Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Shots Fired | 3.4 Ep. 10

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse I'm Shawn Tracy and I'm Dave haddock today we're checking out the plaza our corpse area 18 with a look at hollow advertising finding out just what the projectile manager seen on the road map really is and getting festival with some brand new in law holidays but first let's see how much abuse a hammerhead can take compliments of the community sky are Imperium put Aegis is gunship to the ultimate test pinning progressively stronger waves of enemy ships again it's a single hammerhead and the Tri I team was there to capture all drama explosive drama nice so with our Corp coming to the persistent universe in the upcoming alpha 3.5 it's about time we started to take a look at the first landing zone area 18 so area 18 as you know is sort of a cyberpunk II neon haze type denser urban environment that was actually kind

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   of inspired by New York Times Square slash Port Authority bus terminal in the mid 90s when I went to school there and was probably terrified by it awesome well and the plaza was a chance for the environment props VFX and UI artists to all come together to influence the look and feel let's go to jake Dunlop Aaron Anderson Eddie Hilditch and Simon Bursley to see how those teams are working to bring the plaza to life we've been looking at the advertising for hour 18 it's a huge part of area 18 to sort of get across this sort of busy urban metropolis the adverts that we've put in putting in range from sort of simple screen based stuff all the way up to the more complex the hologram stuff tends to involve lots of different disciplines just by the nature of it they all have their sort of place in in these adverts the fears hologram which is kind of the hero hologram for the

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   plaza that involves props involves VFX it involves some animation it involves the environment artists and it involves lighting so in the original concept there was a water bottle and we moved this on to a camp we thought having a water type advertisement would be a cool idea but we wanted to you know give it more flavor a narrative team suggested we use fizz which is a brand for a soda can inside started in the universe so I checked I swapped out the water bottle for Ken and the environment teams collaborate with us and created a more detailed game and animated it so using geometry emitter I spawned particles along each vertex of the geometry which essentially made rainfall falling from

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   each vertex using z-buffer collision I made it interact with the player so whenever the player walk through the rainfall it splashes and collides with them it also collides with the ground making splashes so there are some though it should be sort of term generic adverts which you'll see a few of that are kind of meant to hint at something that is a thing but isn't actually anything so that's kind of a little more abstract if you have too many of those kind of more abstract shapes and colors and stuff though the whole scene starts looking kind of abstract and doesn't make a lot of sense so we've had to sort of generate quite a few adverse based purely off logos and brands that we already have in the game we had looked through the law looked for things that hadn't really been used very much before

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   and tried to pick kind of more civilian things like drinked Browns clothing manufacturers as a few medical things in there once we're happy with that we were to go through and design the the 2d logos so kind of the black and white flat versions of what each brand uses when we were happy with that it's a case of going through and making the adverts we've had a particularly got fun making new food items torpedo burritos and and gel Beezer are pretty cool and hoping that big Benny will now lose its number one place to torpedo burritos it's important to see things actually in the scene so to start when we see them in 2d they might look really cool but when you see them in the game then maybe they don't fit and they may look a bit too kind of cartoony or stand out too much so then it's a case of going

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   through and adjusting the style a little bit changing the colors adding things like chromatic aberration and distortion to make them feel a bit more a bit more sci-fi as well what all these advertisements are gonna sort of add as a player experience really to area 18 to make it feel different from other known as owns I think is is really life and Colour and sort of environmental movement then you might have seen any environments before because we've got a lot of stuff there to sort of give an impression of a sort of living breathing metropolis that we want area 18 to be so that's what the player can expect thanks all and next week we'll be back with more area 18 as our lighting artists show you how we tie all that together that should be cool so along with our core 3.5 brings a lot of new features the new playable female character the facial customisation system I think I'm

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   shooting something on that next week new weapons flyable ships an updated flight model and new controls so alpha 3.5 is set to bring a lot of improvement to star citizen definitely but some of the less flashy improvements we'll hope to make a big impact nonetheless like the projectile manager mmm absolutely let's check in with Thorsten kay for more the main purpose of the projectile manager is to improve the performance of our current projectiles and we are doing that by improving the gameplay and physics side lumberyard projectiles are implemented as entities and in our version of the engine projectiles are still entities but they are also using the item 2.0 system that we didn't that we developed and that gives us a lot of flexibility the projectiles are using what's called a blocking spawn and that means that the program can't continue execution until the protector respond and that's

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   generally not a big deal for projectiles because it's a very cheap entity but it still needs to go through all the entity system and then this becomes a problem if we want to spawn many projectiles in one frame at once and so far that this hasn't been a big issue in the game but people already are starting to put four Gatling guns on each turret on the hem ahead and down the line we want to have even bigger ships and bigger space battles and then this will become an issue to benchmark the performance of our weapons we created a tester with 200 weapons that are just floating around in space and all of them are firing at the same time there you can already see really quickly that the frame rate is just tanking down and when you profile the levels and you will see that a huge performance cost comes from creating projectiles and

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   updating projectiles so to counter that in the projector manager we first have to see that the project has actually don't need all the flexibility that entities provide and for instance the projectile it's a very simple logic they have very simple physics and a very simple rendering so to optimize and the creation of the projectile what the projector manager is to first detects that it's kind of one of these basic projectiles and then instead of spawning an entity it would respond the small data structure and manage the projectile itself and then when in learn a new projector comes in and we'll just put another put in another small data structure right next to it and because it has just then to fill one small data structure it becomes very fast and forced to spawning a new entity and then

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    for the updating the logic like computers just love small data structures that are right next to each other and then when it iterates over it becomes very fast and for the rendering our project has actually just a box with a special material on it so it's very cheap to render them so for most of them you just basically render this box with the modern material and what we are doing with the project manager is we bypass a lot of the render logic which figures out a projectile is visible or not because often it's just cheaper to draw the projectile even if it's behind a wall of course if you have a character behind the world and you want to figure out if you actually have to draw it or not but for projectiles we can skip that step and through these optimizations we didn't get nice performance and what's also noteworthy is that we can

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    to use the old system so for instance I can see on larger capital ships where we have a large gun and that we probably need a more complex projector at least put some geometry on it so all in all the projector monitor shouldn't have too much impact on the players just provide better performance some of the less flashy but really really important improvements that are being made like the projectile manager and a lot of things that go on behind the scenes for the tools as well as just making the developers lives a little bit easier always bring either performance improvements or the whether that's just more iteration speed for the artist it's these small things that are a little less you know flashy or front and center but they are just as important to bring you all the things that three point five is going to bring you it's cool you like talking about the tech stuff yeah like

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    talking about the newer stuff yeah coming up next we've got a chat with Adam Weiser from the lore team talking about how some of the holidays we know and love today might look a bit different 940 years in the future so we've got like like 12 to 15 holidays for various events throughout the year but today I'm going to kind of break down a three of them that are coming up in the calendar that you've never heard of you for the first one we're gonna talk about is Stella Fortuna and this is a really fun and joyous holiday where people can eat and drink and be merry and just you know spend a day living life to the fullest and this is a kind of a special holiday it dates back all the way to the early 23rd century when Humanity was looking for a way to kind of encourage people to

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    be brave and to be bold and to venture out amongst the Stars and they would did this by celebrating the first interplanetary holiday by scheduling a day where they could celebrate on both Earth and Mars with the colonists there at the same time and after Stella Fortuna we have triggerfish which occurs on April 1st of every year and this is basically an updated version of April Fool's Day a chance for people to play good-natured pranks and jokes against each other but instead of yelling April's fool at the at someone you yell triggerfish this name came from the non-existent fourth planet in the Magnus system which residents of Magnus basically would convince people in the 27th century that there was a fourth

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    planet in the system that the UAE kept off the map and the suckers that were actually gullible enough to travel out there to try to go find it were deemed triggerfish and that name kind of stuck and eventually took over April Fool's Day as becoming the term for that day the final holiday we're going to talk about is packs Humana which is a day to celebrate former and current members of the armed services it commemorates a very special moment back on November 8th 23:08 when the united nations of earth decided that for humanity to be able to expand into the stars we needed to be one species altogether and to symbolize part of this all the different armed services from the different countries started marched from different points in

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    New York City and converged together around the Senate building to show that we were from many-to-one force for the good of humanity that March is what would still celebrate it today in New York City with the different branches Navy Marines almost art from different points and coming together so that is paekche mana a day to celebrate those that serve the UAE so again these are just a few of the ones that you'll be seen in game and I can't wait to share more with you in the future thanks Adam so that was just three of the holidays that we've been working on and hopefully we'll be revealing some more of those as we go on further down the road well in observance of Stella Fortuna we have two st. Patrick's inspired promotions beginning tomorrow the first is a screenshot contest you can find out all about up on spectrum

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    there will also be some commemorative vehicles with limited edition green liveries available tomorrow all the details can be found on the Roberts bass industries comm website they won't cost you a hangover and if any you are attending South by Southwest our very own Johnny Erskine and J cross are appearing tomorrow at the Austin Convention Center you can find John in room 8c at 11:00 a.m. and Jake in the austin suite at 3:30 p.m. local time they'd love to see you there if you're in the area absolutely and I've been told that there's a special bar citizen barbecue event in Austin on Saturday at the Iron Works barbecue at 5:00 p.m. which frankly sounds delicious yeah I'm a bit jealous we are the best promo dudes in the company yeah there's a lot going on this week is it everything though Jared wants us to plug reverse the verse tomorrow at 10:00 watch our TV 10:00 a.m. Pacific tomorrow so thanks to

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    subscribers for all their shows and thanks to all of our backers for making our games possible so until next time we'll see you around purse thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in star citizen the squadron 42 you can subscribe to our Channel or you can check out some of the other shows and you can also head to our website at www.uvu.edu/library