Chris Roberts: Game Commander

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   [Music] hello everyone um I thought we' uh do a more informal look at um how it is uh directing and running um Star Citizen and Squadron 42 so uh right now I'm uh actually doing some coding I actually quite enjoy coding I don't get to do it

2. 00:00:47

   nearly enough but um in our push to games con I'm uh getting um uh back into the code uh a lot of the sort of physics and skeleton stuff and attachment stuff that we've done was I wrote a originally um back at the very beginning and continue to maintain and so uh we're moving uh to what we uh you know we've described it before we have a local physics grid and a global physics grid and we built this whole zone system um that sits inside our large World in um uh the the engine which is what we're going to be showing at gamescon large world is uh where we've moved the entire engine sort of vector space to 64-bit from 32-bit allowing us to have much much much greater distances like Millions of kilometers uh even billions if you wanted instead of uh you know

3. 00:01:34

   what typically would happen in fps game which would be sort of an 8 by8 or a 10 x10 square kilometer area that you can actually play on and as part of it um you know to have all these big ships you fly around while the ship itself um you know can be flying like this but you want to be walking around inside it so the actual physics simulation of the interior of the ship and the simulation of space on the outside is separate and so we kind of call that the local grid system and it's tied into the zone system because the zones are areas and so an area could be an interior of a ship or even inside that a room could be another Zone and a ship itself can be a Zone and then say around a planet can be a Zone and so that's how we move the data and and sort of keep it in a um contained manner without having to update too much stuff or render too much stuff because we have the problem in

4. 00:02:20

   Star Citizen that uh we can have huge huge distances with nothing in and then we can have uh small areas with lots of data in like for instance inside a big capital ship um so uh one of the issues uh which I'll be able to show you on marks machine because I'm sort of in the middle of fixing the codeup is um what happens is uh we have what's called a physical uh we have this physical grid and we have one for the interior one for the outside and and so everything outside in sort of global space simulates in that grid and that's how you Collide against uh the geometry say of say the Retaliator which is the ship that uh we're sort of working on right here and then uh you have the interior grid and that's when you enter the Retaliator you walk around inside the corridors and the rooms inside the Retaliator and then we put sort of the geometry of the interior of the Retaliator inside the interior grid and now there are elements of the actual

5. 00:03:09

   overall ship the Retaliator that you probably want to have in both the global grid which is part of sort of outside the general space and also inside to make sure you don't fall around and so one of the uh one of the issues that we have is uh we add all these items inside both interior and exterior so a seat uh say inside the Retaliator or a turret seat or anything is a item and it gets plugged into an item port and uh you know typically in the item Port system it just gets attached so it doesn't know whether it's inside and outside so at the moment the seats all get just added to the uh the Retaliator but it's all on the in the global grid and the seats aren't being added on the interior grid and so the problem is when you walk up to a seat inside the Retaliator and you want to use it well if you uh you know walk too far uh it doesn't have any

6. 00:03:58

   Collision GE omry in the interior grid so you like literally will walk through the seat that you can see the render geometry and drop right outside the ship um so it's essentially a hole inside the interior physics um Collision mesh because the seat has only been added to the outside uh the global uh physics area instead of the Interior area so the code that I'm sort of working on is allowing U the physics uh system when we build sort of the the physics Collision geometry for the skeletons um and the skeletons are what um the seats are basically made of and the ships are basically made of that it knows that uh this particular item needs to be placed in both the exterior grid and the interior grid uh and so we're making it so we can also have multiple different interior simulation areas inside ships and so there's a little extra um work

7. 00:04:48

   for that but uh that's kind of what I'm working on it's a system the attachment system where we can attach all the different items to the ships and they all get put into one physically simulated entity was actually something I wrote a while back to uh for the very first sort of do fighting module that's one of the reasons why I'm extending it now to sort of deal with the um concept of the interior and the exterior physics stuff um you know I have a bunch of code on my screen which probably isn't that interesting to you guys but uh if we go over to Mark aun's uh desk because on M and I still in the middle of fixing around the code so uh it'll be a little bit for to compile and you probably don't want wait for that go to Mark Haven's desk I can actually show you the issue that I'm talking about uh in terms of falling through the floor so let's go do that all right so we're here at Mark's uh desk since he's uh he's not in the middle of refactoring a system uh

8. 00:05:36

   and we we're going to we're going to we'll demonstrate what the issue is so now we're actually inside the Retaliator this is uh part of sort of the stuff that everyone's can see the L we're actually in the Retaliator local grid uh so we're simulating inside a separate grid than if we were outside the Retaliator um and uh the cockpit area here this whole cockpit area and the seat is a separate item and uh that's actually our our guy and you can see that's the that's actually the physical proxy of that seat now if we we can turn this off so it won't be so slow so you would think that if you walk up to that you would actually not walk through it but the problem is since that seat was added attached to the vehicle it's only getting attached to the vehicle in its full physical entity which is is in the global grid not in the local grid so if

9. 00:06:23

   we just walk through and we have fallen through the floor we have fallen out and now we're in no we're on some turret on the bottom yeah if we can we look up I guess we could probably see the cockpit above us maybe oh now we flown now we've fallen through the bottom of the Retaliator uh for kind of the same reasons because again that got attached on the outside so if you run up to these on the outside this is an item so we hit F10 here uh can you use it from outside yeah oh there you go and the the animation enter and exits are little broken um so so so that's that's kind of why we have to add to both the uh the local and the global grids is to make sure that the collusion works for uh in both cases when you're inside and

10. 00:07:11

    outside and it's just all about the interior so whoa so that's uh that's what I'm I'm working on Mark what are you working on right now trying to see if I can fix the ENT and exit positions for the zones as you can see when you get in and out using the wrong offsets oh okay there you go uh so it's all going to look much better when you see it in a in a few weeks all right there you go okay hello everyone um so last uh we were I was explaining to you the challenge of the interior in the local grid of the Retaliator and how we needed to have the physical Collision um geometry of the Retaliator exist both in

11. 00:07:59

    the global grid which is actually where I am right now and this is in the main world and also on the inside in the local grid that's just for the interior of um the Retaliator and we needed also to have the items like the seats or the guns or the turrets all that which are actually not part of the base vehicle that get added on as items they also needed to exist in both the interior and the exterior and since they weren't existing in the interior you would walk up to the seat there would be no Collision you walk through it and drop down through the bottom so uh you know I've fixed up the physics code to essentially duplicate the physics geometry make sure it's mirrored between both the interior and the physics um so uh let's walk up uh here um I actually kind of feel like is that yeah it's all physics um and uh I will

12. 00:08:52

    open let the elevator to get in and if you notice I can just turn physics on you can see there's the bounding physics stuff for it and we'll get into it and this all exists in the global grid right now so there's Collision I could walk onto it I could walk against here bam can't get out of there um so let's just use this and as we are going up now bam we are now inside the global grid and it's moved up and if I go back over here you can see the dark gray here is the um physics geometry that's in the inside gray the light gray is the exter so they're on top of each other cuz it's the bug drawer renders both the interior and exterior and you'll actually see it moving around because the ship is slightly moving around on the landing pad because the landing skids are not actually uh balanced out correctly at the moment and so that's why you seeing

13. 00:09:40

    that shiting even though if I take this off you'll see from my point of view there is uh no movement which is the whole point of the local grid is to to uh is to do that so let's uh go up and uh now we'll go to the um the front the cockpit area to uh see uh the actual physics working there which wasn't which weren't working before so as you saw last time here there's the there's the physical geometry for that and uh if I go up here I can't bounce into it I won't drop through the Bing there's no dropping through at all which is great and uh yeah I'll just use it get into it and there we go

14. 00:10:31

    there you are so there we have physics working uh both interior and exterior inside uh inside the Retaliator pop out now and um so another another little uh feature bug thing sorted out um for uh for the full multi crew experience so uh we've actually got most of the functionality working um fluidly which you know before when we demoed it in gamescon uh last year we sort of had it it was very specific specific for the constellation this is a complete system that operates with the zone system the large World um going in and out of the local grids completely automatic like in that situation there wasn't any transition animation I just came up on the elevator and when I was inside the volume of the Interior automatically put me inside the interior grid and now we have Collision existing in both of them um the next stage is I

15. 00:11:19

    need to do some uh Ray tracing uh um searches for both interior and interior so we can detect the use of items uh and then it'll be complet completely fluid and systematic and not sort of set up the way you've had it in the past where once you're inside the vehicle there's a special handling case um so we're trying to make everything more systematic to allow the game to be uh allow you to do whatever you want with it so we're hoping that there'll be lots of cases that people start to do things that we wouldn't even expect and it's really just going to be sort of like a great adventure out there so um there you go I hope you enjoyed this uh little insight into the ins and outs of physics and local grids um and I'm looking forward to um showing you more stuff as we go along and also seeing you guys at Gamescom goodbye and