Star Citizen: Around the Verse - What is Mega Map?

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] hello and welcome to around the verse our weekly look at the development of Star Citizen I'm Sandy Gardner and while Chris Roberts visits the Frankfort Studio I've been joined today by CG supervisor Forest Stefan thanks for stopping by Forest uh and thanks for having me it's uh great to be here in today's episode we'll share how the mega Maps feature eliminates load screens between levels which means more time for gameplay and less time waiting very important stuff very important uh but first let's kick it off with Eric Davis and our Los Angeles Studio update take it away Eric hey all I'm Eric Ken Davis Senior producer here in Los Angeles we've had quite a busy month since we last talk so let's just dig right in to start off our ship team has been working on the Drake Buccaneer art has created a custom dual weapon Mount all lods have

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   been generated the tech content team has implemented UV 2s and damage Tech design is making their flight balance paths which will get it ready for flight with sound VFX is making solid progress as well the Drake Buccaneer will be a great addition to the Drake lineup and we really can't wait until you're in the cockpit the ship team has also made a lot of progress on the newly revamped RSI Aurora the white box phase is now complete which includes a proxy laying out the space establishing the animation positions laying out the screens and making sure the characters could hold the controls we've started the final geometry on the cockpit in an effort to improve the inside of the ship now that Tech design has implemented all the art updates into the ship's new archetype the RSI Aurora is heading into graybox it's been awesome to see all these different Pieces come together and breathe a whole new life into an already great design we're really looking

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   forward to finishing up and getting it back in the air there are a few other ships making their way through design as well as a slew of quality of life bugs fixes for the upcoming 262 release but we're not not quite ready to reveal those just yet in addition to ship production the tech Design Group completed the design for multi-function displays or MFD screens which control power heat coolers Shields weapons counter measures and missiles in preparation for item 2.0 functionality these designer prototypes are meant to help us understand what's needed and see how everything will interact with each other once these designs have been approved the amazing UI team will create an interface to take advantage of that functionality that engineering is implementing in the back end once the system is in place a ship that is staffed by knowledgeable crew will be able to operate their ship beyond the default system settings and minmax the

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   various ship systems to suit not only your play style but potentially save your life during a devastating attack this month QA aided La development checking a variety of fixes for 262 while also providing support to Austin QA with PTU and live sanity checks smoke tests sweeps and deployments and helping new hires get up to speed with the game as for Feature work the team swept ship destruction V effects item system 2.0 and implementation of recent Loadout changes and tested multiple iterations of new targeting and ESP code for a quick reminder on quality assurance terms a sanity check basically ensures the game loads which is now automated but still could take an hour and then another 30 to 60 Minutes to investigate any error that Ares a smoke test checks the basic functionality but this takes 6 to eight people roughly a day if there

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   aren't any major issues and a full sweep means checking everything you possibly can a proc process that which requires a much larger team and can take over a week as you'd expect full sweeps are most arduous rigorous and intense but also incredibly important now over on the narrative team they've been hard at work at some additional 3.0 missions they've also started some much needed documentation for posters and props to help populate the world of Star Citizen they've also made a lot of progress on the Shan history and Society documentation by creating an equivalent Time Capsule approach for the Shan history from birth to present day also those that saw the three lateral head test portion of GDC a few weeks ago we can now talk about how the team has been doing breakdowns of ethnog groups in the Star Citizen Universe utilizing the power behind that technology as our

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   character customization is rapidly coming together now the engineering team has begun work on the new shop entity that uses data core components it will allow shops to easily stream be streamed in and object containers which will be finished in the next Sprint the plan is to make shops more Dynamic and reactive to the economy by retrieving their inventory from the back end the engineering team also added a new attribute to vehicle xmls that allow designers to specify the interior grid type of the vehicle small medium and large this is a pretty big optimization that will reduce memory storage as All Ships previously defaulted to medium size now last time we discussed the development of the new light group entity that was equipped with a state machine to serve as the ultimate life switch now the implementation of the

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   Core State switching functionality is complete the next step is to start using the Light Group in our vehicles and environments and replace all instances of old layer switching method of light management this new light group entity has allowed us to reduce the number of Lights we've been using which has dramatically impacted performance for example on the Drake caterpillar we were able to reduce from hundreds almost thousands of entities down to 90 or less with no visual impact and that's just the beginning in the upcoming weeks we will continue to evolve the light group with additional features based on feedback from other departments we've been developing also a framework in ifcs or intelligent flight control system for the autopilot to handle situations like a takeoff and Landing sequence this also applies to AI Control they'll be

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   providing the AI developers with a set of tools for controlling the ship like a a move to or change to Etc this will improve stability and predictability of ship motion under optimal conditions there was also a large large update to our room system and atmosphere containers with the addition of several new features as well as better debugging tools and several bug fixes so far the room system has only been implemented in a few locations but these changes will allow us to fully Implement rooms and atmosphere throughout the various location and ships in the game at the moment all the air locks you enter and exit are scripted events they don't Factor an atmosphere of any kind with this new system we'll be able to replace this setup with an actual room and atmosphere that allows for a Dynamic experience in addition to the room system changes they've added a feature to allow the designers and artists to

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   set wear and dirt parameters for loadouts this functionality comes in two levels overall as well as individual values for specific items wear and dirt values are used by the render node to set Shader parameters that make items look old or Dusty scuffed up and burnt out you've seen an example of this on the module surface Outpost seen in the last week's Studio update this task also used Loadout edit edor side work where the team added UI support to edit wear and dirt we've recently also started working on a pretty massive task called The Entity owner manager to give you a little background this is a core feature required to take our gameplay from a multiplayer game to a persistent online experience this system will be responsible for managing ownership and lifetimes of all the entities in the game and will work in conjunction with the backend persistent systems to

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    indicate Dynamic changes to the world that need to be tracked and persisted across sessions The Entity owner manager will also need to work with various game and entity Engine Systems including debris Salvage criminality streaming missions cargo shop and much more to help create the persistent experience across clients and servers in other news the team has been working on scanning subcomponents which require us to do some slight refactoring of the object data bank now the data Bank can support the storage of child entities which will be the subcomponents on on ships players Etc in doing this we also improve the thread safety of accessing data within the data bank which allows us to move some calculations onto other threads which will help improve performance this work is focusing on two big elements the Ping component and angle of focus the

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    Ping component is the method in which a player or Pilot will send out a wave to see if there are objects out there of note within their scan range this could also be a ship an asteroid or even signal traces that Mark whether a player entered or exit ited at Quantum travel other players can detect these traces which could have some pretty heavy game implementations for example if you were an outlaw it would allow you to track potential prey angle of focus allows players to adjust the angle with which they're scanning a smaller angle will provide more range but only contacts within the angle can be detected we're currently refactoring the underlying radar query logic to use Zone queries rather than a huge iteration of registered radar objects which will make the the scanning system much more efficient now if you remember from our

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    last update our Tech content team supports and implements every pipeline within Star Citizen and Squadron 42 one of the main focuses for this team is performance improvements for instance we changed our mesh vertex and position formats which massively improve streaming of these meshes as well as reduces build build size they've also been improving the python integration within our editor which allows for faster development of python tools usable by every Department across the company they can now script any sandbox process they want for example placing asteroids generating modular outposts Etc all of which saves a tremendous amount of development time on otherwise tedious and timeconsuming tasks you also may have noticed the player helmets were disappearing once they got to a certain distance away from

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    you as discussed in the character customization feature at not too long ago we've now converted all helmets to a DOT skin format the conver conversion was important to allow a unified LOD ratio across the character skins meaning no more helmetless people running around the verst so don't be afraid as the oxygen system comes online we would hate to be the reason you lose that FPS Battle On the Dark Side of the Moon to ensure this is easier in the future Tech content has also created tools that rig skins and exports automatically this dramatically reduces Dev time from potentially an entire day down to just a few minutes now that head helmets are optimized heads were next on the agenda we've successfully converted all heads to use the human skin Shader developed by our Graphics team since we do 44 different areas of Blended wrinkles and

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    Blended diffuse our texture cost was quite high at about 100 Megs per head with this change we were able to save roughly 90% of the original texture memory cross without a discernable visual impact this means we can have a lot more characters in the scene without melting your graphics card with the implementation of the female character progressing rapidly we've transferred thousands of animations from male to female to complete her Motion Set and provide a data for animation to start iterating on this will also allow us to focus on refinement and subtleties without compromising on what she'll be able to do when exploring the universe there's quite a bit more to do but we're making leaps forwards every day another character animation tool the tech content team has been completed is this track and Report the number of

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    various Wild lines each character will have in the universe with our over 1255 pages of script for squadron 42 which includes all story lines as well as wild lines we needed a tool to continuously generate reports on how many we've completed and what we have left to solve once the various lines are all in the system will be able to pull those lines based on player action and situation but and also randomize the potential wall line response so the NPCs aren't repeating the same line every time to help our cinematics team focus on content needed for squadron 42 a tool was written to allow for visibility of scenes before they even hit the engine this allows for fast exporting of animations and preview renders which are then automatically uploaded to shotgun which makes it much easier and faster to review than many hours of cinematics or Squadron 42 the character team has been blasting

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    through the concept phase the high poly phase and onto the in-game mesh of the heavy Outlaw next it's going to go into rigging and implementation we've also sent the light medium and heavy female marine armor as well as the unders suit to rigging and implementation once we had that male base suit done we utilized a wrap technique with with adjustments to save development time and ensure we're getting everything together as quickly as possible another suit that move has moved through the high poly phase is the female Explorer suit so she'll be exploring the universe in no time on the Squadron 42 character front both the Eva Deb crew and the Marine BDU have gone through high poly and are onto the in-game mesh and texture string phase which means they should be in rigging and implementation in no time in a category of things we can't talk about

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    we've continued developing the vanuel as well as medium and heavy versions of the OMC Outlaw faction and lastly the mechanized Titan suit is in R&D along with other alien concept sculpts and a whole lot more that we can't reveal just yet but stay tuned for updates in the coming weeks well that does it here for Los Angeles thank you so much for your support we'll see you again soon as you may have seen on our production schedules our developers have been working on a new system called Mega Maps understandably some of you may not know what that means uh yeah it is a tough uh concept uh to grasp in the simplest terms Mega map means to eliminate the loading screens um so it basically uh streamlines the object containers while loading in and out the different areas uh and the different game modes the goal of Mega Maps is to allow players to

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    travel through the universe without interruption or lag time to better explain how Mega does this let's take a look the mega map is a new feature that we're putting into the game to cut a lot of the frustrations with load times out for people essentially eliminate load screens all together the issues that drove us to this technology come from the unprecedented scale of this universe we're creating what this means is we couldn't load it into one m without crippling memory and performance so we divided it up and put the segments into object containers which we could load as needed the problem with that was that it meant players would need to wait through

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    a series of load screens as they moved about in the game the mega map was our solution we load the mega map as we would a standard map the mega map itself is empty but once the mega map's loaded we actually start to fill the mega map with content our various game mod modes via um object containers so we would load the mega map which is empty load the front end which is a set of object containers load the front end game rules which tells the game how to work in that game mode the user would then pick a new game mode to play at that point we throw away all the object containers we throw away the game mode load in the Free Flight game mode and the ding star object containers but we do that via

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    streaming rather than a complete level load so we're able to shave um the vast majority of the load time down to a few seconds rather than long enough to Warrant a load screen as you can see even with mega Maps switched on there is still a load stall it's only a few seconds compared to the 30 seconds it takes to load without the mega Maps feature but it's still something we're working to eliminate by making the feature operate asynchronously so gam playwise that's great for players if they want to be in the front end changing some settings they can go to a hanger they can put some items in the hanger look at their ships then immediately go back to the front end they load screens pick a game mode um as race mode they can dive straight into um race mode play around with one ship

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    decide they don't like that ship come back to the front end switch to a new ship still no load screens rather than having a process where they're sing the front end and they have to think carefully where they want to go because they know there's load screen coming up go there do some stuff and then load screen again so by adding this new feature we're putting into the game the first application of um a lot of the object container streaming which will be um a fundamental part of the Pu experience moving forward as the Pu becomes essentially like its own Mega map with a bunch of sets of object containers that will stream in and out as you move through that map the the thing that makes this tricky in

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    terms of gameplay programming is with the new flow we're now not destroying and recreating the player between game modes so with the new setup it potentially makes it easier to persist some of some of the players attributes between these game modes because the fact that we're not destroying him and recreating him so one of the more interesting bugs that the new Mega map flow has produced was QA finding that they could um place down a liquor cabinet in their hanger take a few swigs from a bottle get slightly uh blurry visionwise then uh decid they didn't

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    want don't want to be in the hanger anymore or they want to go fly their ship in free flight however with this new flow the players not being destroyed and recreated so unfortunately for you the player you now find yourself in the ship with blurry vision trying to fly through space which is probably not the best thing for a player to uh be doing so it's something we'll obviously be looking to fix but a nice uh illustration of the kind of interesting challenges that we're facing um fixing up this new flow Mega map for multiplayer is a little bit more complicated it builds on top of the the single player implementation the tech is the same up to a point the additional

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    challenge is that each level in our multiplayer game lives on its own server to handle the tens of thousands of players who might visit it at any one time a multiplayer match and it comes to an end and you want to change to another multiplayer game mode and map then you're going to have to um unload the map that you're in say d star go back to the front end make your selection as to what you want to do and then load into the the next map say broken Moon doing pirate swarm or whatever because you're going from connected to a server back to the front end we've got to drop the connection but we've got to keep the mega map in memory uh empty out all its contents put all the front end pieces in let the player make a selection and then go and connect to another server while keeping a map in memory at the same time and then streaming all the new pieces

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    for the new map it's a bit like trying to unplug your computer and then replugging it without losing power and that's not the way we've been doing things before it's been very much uh get to the end of a a match you drop the connection to the server you clean everything out and it's kind of like a hard reset of the system load in the front end make your selection end of that hard reset of the system connect to the next server so we're just keeping the map in memory but switching connections uh to servers and switching between single player and multiplayer game modes at the same time uh without doing this this reset which is a bit of a challenge because the way the engine's being built it's kind of the assumption that once the system starts up it'll either be in single player mode or it'll be in multiplayer

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    mode and it'll always stay that way until the system shuts down again but now we're changing these things dynamically all the time um so that can create a lot of bugs so it's kind of been a process of uh trying it out finding out what it breaks fixing it trying it again finding out what it breaks fixing it and we just keep doing that over and over taking a a system like um Crusader and ex extending it you might have um an object container for each of the stations uh each of the coms arrays there'll be an object container that contains references to the object containers for where all these other things are and they'll just be sort of left there very lightweight form and then as you head towards say Port Allisa the object container for Port Alisa will

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    get loaded in and expanded and that may contain other object containers that contain parts of the Interior or different decks or whatever and they'll get loaded in on demand so it it kind of you have a skeleton structure that's defined by an object container and then you can fill in the various parts and collapse them down again and load out another part and then know what scale they going down would say a rooms an object container um assemble them together to make a deck assemble them together to make space station that's an object container interior exterior possibly could be different object containers that's linked to an object container in space it says where that space station is and that will be parented by the sort of root system object container it says where all the different space stations are on that system and different planets and so on so it kind of scales out that way but uh so far it's only um been done

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    for the star Marine maps and Arena Commander Maps um when we bring this technology over uh to pu it'll have to be done through Crusader and the other systems that are going to come online uh so it's a lot of work that we need to do still but the the technolog is kind of at the point where we can start seeing the benefits of it now star citizens question of scale really isn't it it's it's taking a standard game and making it much bigger than than anything else that's you know currently out there um and the only way you're going to be able to do that is by focusing on what the player needs to know and tailoring that experience for each player even though they're all connected to the same server so you're always looking for opportunities to to not do something and avoid that little bit work well on the

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    computer side of things anyway yeah thanks guys for that Insight on Mega Maps cutting down on weight time is really important to improving gameplay yeah absolutely uh I also look forward to seeing the uh multiplayer Mega Maps rolled out in Star Citizen yeah and then many players will be able to quickly Traverse the universe at the same time now before we wrap up today's show we want to express our gratitude to all of our subscribers yeah shows like this one would not be possible uh without your support which is why we are rolling out new subscriber perks due to popular requests from our current subscribers we've got a third edition of jump point in the works and we're also making the Free Flight of the month a permanent addition for all of the subscribers more details on the subscriber perks so take

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    a look hey everyone I'm Sandy Gardner and I'm Alexis we wanted to take this chance to thank all of our subscribers both centurions and imperators for your ongoing support we look forward to continuing the journey with you you and we've updated your subscriber perks if you're new to the Star Citizen Community Star Citizen subscription programs were created to provide an added level of community interaction and offer you some unique perks as a subscriber Centurion or imperator you get access to jumpo jumpo is star citizens monthly magazine featuring interviews with the dev team in-depth looks at the process of building game assets along with new fiction and lore pieces there is also the vault which is updated weekly with

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    all sorts of ship Concepts environments and characters subscribers allow us to create all of our video content shows like around the verse bug Smashers lur makers Guide to the Galaxy happy hour and citizens of the stars as well as more in-depth events like 10 for the chairman and subscribers Town Hall we like to put you behind the scenes hearing from the creators themselves about the development of Star Citizen centurions and imperators get exclusive access to submit questions for Chris and the rest of the dev team to be answered during 10 for the chairman or town hall videos you also get access to the subscriber forum where you can interact with other subscribers and myself as well as participate in subscriber only polls and Q&A threads a new perk for all subscribers is our ship of the month club that's where we unlock a ship for subscribers to test fly so if you're dueling it out in Arena Commander or

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    exploring the space around Crusader you can try out a new ship every month imperators will also have access to test flight all available ships and variants when new patches go live for a duration of 1 week subscribers get a variety of other extras including Early Access to event tickets and discounts on physical merchandise as well as subscriber exclusive merchandise and for the collector and you there's a free hanger decoration every month these have ranged from models of ships glowing algae plants and even an ancient underwater creature skull for your in-game hanger imp parator subscribers get a little extra double the flare double the discount coupon plus your ship of the month roster is expanded too you can get access to some of the limited alien ships like the Vandal Jean and vano ships as they become available so again thank you to all of our subscribers and

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    we will see you in the in the verse in addition to the new subscriber perks all active subscribers or anyone becomes a subscriber before April 17th will receive an awesome piece of flare a big Benny's vending machine cool that's a great addition to any hanger and if you're interested in learning more about our subscriber program click on the link in the description below uh and that's all for today's show again thank you to all of our subscribers as well as our backers none of this would be possible without you so so much thanks for everything also please join us tomorrow at 12 Pacific for Star Citizen happy hour for a special game development

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    episode Jared hucke Tyler Nolan and Tyler Wicken will be joined by technical designer KX Renault uh and after the excitement of last week's basketall basketball half court reveal in the UK Studio update kaix will try his hand at creating a first pass game mechanic that might make it possible to shoot hoops in the game of course this isn't a mechanic currently scheduled to go in game but it'll be a fun behind the scenes look at visual scripting all the same wow sounds like a musty episode thanks for watching and we'll see you around the verse thank you for watching so if you want to

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    keep up with the latest and greatest and Star Citizen of Squadron 42's development please follow us on our social media channels see you soon