able to animate those faces um so the DNA system and again three lateral does a pretty good job explaining this within their uh within their within their presentation but what it is is there's a whole set of
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Rigg logic constants that are sitting in this face and you're your face is actually created by this these constants this rig logic code and that's what we call DNA so when you're customizing it there's like a dynamic DNA this is this DNA is changing so you're grabbing a bit of rig logic from this head a bit of rig logic from this head a bit of rig logic from this head depending on where it is and it's actually adjusting all the constants to to suit but all of those heads themselves have 444 blend shapes themselves already so you're not having a base head that just has a bunch of blend shapes sh of all the other heads it's you have this base head that already has 444 corrective blend shapes within it and when it animates those blend shapes work but you combine those rig logic constants onto the different areas of the face and it will still
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animate correctly so maybe to take it even higher level if you were ever to just animate an export an animation for a particular face the the rig is in a certain configuration so if we took Gary oldman's animation and we exported that on Gary Oldman skeleton and then we played that back on let's say uh um uh uh Captain White or Liam Cunningham his face would strangely contort to the to the shape of Gary oldman's face because all those joint positions are all coming from Gary oldman's rig now rig logic puts a generic uh not really generic but a a generic control Set uh but the rig logic constants are all unique per your heads so if you can combine pieces of those rig logic constants you never end up uh uh contorting ing that face so uh Liam Cunningham's face will retain its
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shape and still do the exact same animation that you exported off of Gary's head rather than just you know assuming that shape so hopefully that wasn't too maybe I got a little too deep with it and it's really better if I have some visual sort of uh some visual sort of guides and and we're going to have a whole I'm sure a whole ATV to talk about this and I'd love it'd be awesome if we could get Vlad out from uh three lateral but uh again we've implemented this right into the engine and uh yeah it's going to be really really cool to see and and I can assure you that there hasn't been a customization system before at least not that I know of and I don't know you know everything um but well I'd like to you come close I don't I absolutely do not um uh I've never seen a customization system being able to do that so basically be able to play normal animation and at you know a
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pretty true life Fidelity um and be able to change exactly how that particular face looks and still be able to play those same animations so will helmet and ship Huds return or is it all multi-function displays from here on and the helmet Huds never really went away oh for ships though right when you're sitting in it uh well the main thing with our helmet Hut is that that was meant to give you uh a bunch of FPS feedback so how how much ammo you have what's your health it's kind of your character HUD really is and that's the one that goes on the helmet um I don't know what the plan is uh for ship Huds and and the helmet um maybe Steve has an idea but I'm not so sure we're not really the guys to answer that and really it's a design question more than anything um it's there's no technical limitations going one way or the other um but I'm pretty sure we're going to go
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with the mfds in almost every single ship but you're still going to have some sort of FPS HUD up there because you have to know um uh the status of your character I mean what's your health um because we're going to have well we already have them now uh the oxygen levels and all these other things you're going to want that sort of feedback whilst you're in the ship and still be able to get the feedback from the ship so mfds make more sense I think and what's next for first and third person player animations January monthly report mentioned uh foot anchoring for example okay let's U again there's no first and third person though right very important first slash third uh well yeah right so it's so it's unified and I mean that's a great question for Steve Star Citizen Works off a unified system unlike say a traditional FPS where uh you may be
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using the same skeleton but the animations that are being played on third person and the ones that are being played at least on the hands on first person are um uh slightly different um on Star Citizen they're exactly the same so what we've started doing is we've started building these uh these go teams or feature groups and what they're designed to do is to take uh uh sections of a feature and put together an animator with a coder with a designer uh to be able to start executing those things out um shortterm sort of things that we're working on right now for instance the shouldered weapon really getting the rail gun uh to feel like it's a it's a
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ship Downing weapon um you know you should be able to just pull this thing out and Fire it and just feel like you have just let loose all hell um that's going to be super important once we have the planets in there cuz I you know you can see it right now people firing with ships is St yeah yeah so at the you know we're working on that from an effect side from an animation side from a code standpoint um it's it's about feel right getting everything to feel correct we're working on as well things like uh Sean mentioned oxygen and stuff like that we're working on oxygen and stamina and uh what does it look like when I'm got full stamina and I'm running up against something
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like a a wall that I'm going to uh to mantle up onto okay well what happens if my stamina goes down and down and down and down and down there's a visual difference there right same thing with when my stamina is basically gone and I'm I'm just too exhausted to jump I'm too exhausted to climb um what does that look like um as well continuing with we have new weapons uh that are constantly uh coming into our pipeline um and ultimately you know making an FPS is not just the animation that goes into it it's the code that goes into it you know all this but it's ultimately it's the field if it doesn't feel right
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if it doesn't play well um you you need to be iterating on this until it does so it's the not even it's you have that with the FPS side but Al also have that with the player animations for other things like getting in in and out of a bed and absolutely and stuff like that as well I know that we've been doing some Polish animations on the first person um or polish passes on the first person animations for things like exiting a bed sitting in a chair and making sure that the cameras all situated right and all that exactly we've also been uh working on things like for instance uh usables uh if I'm an AI character and I'm going to be sitting here talking with you guys drinking um a cup of what are you drinking there Steve it's clear um it's either energy drink or vodka one
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at the tail water water umod you we need the AI to be able to walk in sit down in the chair properly to be able to grab the glass to drink from it properly to get back out um and this is from just sitting down at a table like this with a tray table with food with drink um at a bar say in in the nightclub and things like that and also enabling the player to do those sorts of things so um we can have the player sit down at at the mess hall and pick the glass up and use the glass things like um and we're also moving forward on things for player interaction so um picking
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up aside from say a glass but looting things you know stealing things from the world and and stuff like that yeah no the player interaction is kind of an interesting thing there's a lot of little challenges in there that you wouldn't really expect um and and like one of the big ones is just like mesh formats for example so a character generally is made out of skin files so these are the ones that deform and stuff and uh you know an interesting thing with the player interaction system is that it requires physics for the mesh that you're interacting with because when you go into your interaction mode it's got a ray cast against something and oh that's the thing I want to pit okay great you got to pick it up problem is is that these skin files don't have physics so how do you interact with them and it's like it's all these little niggling things um uh that take the time um but again once the system is in place everything opens up you know they clouds
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open Angels sing um but yeah and I mean it sounds like a small thing okay AI pick up a cup great big deal not going to make my game much more fun but what it what it does do is it opens up the ability for us to do everything else that those a need to do that just happens to be the very controlled environment that we can do uh this particular Tech in uh but then once that is AI can pick up then weapons they can do whatever sort of inspect and these kind of things um AI can can pick up uh you know um pieces of the the player even or other AI like I mean there's all kinds of crazy things yeah it's about it's about limiting the Delta between between systems when we're when we're first uh working on them um the the same piece of functionality uh and all the tech that
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gets my hand whether I'm a player or an AI to go to this object this object is oriented properly for me to pick it up and use it is the same piece of tech that requires you when you go to say a shop if a shopkeeper of some sort pulls a weapon out and gives it to you it's the same it's the same Tech and that's the other thing in in the go teams uh we're also trying to get them to um instead of say a a typical task which would be have an AI pick up a cup um it is a a broader Vision so we want them to be able to pick up this and and and this uh this weapon and to give you this
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and to put this away and stuff like that now that we know what that broad vision is for that what is a singular test case that we can do to to pound pound on the issues yeah exactly um and I think it's important always to to to bring that up because I I think a lot of of times we do talk about these little pieces of tech and then there one implementation and everybody's going well what's a big deal AI pick up a cup who cares I mean you know you could get away with that in in a lot of other games go play uh you know moral wind or or you know Oblivion to that effect and and look you know very little interaction within AI in the world hell they even got the same voices when you start talking to different AIS it's like hello there hello there you know was you know about minutes I'm going to go get a bucket and
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I'm coming over get 12 buckets and come back to me and then I'll give you the experience then yeah so um so yeah no and I think it's important to uh to realize that that there's bigger needs from from those systems and though we talk about the one specific example it's it's a bigger thing uh that we're trying to do also those small things are just such a Hallmark of Chris's games you know the little hand on the cockpit and wi commit it's what brings you into the universe you know the fact that we have characters who can carry around a cup matters for star cism sure absolutely sure this one's for me it says uh Ben any updates on Gamescom citizen con plans um no updates to share yet we're very close um planning big fancy events in Germany means you cross your tees and Dot your eyes before you uh set up tickets or anything but
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[Laughter] uh all right one says Steve can you demonstrate what kind of animations You' been working on for melee and hand toand combat that's somebody from the that's totally somebody from the company that's asked that can you please demonstrate so wait wait who oh that's the that's dance emote that's where we this is a family friendly stream yeah I know and we're trying really hard we're trying really hard not to swear not to we've we've been expit you are doing a good job doing a great job and by the way this was a lot of pressure cuz it was like happy hour with Sean and Steve and like it feels like we got to sit here and just you guys make me happy for one hour and it's like I well they said it was happy hour we can't drink we can't swear it's like it's not what's happy about
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for everybody else this is this is Sean and Steve's unhappy hour because this is not what a happy hour for reals this is one it's about but anyways yeah maybe maybe let's talk uh can can I can I can I uh sort of um you want to frame it I want to frame it yeah want my so in almost every single meeting with Steve and I mean I'm really upset that you don't have a prop and maybe could we get get this man a prop hey can stage head can you go get me one can someone get me a firearm in in my office firearm noof banana aoft oh wow that perfect no we're good it pays to carry a banana so in every single meeting and not just like actual
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boardroom type meetings but like Skype meetings um Steve Steve must and you would expect this out of an animation director uh Steve must demonstrate um Steve must demonstrate do examples and uh yeah I think uh no pressure I mean let's talk about pistols well banana pistols we we have we have JJ right now going to get us a firearm um depending upon how fast he goes this may be uh a long period of time for us sitting here and just well just should I just should I just start sing you know while we wait I can run through some of the various Jake gross beard questions Jake beard questions yeah and you'll notice that I
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gave up on mine because I heard that we were going to be on the same stre I'm like I can't be yeah why did you show looking good man no I was really itchy man you got to get you got to blow past you got play play through the pain man you just got to play through the pain oh wait oh here we go all right well so what was the question they want to know them but I want to know about this first actually CU so man goes first yes exactly yeah so uh melee animations uh things it's just some of this is is typical sort of things that you would expect to see uh where you're going to attempt to uh come across and say punch somebody in the face um if if we would have some sort of sharp object on the end this uh you might stab them uh as
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well coming in uh with a butt strike to the face something like that uh one of the things that that we're really excited about is um Sean yes sir would you come with me oh absolutely I would and just look at the camera there is uh is stealth kills so we have various things where we're going to come up behind a guy and we're going to grab him and and stab them and drop them uh we've got one with you don't want to do the front one do you uh we actually have one where a character uh hauls off between another character um we've got left side ones this is where a character will come in like it's it's built into quadrants so
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you have a rear uh a left side a right side and a front so things like on on the front side coming in and again here walk through through the back um uh I think for the front we also have just a just a straight on um you're here and it's just like that okay I'm going to set back down I feel abused so wellow that was exciting good up usually he doesn't use a assistant I that was usually you don't get an assistant that was yeah did you notice I also didn't take out my pocket knife that's true that's good so Jake are you willing to continue
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growing your beard until 3.0 is released until 3.0 is released um I don't know if my I don't know if I don't know if my wife would uh go for that from from honest uh so I'll grow it as long as I can guys no promises though you know no no no no no he used to have did you see him with the he had this shaved off and this here oh yeah and oh that was that I had just the mustache while like the Civil War General look yeah actually I think I think Tyler sent it out on the on the Star Citizen Twitter account at one point so I think they've seen it it that was awesome but that lasted maybe a day so need had a little monocle and everything like that you know yes all sorts of good ideas here Sean will Jake Ross's beard be one of the character DNA options uh perhaps but I know what definitely
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will be and it's the Shawn Tracy haircut o I'm looking at you guys yes every YouTube video I at least see three or four comments somebody tells Sean that he's balding behind doesn't take a whole lot of texture to do I had no idea I went home after one of these ATVs and I read the YouTube thing and it said somebody tells Sean I said what I went to the bathroom and I screamed never so despite all you guys I'm gonna put one in there I'm if I have do myself character art was like no way I'm like I'll do it myself I don't care I will I will lowest poly lowest poly hair we have in the game but the shiniest but the shinest draw calls will be perfect yeah draw calls
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perfect yeah I mean of course we want nice nice full beards um and we want some fun ones too um but actually beard are a tricky thing and that's something that we we definitely need to have a conversation with flad about um in terms of how do you adapt the beard to different facial shapes and all this kind of stuff you can get away with a lot of clipping and stuff but yeah that's a very very nice full beard and doing beard in hair is just a tricky shading problem too so Steve what kind of Animation will uh what kind of Animation what kind of Animation work do animals and plants get animals and plants what kind of Animation work do animals and plants get yes first person third personation first person third person trees you got to
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take cover they need to mantling manling mantling right it it depends I mean I think the the the it's kind of a difficult question to answer um the animals will have can you clarify that a bit more the the animals for instance um any animals that we have uh in the game uh will have a proper animation set for them um so typically for us uh design drives a lot of what it is that the creature can do so um you know that way you don't have um a space deer doing
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Sor no I space doing jiujitsu right stuff like that the best mental image ever a space deer doing jiujitsu kind of what does this sper sound like Steve what do oh oh man someone's recording this that sound is totally going on going off the um but yeah I I hope that answered the question I mean it really is does it's I can mention the the tree stuff like how we actually get away uh with not animating trees cuz of course trees don't need to mantle and you know take cover and and and do Locomotion but trees do need to rustle in the wind things need to move around they need to bend With the Wind um so uh back at krych this was a huge thing right like I mean we had palm trees we had huge huge
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forest trees and they all needed to rustle in the wind the palm trees actually needed to bend and move around so uh we have a lot of the same uh uh uh technology that was being used for that it had to be reimplemented in kind of a new way for the planets um and because of the sheer amount of them uh but we developed some tools to help the artist to mark up the trees in such a way we actually use vertex colors so every single channel does something a little bit different um so and you know it's interesting that we keep talking about this cuz like Zone coling used vertex colors and all these other things but um on I can't remember what exact I'm trying to remember what exactly each of the channels does uh but one of them is like the intensity one of them is the frequency and the other one is like a masking so basically where it goes now uh the guys have developed some tools so that the the artist can actually mark this up a
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lot easier so that they're not just grabbing individual birs and saying okay this one needs to move this much this one needs to move this much um and and we did develop a pretty good process back at krych to make sure that again the trees could Bend in the wind they could rustle in the wind and uh even better is when you walk through things like grass and that kind of things they Bend away we had touch bending and detail bending is what we call it so detail bending is the sort of stuff that happens uh with the wind and then the touch bending is something that you you walk through grass and things like that it's very visual effects uh or physics depending upon how how it works oriented it's not really a um it is animation in the sense that it it moves um but it's not but it's vertex animation it's it's not skeletal character animation or something like that right now with regards to atmospheric flight will the
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different gravity of different planets impact the uh flight model differently uh yes uh that's what I understand is happening um now I'm not directly involved with uh John pritchet and the ifcs work that happens uh within the planet atmospheres um but yes I understand that that's already been done actually so it already takes that gravity into account now what I don't know is that whether that gravity is variable right now within it system if it reads what the planet is actually doing in terms of gravity cuz the planets all have variable gravity already um and it's interesting because we could have just made it so that it was based on the size of the planet um and we could probably still do something like that so the bigger planets obviously have more gravity and the smaller ones have less or whatever um but yeah am I misremembering is is gravity something that's already was
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already in cry engine when we started that sounds no there was no gravity in cry engine when we started we just floated around in zero g in every single game I'm just teasing you um yes of course we had gravity within the cry engine but uh one thing to keep in mind was that the gravity was a was a perfectly you know downward Z VOR um we didn't have the idea of you know a spherical gravity shape right so then when you're sitting on this side of the planet being pulled to the center of mass for the planet um that was never a concept that we had before so our very very high level um or low L it's you know that's funny whenever we talk about programmers sometimes like a really good programmer sometimes we say the high level programmer but the best programmers are the low-level programers so it's like saying a lowlevel our low-level physics programmer Chris Rain um should we just call on assembly
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programmers we should just I don't know we can just call them I don't I I don't want to say anything bad about him because I need all kinds of work from him so we should call him Mr awesome Mr uh no Chris R yeah and also Chris Roberts all the all the Chris's all the Chris we're getting into in trouble let's move on with regards with regards to melee and hand to hand will there be counters there are uh currently uh design discussions on um full hand-to-hand combat so um a couple months ago I did some just rough blockouts for uh punching punching
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blocking uh and things like that um counters these are all these the the the quick answer this is uh probably um uh there there are um design docks floating around for things like this we have talked about um things like what happens when you get into a bar fight or something like that um uh the the piece of technology that actually creates the stealth kill result would be in part some of that same technology that creates a counter so if you're just going to do a block um you don't really need anything from
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the other character right your your hand's just going to go up and you're going to block or something like that um but if you're going to counter like you're you're going to do uh he's going to come barreling down on top of you with something and you're going to to go into like a I don't know like a show mini arag or something like that you need to you need the two characters to be um in sync and that in sync connection then um is the same piece of technology that would be a takeown yeah and maybe to to manage expectations here a tiny bit too like we're not talking Dishonored level you know type type melee combat and we're not talking you know for Honor or or or anything quite
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quite as evolved right this isn't the core of the game we're going to have we hope to have pieces of that of course um yeah I can't even say where where it's supposed to happen but uh uh yeah um just to yeah maybe manage the expectation there a tiny bit we're not making Dishonored uh is the thing so a lot I mean a lot of the the the the further down the line melee system stuff is is scheduled for later on this year sure Jake you hosted the Studio update on ATV yesterday is is there anything you didn't share that you wish you could have oh man um yes more of his smile more beard more beard I wish my beard had been longer um
- 00:39:15
no uh there's a there is work going on in Austin on a specific ship that we have not uh talked about yet and I wish I could have shown that off um but that will come in due time yes it will yeah very very good oh man there are many challenges to making Star Citizen where's this weapons yeah person of one of them is this guy yeah and again we share what what's one challenge you're working on now now and how are you a to overcome it since we a job interview what are your strengths and what are your weaknesses my superhero would be
- 00:40:03
the Green Lantern boo Bo I'm just kidding it wouldn't be my superhero nobody's superhero is the Green Lantern nobody's like man the Green Lantern he really stands out awesome like thaty uh I don't know every day is is chalk full of challenges um the the difficulty I think in talking about a couple of them is like uh I don't know that we're going to over come it or um I don't know that I'm going to solve it in in a particular way or whatever um I don't know but if we don't know we'll never stuff we hit this morning I mean actually scale extensions are messing up right now that's pretty fun thing um this is pretty frustrating actually um we talked a lot in the character customization stuff that we uh showed in terms of the port setups and uh attaching different armors and the helpers moving and all
- 00:40:50
this kind of stuff or Works fairly well um except we've run into a tiny bit of an issue with um similarly named joints and the joint ID um The Joint ID is getting mangled basically so uh a joint thinks it's in one place um in the animation but actually it's in a different place in the character so I've got an awesome video just from uh one of my senior Tech artists this morning I think you saw it as well with uh a guy that you know we reattached a torso piece to him and all of a sudden was that the nose going yeah and and also well his head detached so his head is now on his on his for knuckle uh because the ID like like it's on the middle finger but that's his root now of his head It's cool cuz he can still talk so so but no like you've got the legs the chest is over here and
- 00:41:41
maybe we can I don't know if we'll share the video it looks pretty awful so but you got the legs the chest is right beside it and then the head is out on the hand and then we play animation on it and it kind of looks pretty reasonable the chest does the thing the legs do the thing but they're all kind of weirdly attached in separate so I mean that's an issue we run into right now and uh uh working with Paul ryel and trying to trying to work that out and evil hereg back in U uh back in franford we can solve this easy on the lore side we just say it's space mutation that's what happens when I said procedural characters job done if we need Spore Creatures we're good well I think I think the the answer from my side would be that a lot of the stuff that we're doing uh because it it involves multiple departments um in uh multiple different people's expectations
- 00:42:30
is that it's it's I use this example from time to time in that pick an object let's say a cup right um and I say to you um I need I need a cup right likely um you're not going to model this exact Cup right you're going to give me something else but that's not what I'm expecting I'm expecting this cup I'm sorry two cups no no looks not good so the setting the expectations being able to say okay we're going to work on uh breathing and and stamina and what it not only the final result that the player should be able to feel or play
- 00:43:18
Within the product um the way that we tend to solve this is by removing as much um sort of outside requirements um as we can so we we take code out of of the equation at First We Take animators we put them together obviously with the goal team where the programmers are the designers are the animators are we talk about what we're trying to achieve and we create the animations uh as a previs basically to say this is ultimately what this needs to look like what this needs to feel like then we're
- 00:44:08
able to take um that result and we're able to put it in front of people and say this is what we're trying to achieve how do we get there it's a hell of a lot easier for me to get a model of this mug if I send you the picture of the mug and then you guys go okay we have to model this and look at the specularity of that and oh this kind this is kind of a matte finish here then it is for me to go give me a mug not that mug mhm yeah not that either yeah but can you make it black but not that black right right so I think that that's super super important for things um being successful uh communicating um between uh different departments and and also within the goal
- 00:44:56
team and being able to sort of you don't want to get deep into these things and then someone go oh uh yeah that's not what I meant yeah these and these two things that we just mentioned here you were talking about struggles or are you know you have bugs that are introduced that you have to work through and solve and this these R&D type type phases of of um of these features that we do are huge um things you have to take into consideration when you're scheduling when you're creating schedules because like you don't you don't know what bugs are going to come up you don't know how long certain R&D tasks are going to take so these are things as production that we have to take into account and sometimes we're we're extremely accurate depending on how much experience you have and the thing you're working on but sometimes we're we off just because we don't know what we don't
- 00:45:43
know and uh so when we're creating schedules that that U we're putting out uh to you guys you know that's something that we're we're absolutely keeping in mind is is okay what kind of bugs the bug fixing time do we need to allow for this and what kind of uh R&D time do do need a lot for this as well so sure and a lot of times like another thing that comes up too is like reviews um of of particular assets or particular things that we've done or particular features even um a lot of times like uh in the past anyways the schedule had been such that you know we we didn't a lot for a lot of review time so at the end of it the feature came in whatever was online and maybe I reviewed it or Steve would have reviewed let's say it's an animation for example and actually Steve's not fully happy with that but in in such a way that actually we're out of time so so sorry Steve you know I know you don't like it but guess what it has
- 00:46:30
to go you know so you know that's a lot of that just comes out of um I think organizational um U maturity in terms of you know the organization is maturing as a producers um and yeah so we created like those future teams and things like that we said well you know uh we we want to have characters going in let's say a metol we want to have characters going in sitting down uh having a proper AI schedule where they go through their their days yep uh you know they get up they they go they sit down they eat something they go to the bathroom they do you x y and z um so we could we create animations for it they could create code for it whatnot and whatnot um but when those things were were split apart what you were
- 00:47:18
getting is you were getting animations and you're getting code but the two things didn't always mesh so what we did is we we said okay stop we're going to create as we talked about this simple Delta um and put together an animator a coder a designer uh a tech guy and said this is what we're trying to achieve and we would start uh let's say on a Monday and uh two Fridays after we have an official review so every two weeks they're putting out in a way a little bit of a a mini product yeah right where we can say great show us that in the game show us that in the level sure right um and during that that time period
- 00:48:08
um I'm able to talk with the animators involved or the leads involved with that and say ah let's let's keep this in mind let's adjust this I like what you're doing here let's do more of this let's do more of that but what it also does is it gets the animators to work work with the designers and together they come up with with solutions to things that we may not have foreseen uh from from the GetGo they're like oh wait a minute um if we have all the cups sitting on the table right and and we say the character goes and just reaches that cup the guy next to him has the cup in the same spot mhm okay so what if they both go to reach the cup at the same time right now you got five or six doing that look it's like the rettes
- 00:48:57
right so so instead they said well what if we just did something simple like this and then this one's over here okay so now what they're doing is within the the goal in the vision for what it's supposed to look like they're actually going in and and driving the feature themselves as well and um making decisions that head towards that goal and because they're doing that on a daily basis we're able to head off a lot of these issues um that we may have had previously where you know say something would fester for for a couple weeks um or someone would
- 00:49:45
do what was on the task list but not necessarily what was fully intended right and because that the those people are now working together as a group they're like hey this works but that thing doesn't oh yeah okay I didn't realize that was a secondary portion of this hold on let me let me work on this for a little bit I can get back to you with it right and it it makes it more uh exciting and and more where the teams are able to to to almost self-manage themselves and we're able to actually direct yeah in a more efficient way yeah it's just it's so much more efficient and uh you know a lot of this might have been obvious to to some people but uh you know the the the company again has matured and grown in in pretty organic way so we we have to
- 00:50:35
make these things very clear and like this is something that needs to happen this way this is more efficient and just like we iterate on technology we have to iterate on our on our production process and and that's really what we're doing and even right now we're sort of we're in a sort of half half and half basically we've got very linear kind of pipelines right so like the ship art pipeline for example is it's it's you know that is like a an assembly line right now like that is perfect and there's no you know you're not going to make a a feature team for or a goal team for the ship hard pipeline because things are very very solid um but they they they are in their own go team in a way and that like for instance the the guide the animators in ATX um they they worked very closely with the ship art team to create um a
- 00:51:24
system that would allow the ship Arc team to have a lot of flexibility in the the visual look of the ships um but for instance like if I put a a stair here and then on the other ship I put a stair here did you notice the difference right um if we can keep the if we can keep the stair here staring at Ben's banana that's a story of your life right so uh but we if we if we can keep the things the the places that the player um connects to a ship in um similar metrics I think there's something like 29 separate metrics for just entering at
- 00:52:13
the moment right um we are able to spend creating um solid animations for those and the ship team is able to go and create as many ships as they as they want they utilize portions of those templates um and it enables us to be able to get ships out sooner to to you guys than we did before and now now that team moves like this they they know how to do this stuff inside and out and it's like hey we got a new ship coming in cool which which metrics do you want to use oh we're going to use this for the answer we're going to use that for the exit we're going to use this cockpit thing not a problem we can set this up and it's it's so much smoother and and
- 00:53:05
yeah it's it's a perfect example of a a team that um initially had all these disparate parts that that began to as they started working through this process now now they've got a solid process right they're and don't forget this is all people in different Studios too across different time zones so it's incredible La Austin um and UK I mean it's just yeah yeah it's incredibly complicated so well let's wrap this up um okay well I hope it was a happy hour I it was interview I hope so uh thank you guys for coming on um anyone out there who is at PAX East in
- 00:53:53
Boston be on the lookout for uh Jared and Tyler Prime they uh I don't know if they have anything to give you but I'm sure they'll want to talk to you um tell them I said hi uh thanks everybody we will see you next week on happy hour Cheers Cheers yep
- 00:55:04
Mullan we forgot we had something yeah so uh what you're looking at here guys is um this is the FPS feature test level and what you can see here is a a tremendous amount of bugs and random nonsense that's happening um that little by little we're we're working The Kinks out of but what this is doing is the the whole goal of this is that I'm able to start off at the beginning of the level and run through everything uh till we get to the end where it's smooth you can see there's a counter on the Le hand side that's telling me how long it takes for me to get there um I'm able to run through a lot of the the features The Vault the mantle um cover for instance and things like this um and it's a very
- 00:55:55
quick way for me to sort of get the the status of uh the the FPS overall this particular area that's cool this particular area here is uh lava so um this this lets us know like this is this is the thinnest object in the game basically that the distance-wise that you should be able to Traverse on um here I did it really well often I fall into the lava because I'm a bit of a putts um you can see here uh we're able to kick out just like you guys uh we're able to kick out third person and uh review the an the animations um uh the lighting on this level has a is is a uh
- 00:56:48
issue we're working on work in progress that's going to be be updated yeah it's not like the players ever see it so as long as it looks as long as you can see yourself I guess um you know here's here's the weapon Arsenal so being able to test uh test fire on this we also have uh ranges uh that's 10 20 40 50 and I don't know if you could see this one you'll see it eventually but that tiny little green square there that's 100 um yes that's me pegging things at 100 yeah but if you ever went to the range with Steve for reals well yeah I can't hit the broadside of a barn from two feet um but
- 00:57:38
uh oh you can see here you notice this is bugs in all um so you know we do have some some bugs uh that are showing up in this and that that enables us to sort of get a baseline as to where things are um interaction St yeah player interaction so picking up boxes obviously his pickup animation uh didn't appear to play properly there um walking um oh cool the Eva thrusters are on apparently his Eva thrusters are still on and things like this um but this is I I spend at least an hour um every day uh in this level uh reviewing stuff recording things making
- 00:58:28
notes um putting uh tasks on the backlogs for the different groups uh goals on the different back uh on the backlog for different groups um you know here's the gray cat obviously the The View on the gray cat way way too stable um so today I may actually go in and modify the eye stabilization parameter of that in it's probably because we didn't put gForce on that like we did with the Ursa Rover oh okay well we can probably sense look into it today maybe we can it's good idea just little kill that bug um it's good stuff yeah so this is
- 00:59:15
melee some melee stuff that's what you were doing to Sean right yep yep uh did I do a takeown in this oh may not have done a taked down it's okay let's bring the the feedback up and you can do it live here with Sean um but we also wanted the AI if you noticed him I was shooting at him earlier um he's also enabled for takedown so I can I can run up behind him and and stab him in the back and stuff like that um it's like a private torture chamber for AI for you yeah the video yeah basically you know we could pick up grenades and throw grenades here and and all sorts of things so cool next time we should have videos to just chat about that'll be fun I can dance if you want well all right everybody thank you
- 01:00:03
again I hope you enjoy that animation and uh learning how uh Steve's process works we'll see you next
Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.
