Inside Star Citizen: Cooking With Gas | Summer 2020

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:00

   so in star citizen there's a lot of cool places to visit but traveling between those places in space and such uh maybe it gets a little bit flat and boring uh and maybe that's what it's like in real life but we want to make a really really cool experience here and i think we can make it look a lot nicer through space gaming so this is a child gas cloud this one spawns with some asteroids and this is basically one of the ways we're going to add depth to different locations in stanton the way these are created are through a process in houdini that i've been using and basically i can just try and make a simulation play around with it try and see what looks nice

2. 00:00:48

   and then i'll try and bring it into engine once it's an engine then i can start lighting this guy up and and creating some interesting areas all around it the reasons why there are some dark areas and some lighter areas of this gas cloud is because it's gas particles right so the hotter or maybe more intense gas will light up a little bit more and the darker gas will just pretty much give some shadows and uh and occlusion around here so the red stuff that you can probably see here along the outskirts here it's it's the new space dust and it's pretty much being lit up by a light leak color that comes from the properties of the gas cloud and so the sun will pierce light through the cloud and then it'll tint it a specific color

3. 00:01:36

   so that's what it's doing to the particles right now as i'm moving towards it but we can see it a little bit more obviously if we zoom into an asteroid here has this little bit of a red tint on it because the gas cloud starts it's generally a bluish color light bluish but it has a lightly color that is orange and so when the light pierces through it it gets more and more of that tint added onto the objects around it so this is one of the gas cloud childs that we have right now but if there's a child there must always be a parent so if we zoom out and we'll speed up a lot here [Music] this is its parent and this guy is quite massive so it has several children within it so

4. 00:02:26

   i know where a second one is here so here's another child on the opposite side of the cloud it's a very similar scale to the one we were just at and it gives you a very similar amount of depth and feel but it's lit in a completely different way maybe it looks a little bit more aggressive and it gives off a cool feel like that so with play spaces generally you'll spend most of your time in these uh child vdbs um and then you'll do your quantum traveling or even flying at sem speeds from one to another but something like this would be a quantum travel to your other child or multiple other

5. 00:03:14

   children and so i really wanted to at least test here in this setup what i've got here and see if quantum traveling through this uh really nice maybe angelic bright area would be a would be an interesting feat so throughout this i've been moving very very fast uh probably faster than what you can quantum travel at um so it is generally really hard to to tell what scale we're at right now but if i go down to this guy this little child here and you can see your asteroids you can see the whole thing but maybe what we can do is turn on some planets for scale so right here this is a sphere this scale of yellow

6. 00:04:02

   so it's it's really it's really it's it's very close uh to the scale of a of a moon here this child itself but we can scale up a little bit here's the size of hurston slightly bigger not too bad and here's the size of crusader and we have that compared to the parent the parent is even larger than that so i think there's a lot of space uh that we can use around here to add extra extra little depth little children even though that sounds funny to say little child gas clouds all around the parent here and it can hold them as a home as work continues adapting the gas cloud tech created for squadron 42

7. 00:04:51

   to use throughout stanton and beyond the actor feature team is busy adding further iteration on features like force reactions which not only aim to provide a realistic and visceral sense to being hit by just about anything in the star citizen universe but also give reason to all those seats in the bellies of drop ships when exterior forces begin transferring to those within so force reactions at this time around we're just adding a little more layers to the the game it's going to give you more immersion i think it's if you're just adding to what what star citizen is so the big additions on on 311 is the knockdown and seeing the reactions in the ship when you work on any feature you need

8. 00:05:41

   you need a good testing ground like something a little bit simpler where where there isn't less noise than say loading into the full pu experience every time but it also allows us to really dial in on all the different edge cases all the different scenarios with forced reactions we've got sam and sam's really sort of taken the whole test level to heart and build like an amusement park of different rights you can go on to test all the different force reactions aspects and this is great because it allows you know allows you to have tons of fun first of all and yeah if you have fun when you make a feature is gonna be a better feature hello i am samuel joyce i'm a technical designer

9. 00:06:29

   on star citizen so let me jump into the editor and show you what that's all about one of the force reactions that we're working on is called twitch where the player will be hit by a bullet and their body will react in a certain way depending on how far away they are being shot and how far they are depends on how strongly the impact will be so when you're being hit by a automatic weapon you'll really feel that impact similarly if you're you're being shot by a rifle the rifles generate a lot more impact which means you're going to get a much more severe reaction when you get hit by a shotgun from fire away you'll get spread you'll get peppered by many pellets and the more pellets you get hit by and the more of an impulse that's generated

10. 00:07:16

    meaning your camera is going to shake more however if you walk up to the shotgun and get shot point blank suddenly you get knocked down and now you have a chance to shoot your enemy when you're in the field battle you're going to be shot by rockets of course we've got god mode in this instance so when you get by the rockets you kind of like fly sideways so what i'm going to do next is set up the force directions to always play a knockdown whenever i'm shot by a pistol so we see the most accurate representation of being blasted by a shotgun what this big green square is for is for testing our force reactions so for example if i increase the force to about 60 we're going to get a really small little nudge which will knock us down and we'll barely go anywhere and if we up the force a bit more we

11. 00:08:04

    should start going about one and a half meters forward so the furthest that we want you to be able to fall when you have an explosion go off behind you is about three meters so this little yellow line helps us measure that one of the things we want to be wary of when you're getting knocked down is when you get knocked down from a great height what's the character going to do is he's falling the kinds of issues that we'd be looking at would be just the general animation flow and being able to see if we get got enough frames in each little area where it looking clunky and make sure it's smooth [Applause] as you saw there just as the explosion went off my camera shaked a little bit there's a little example of what the grenade explosions pressure is going

12. 00:08:53

    to do to the character if you're not quite in the blast zone so here's a grenade where i haven't been able to get out the way for the effects next up i'm going to show you ai twitches so once this guy knows some of the reactions that you could see i can trigger them myself over here when he's being shot he'll be hit by this thing so we've just gone to the shipanga test

13. 00:09:40

    level where i can spawn in any of the ships that i need to test in so today we're gonna look at the andromeda if i just teleport to this seat and then we go we can get that what i'm going to get this to do now is we're going to get the ai to fly my ship for me and what we're going to see is we're going to see some your character is going to start leaning depending on the g-forces of the ship so right now we're flying directly upwards what i'm going to do now is ask a andromeda to ram the ship sometimes um i feel sorry for these guys

14. 00:10:38

    we just keep knocking them off the screen all the time to wrap up i would say this release is gonna be one uh big new push on the force reactions the knockdowns for me especially it's a it's a new feature that that really adds a different dimension to the game but this is by by no means the end of it we're going to keep iterating on it we're going to keep adding more types of reactions balance it and you know obviously this is where a lot of player feedback is going to be useful you know hope you guys really enjoy what we put out there get your feedback back to us and and you know trust us to keep working on it and and getting it dialed in where

15. 00:11:25

    everyone is really happy with it so what we learned this week well we learned that gas clouds can be used to make some of the areas between points of interest more interesting themselves that it can be just as much fun building test levels for developers as it is making game levels for players and that when the captain turns on the fasten seat belt light you better move around the cabin at your own risk for inside star citizen i'm jared huckaby we'll see you next week you