Star Citizen: Subscriber's Town Hall w/ Sean Tracy, Josh Herman and Chad McKinney

26 September 201700:52:391,411 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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how many can do okay what's right welcome everybody to this month's subscribers Town Hall where we take a we take about an hour of our time to sit down with some a G a G I see some GI Joe is zoom way on that G I know I have the time in the forms when they see is CG is where you sit down with CI G's developers and answer questions live from our development subscribers so if you've never seen one of these before it's very much like one of the happy hours but we take questions exclusively from our subscriber chat during this so if you are subscriber and you want to submit questions or you're not a subscriber and you know a subscriber get them online have them submit their questions in the subscriber chat up on spectrum because that is where we are
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pulling questions before we get started let's introduce our esteemed panel of colleagues today and chat immediately immediately to my right who are you what do you do for Texas Josh Sherman and I'm the character art director and what is a character art director epi basically oversee the character team and the character concept team and then that's it all right does that extend to animals at all yeah the characters basically anything that's not a ship or weapon that moves around so if it's got a rig it's probably a character okay and to my right the man probably needs no introduction I think I still do tell the folks who you learn what you do my name is Sean Tracy I'm the technical director of content here at cloud Imperium games and the technical director of content though it's a kind of a weird title it's
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kind of looks very upsetting meetings yeah it looks angry in meetings at all times you know especially 8:30 a.m. you know Monday morning yeah I'm not gonna look at the happy basically I'm in charge of tech art and tech animation which are the two teams that develop all the tools develop all the processes that we use to create all the content that's in star citizen and last but certainly not least despite my joke earlier lead gameplay engineer mr. Chad McKinney what do you do lead game plan dinner so I work with the designers and artists two main features in the game that are the different game mechanics blowing stuff up choking people out all the different ways you can die and blow things up yeah but what do you do on the game uh what do I do in
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this I do all those things instructions what kind of things are you guys working on like now trying to close out BOTS is the main focus for my team so it's just like things get flared up like just recently was persistence we had a big check in and kind of kicked some dust up but just trying to get this to evocati it's a big question what are you working on for me it's usually a game of spinning plates and kind of spin this one over here and over here oh that one's about to fall so there's a lot of sort of different things that I'm keeping around and at one time some interesting stuff is some of the face we're revamping that it's getting done for the faces some polish for the squadron 42 characters just some techniques around that some development of new tools for the developers improve
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their quality of life and ultimately that three oh must fix bugs so we can get 300 out to the community how about you Josh kind of the same is shown so closing out 3.0 stuff as well as kind of prepping for next release and squadron 42 character polish 3.0 is pretty much they all encompassing yes yes yeah wait on all of our shoulders at the moment and we were just you were just getting assigned but 3.0 bugs in the meeting right before here we were just filling them as we speak all right so those are the types of things that are that our guests are working on so if you're going to submit questions in a subscriber chat you have your best chance at getting them answered if they are in line with the things that folks are working on if you're wondering where the carrick is and went out this unfortunately is not the team who's gonna be able to answer those kind of
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questions in addition to the subscriber chat and you can submit your questions there now please please preface your question with the word question in capital letters surrounded by brackets it's gonna help me pull it out of chat we also set up a thread last week where we collected questions in advance from subscribers so while we wait for questions to come in I can't read what that says JJ okay while we wait for questions to come in we will start taking them from some of the ones that we collected right off the bat our most voted on question from subscribers with regards to the 4.5 million dollar stretch goal we'll see IG build some sort of connectivity so that ship data like fuel left landing gear up and down lights on off speed shall control power allocation all of this basically star systems systems star citizen systems can
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they be exported to other devices like touchscreens tablets even voiceattack and then will those responses from stuff from those things be fed back into star citizen if I remember correctly he's referring to our 4.5 million dollar stretch goal where we said we'll look into tech for like flight chairs the ones that have the Rumble and stuff track IR and FFT displays still pretty early going in the project have we even begun work on that guys not so much the external apps we're still really focused on core gameplay so for 3.0 we're working hard to get atom 2.0 systems and MFDs in game for the ships and so that's where most of our focuses and when we get that I think in a better place we can start to look at some of these other more exhilarating puts and see what we can do to bring those online but right
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now it's just about you know in game core behavior yeah so like a it just to go on definitely with Ted it's like we've got to work on the Sunday bit of the Sunday not just a just the cherry and then sometimes getting it up to things like a flight controller chair for example that I can think of you know maybe a small percentage of players actually have so and and it is really easy to focus on the cherry oh yes it is really easy to spend a lot of time on these minor things it's not minor but maybe not as global as you would you would one thing is that if it has 10,000 people the things that affect well sure it's like Yemen or die's and the ships for example the screens that are actually in the ship for all the players that are playing the game so we've got focus on that before we focus on these things but having said that
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there's a lot and implementing these kind of features or or support for external stuff like flight controller chairs various different flight stick setups and these kind of things is not a dramatically difficult thing to do it's just where does it get prioritized into the grand scheme of the game so not something that's off the table just something that we're not ready to yeah sure of course is to dive into yet sure and maybe I can give a bit of a preview of stuff that's that's coming along and what's being worked on right now anyways on the spectrum side we look at our spectrum overlay so there's a lot of work going on behind the scenes with the guys that develop spectrum as well as our audio engineers as well as our UI engineers and we have to get our
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spectrum overlay implemented in the game we've been talking about this for a little while so the hope from that is that should we get some of the web-based sort of spectrum stuff overlaid just sort of like a steam overlay or something like that within the game kind of exposing web-based things like that to a tablet or something else is is not as difficult as it would be just having the game sort of talk directly to an external iPad or something like this because all of a sudden you've got a you know a Windows machine needed to talk to some sort of iPad an interface and all this so if we had a spectrum sort of web-based overlay we could implement some sort of cannot remote controls but the controls into spectrum that could do things within the game as well as be controlled from from the web so that's kind of a cool thing - let's see what else do we have
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from the shet here sorry my the internet went out here let's see we've got a question here from the live chat I do you have any information on female characters sure I got lots of information about all the female characters that I've been hoarding them on my PC that's it that's why you guys don't have them okay cool yeah we're still working on them I think one of the things that we're doing right now for all the assets is making them one-to-one meaning that you know everything that the males have that the females have so that when they when we finally release them that they're all gonna be kind of equivalent so we're not gonna have you
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know a massive amount of assets for just the male and then when the female comes on there's like two things you can do and we're actually very very close to that you know as we produce things we basically make it part of our pipeline now to make it a one-to-one so it's no longer just make the male asset and then be done we were doing that for a while and that creates a really large backlog where you make a costume you make another costume make a costume and all of a sudden you've got 10 20 30 50 costumes and you have to go through them all to make sure that it's one to one and we're actually very close to that which is really good but aside from that we're just kind of waiting for you know some of the bigger character release so we want to do a bigger release where we can bring on full character customization and it's probably one we'll drop it can't you so so so so so
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maybe like a like I got to play a patch that where the majority of the content is the character stuff first yes or at least that would be where a lot of it is dropped so it's not all gonna just be you know like kind of trickled out I think it would be cooler to have it released in a big chunk and everybody play with it so okay cool yeah and maybe to go just a little bit more to it and why we've gone this route and why why you don't see the female players because you know in in most games or a lot of especially MMO games right now the main thing they do is just scale the skeleton I'm you have the exact same proportions from a male to a female and this just isn't the case in reality and something that was that was dictated very clearly from Chris from the get-go was that female proportions need to be accurately represented now yes of course everybody is proportionate a little bit
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differently but there is sort of the atom in the e right so we literally have two different skeleton rigs we aren't just scaling a male we could have given you a female player two years ago if we were going to put that female on the exact same skeleton with the exact same proportions as a male the the problem with that is that you get this very androgynous look um where where females aren't females in the game the coupled with needing you know now because you're on a different skeleton and a whole different proportions think of the armor red transition that you have to make so we've got these under suits we've got these medium light heavy armors that are on the male so now we can't just you know grab a throw them on the female because all of a sudden it's all too big so all of that's got to get reworked and not it's not a massive amount of work
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but it's enough that it takes some time so then because we've got the two different skeletons the way the implementation and the engine works you map a whole bunch of animations to a given skeleton so if we haven't yet finished everything that we are expecting to do on the male to start moving that over to the female and we've got some tools that make this a lot easier for the animators but we don't have 200 animators to sit here and constantly be reworking the female assets so once we do once we finish all of the male stuff it's a matter of transferring all that over and since what you know yes there will be updates on the male side but we won't be developing new features um that then all of a sudden we have to go collect and and apply to the female so it's a bit of animation it's it's a bit of did the actual desire for us to have a differently proportion rig and a lot of people will say okay well why don't you make that part of the character or where
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you're actually just stretching out arms and making everybody different um this is just not something we wanted to do we wanted to have a very clear female and a very clear male but then metrics also come into play and that's where things get really kind of shipwrecked and muddy yeah yeah and a great example of this was collides we have we have of course and within squadron 42 we have females that sit in chairs the interest chairs happen to be really big for a male that's wearing you know armor looks fine you said a female in it with just like a BTU or just like a sweater and stuff she looks like a kid sitting in in a you know in a huge seat so we have to kind of kind of massage all of this kind of stuff so that there is a nice 1:1 between the females and males you know I
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mean other games take easier quicker routes to this but because because we're as dedicated to fidelity it was dedicated to making this stuff as as as detailed and developed as possible that's I'm sure you happy now - yeah and you know originally we had even started this is crazy but we had started with something like 12 rigs we had started with okay we're gonna have a hundred and fifty centimeter guy we're gonna have hundred there was a bunch of the sizes there was a bunch of different lengths of arms legs these kind of things and you know slowly we've had to try you know reign Chris in a little bit where we're like okay well nobody's really gonna notice you know the two inch difference between that guy and this guy but in the end we got down to at least those two and yes we've got good tools to support the thing but we
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really need to finish the mail completely first and Josh and I were talking about this a little bit on the weekend last week where there's kind of to give you guys the female player the first thing we want to give you is the character creator so let's make a male guy first then the second step of that is give you the female and then the third step of that is give you the actual sculpting and the DNA gene-splicing kind of customisation so there's kind of the staged approach that we're gonna we're gonna go out there with that was proposed but yeah but that's a nice play into all of it yeah that's a question that it's a question that deserves a long tell thanks or so so thank you with the face where technology is from the live chat here will it also work for players who wear glasses oh absolutely I have pictures of and thanks Josh helping a lot on these
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these face were marketing images so I had gone and recruited a couple guys and I'm like I need somebody with glasses I need somebody that's got long hair I need something that's gonna be read so yes it absolutely works with glasses now it's not perfect yeah I have seen it go wrong and was it your glass actually my like my glasses are like the thicker black so and it's because we have lights eyebrow hair and and dark glasses so yeah so there has been time Robert picks our problem the top of this so we've talked to face we're about this and a lot of that is on there sort of tracking side but yes it works with glasses works with beards yeah whatever what Nicole was doing in work first glasses yeah Marc wears glasses no sunglasses no working somebody just won't pick up your eyes yeah that's the whole thing but beards like like Jared's are a little bit trickier to because what it
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can't see is the lips and if it can't see the lips that's when it loses a face just gonna exaggerate yeah or just shave jeez but I don't have money I don't have I don't have lips Iman is a that's why I don't have an upper lip right and and so people are aware too when you do like a performance capture with an actor and this is generally where this technically kind of comes from you get them to shave if you can I mean there was a neat thing with Mark Hamill where we couldn't get him to shave when we were doing that thing just because of you don't there's another movie so annoying so so some people can't but we have to adjust that you know accordingly but yes it works with beards glasses it's gonna sound weird the way I say this but it works with smaller children as well my daughter my daughter is six years old
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put her in front of that picked her up no problem I was actually pretty impressed what's going with that working so well when it was to be it was fun for her to sort of pull faces so we need to get beard rigging into a good beard pack yes and actually that's one of the things that's really slowing us down on the on the gene splicing thing is facial hair big time yeah because we have to adjust facial attached at runtime and that's just something that we've never really had to do before and it's not easy I'm available for reference some good has to come with a stupid thing if you know how to reapply dual quaternion skinning in real time would be good let me check my calendar all right my mouse when will the ship matrix get updated this is a question for me we are currently working on updating the ship matrix right now a John crew ahead of
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the ship design team in the UK is dedicating a considerable portion of his time to making sure that we have all the latest information on all 106 of our ships and variants that have been announced that this is video Kaitlyn me and John crew of our living this for the last couple weeks our intention is to have is to have this for you in the next month or two so it's it's we're full steam ahead it's just it's a lot of data entry and a lot of a lot of double-checking and triple-checking and and sometimes you think you have it and then you look at this like well what this doesn't make sense why is this one bigger than this one you know this ship should be more powerful so you have to go through its a lot of error correcting is anybody who pays attention do we have a to I mean it just sounds to me like sorry we're doing
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we're developing the tool we just we need to know the full breadth of everything that has to go in there we're sure we're still building the base matrix and then and then we have a spreadsheet that we have a tool it'll basically put everything I see somebody man yeah but we still need to make sure it's 1:1 all the options are available like just yesterday we were having a big conversation on missile racks sizes and how the sizes should apply to missile racks and not missiles so we're changing that up so you're gonna see the sizes of missile racks as opposed to the sizes of the missiles certain to stage of sizes yeah basically it's it's like many things in startups and it's getting complicated and very very in-depth so so but we are actively at work all right let's go back to the thread and see what we got here second most voted on question from the thread in the gamescom
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livestream we saw atmospheric flight that didn't look too different from zero-g flight what are the long-term plans for the in atmosphere planet slash moon side flight model it's still in development whenever I fly with it in game right now I can definitely tell that there's some turbulence that's being applied to it it does feel different than in space flights I don't work on ifcs directly so I can't comment about like the direct directions that we're trying to come taking it but it's definitely in development actually John is in Germany right now talking with the physics guy John Pritchard and so there I mean one of the reasons why is there is to work on AI but another reason is to get kind of the the big physics guys together and and in figuring out how to better integrate ifcs the physics engine and so a lot of that is turbulence and things
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like this but right now it does do some turbulence simulation when at Gamescom when we did the gamescom show for live streams the r3 backer guests were the three of the very first you know start citizens that got to play with the new 3.0 model that's a lot of what they're referring to and we had that whole day before we went live to practice and they were marked considerably throughout the day goes it looks similar because that's what ifcs is supposed to do ICS is supposed to compensate for things like the turbulence and everything but it felt different it was like no this is different I'm having to use there's twitch maneuvers which which actions more often so there was there was a distinct difference in the way that it handled if it looked similar that was by design at that time because that's what ifcs is doing now we talked earlier about something that might be interesting to see what happens when you
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know ifcs is firing all the different thrusters here how different is that going to be when those stressors because they're going to be totally damaged and then the turbulence and the range there's no starting especially once you start trying to react and move like it's not gonna move like it would if it was just in space and there's gonna be some different reactions yes it's it will be different sure and wet and weather and wind and I know and I could be did he just walk right he just walk right in front of the camera right on Dennis oh yeah yeah wind so they had asked a little bit about ifcs some wind and these kind of things so and you had mentioned it pretty well so if you're sitting up in space you can see the ifcs working basically if you take a look at
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all that you know third some odd thrusters that are sitting around the ship but they're all adjusting there they're making it so that you're always stable when you get into atmosphere all of a sudden because gravity is pulling down on it you'll see all the bottom thrusters are sitting there pounding out you know thrust so that you're not actually falling down in gravity if you shut down five Cs all of a sudden blank you're gonna hit the ground so I think some of the things that we have to do is one I don't know if it's being affected by the unified wind that is that is on the planets now so the planetary guys had to work on a brand new wind simulation we had to get rid of all the stuff that was in CryEngine before because obviously it assumed a 2d plane so and the problem is we had to you know Marco cause it's theorized the window basically get it took involve around a sphere so that it still has a direction but it's not you
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know it's not a direction in the world space its direction on the so as soon as we have wind strong enough that will overtake the strength of the ice yes that's when you'll really see it but I'm sure you can get that affection just like you said you hop out of your ship or somebody is does damage any of your thrusters or anything if you're gonna get that that that that feeling and again it's more of a feeling thing rather than an actual visual affection and of course it's a good time to add the standard disclaimer they're 3.0 is the very first iteration of this like any other system stars this and it is very likely to continue to iterate not just with your feedback but with our own feedback in has additional features and the systems come online so that's what we want I mean that's that's that's a
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whole reason this thing's still in alpha we need the feedback we wanted we want to know what the players like what they don't like and what they think should change and then you know if Chris agrees [Laughter] next question from the live chat will the cargo already affect flight in the ships in 3.0 or not I'm not right now there's a little bit of game code to get the mass applied from the Pargo grid into the ship and then to have ifcs after that use that information to make it require maybe more thrust in gravity but not in space right so it won't in 3.0 unless it's something like it's added but right now not planned but that's definitely that is something that I've heard come up multiple times it's definitely on our radar yeah we've spoken at length of several
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times that it's a good example of a feature yeah that we want in the game that will make its way to the game but it's not present in 3.0 can Lando show us his hair you can tune in to citizens of the Stars released yesterday if you want to see my my hair what overhead impact will face over IP have on clients when implemented question mark performance yeah sure that's the biggest thing we're looking at right now so there's a lot of work going on between Chris Botti I've talked to him I've talked about him a little bit before as well as Carsten some of the core engine guys in Frankfort as well as the face we're engineers so one of the things they haven't implemented it into a game that would be going multiplayer in this exact way so one of
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the biggest problems with it was the amount of threads that face we're actually kicks up it's a lot of threads that we can't actually manage directly their Hardware threads they not managed by our jobs our job system exactly so one of the biggest things that we're doing is giving them an interface to our job system so that we can control those threads instead of them kind of just spinning up it exactly as they want now we showed it in the demo with about 12 players so we were actually pretty happy with the overall performance what we didn't like was the scaling of said performance so it's not really it's not about the consistent level of performance because if we were Oliver he's running at you know 60 Hertz and everything was going well Dan no problem what we really needed to do is load balanced and and that's really what the job manager is about is about you know how much stuff is happening in the world at that one time and what should we be dropping off the basically off the job
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system to to take to get that performance back basically so I I can imagine that people would not be very happy with saying oh well you know I'm running at 20 FPS I can't shoot this guy but my face looks good you know that's not gonna that's not gonna fly of course so that's one of the biggest things that we're doing so there is there is overhead to it it's not a massive amount and it really really depends right now at the frame rate that you're capturing at so we really want a 60 Hertz captured but that cost us you know one and a half two milliseconds right now which is not a huge amount but if you're looking at a 60 Hertz game you're talking about having 16 milliseconds for the whole thing so if we've already taken I mean one eighth of that right that's that's a lot of love you just game programmers very sad exactly nothing but four features you know we still know that
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this feature is gonna cost performance and that's why it's always gonna be an optional thing for the players I can't imagine that a hardcore player is gonna care what his face looks like he's gonna be you know I mean not really worrying about it so those are gonna be options that are of course presented the player and should you want to enable that stuff just like you know high-end graphics effects again a hardcore player really doesn't care that he's got shadows in the fog versus having 60 Hertz so there is a it's not massive but there is a performance draw to it and and nothing comes free I mean that's just it's kind of the thing you mentioned the load balance of the balance or what an important feature that's never seen because by design you're not all in well and to be honest just to explain it and and even me at my level have a hard time grasping exactly what's going on with it
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at all times even talking you know - Christopher bull - I mean some days he'll just go off on her quiet engine like so it's it's really it's really quite complex problem what goes on there and yeah it is interesting if you can ever get them I can hardly see the requests what I mean preferable to you everybody's a bit crossed at the end because it has been a big thing of his for a long time from the thread I still want to know what the idea is for handling fauna planet side fauna being animals Florida's Peppa I given the scale of things that seems pretty steep to do everything manually but procedural creature systems have been pretty bad in the past how do you plan to create enough diversity and variation on life-forms across the verse
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Jeff I'm gonna I'm gonna make the artist over I think it's a lot of gonna be you know I think if there will be a procedural element to that but I think a lot of that's gonna be helping create variants of those initial handcrafted versions you know we'll be able to do things like where we can swap out maybe different heads or different arms or different tails or different appendages or whatever that is but just like we're doing with our landing zones our landing zones are also handcrafted so I think that the you know the creatures are fauna whatever you want to call them the wildlife should be the same so it's gonna be you know it's gonna be handcrafted a lot of it and that's part of it is we don't I don't want it to look like Spore it's more has some really cool tech in it but it has some
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really bad looking creatures in it to it to be frank right it's fine like it's that's what it looks like that's poor it's the users Ramon if you saw the screenshots after release it was like yeah yeah that's not that's obviously everything before Ricky yes that's obviously a game where the creek where the players are making them right but even when you whenever you procedurally generate stuff you're gonna have stuff that's gonna look bad versus weird or versus distinct like something can be look distinct and maybe not look great or it can look weird and not be appealing I think another thing as far as procedural tech goes is without artisan put a lot of times you just get kind of a homogeneous yep yeah and it's it's just all kind of like
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centered around the mean you just kind of get this group look and yeah there's some variations but nothing has a lot of character it's not like compelling exactly and that's kind of us saying with the landing zones too it's where you know if we have a landing zone that's very specific we can use you know other properties like Star Wars is probably the most iconic for a lot of people we've got Hoth and ha-has Tontons and it has other you know things that are gonna be on scott Wampus right and then you've got Endor and it's got its own kind of thing and then you've got all these other tattooing got its own thing and we want that we don't want to just say like let's just randomly generate things on each of one of these planets and just see what happens there someone to have personality sure and I think a lot of that comes down to the to the workflows of creating those things so the reason that that's not really even something that most people would consider is possible is because usually the the amount of time
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that it takes to make one of these things it takes a while yeah so if you can work on tools you can work on systems for the asset creation for the content development you can usually scale there their power of having that you know handcrafted input but if you can put Auto rating systems in place and you can put really simple sort of simple interface to animation and these kind of things have good behavior systems from subsea you can scale up that content pretty well but we won't go to the full procedural route because ultimately we have our directors here for a reason and they need to be they need to have the input on on those visited creatures and yeah we want to end up with you know t-rex with alligator legs and you know whatever I don't know I couldn't take another example it's probably better off
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actually you're on Game Dev in a couple of weeks to evaluate yeah there we go are you doing happy hour again yeah those are so fun that's unfortunate hey another face we're yeah what happens to your face in the game when you take a drink or pick your nose well I got some funny stories from this definitely I mean even when we're doing other screen shots but I guess QA at Gamescom it was the same as some same problems so somebody was chewing gum and and they had asked that the the face we're representatives that we had had there what's wrong with the guy's face he's just sitting there animating and they're like well you're chewing gum yeah and and the guy looks like I had that way too Morse was working on the helmet lights it was enabled and he was eating a snack while he's working as like
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what's going on with this guy's face and he was like oh yeah the guys usually eat and you're like sure like you're chewing a total like so so the answer is it does what your face is gonna do um I mean sometimes when you bring your your hand up to kind of like scratch it or whatever it'll lose the lose the calibration I lose the tracking anyways for that few seconds but basically what I would had made it obvious that we have to do on the on the player facing stuff and even Gamescom was a really good thing to put well it was a really good thing to get QA in front of it that hadn't really been specifically trained on it because then we saw all the players facing stuff that we absolutely need to put in because I mean they got in there and they don't know you know they can't just open the console and know oh here's all the Steve are is to adjust it and everything so one of the big player facing things is
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yeah pause you know stop capturing for a minute I'm gonna I'm gonna scream or I don't know pauses put it into like an idle animation basically yeah but there's other options that we're talking about - it's like you know one do I want to be sending you know I could I could enable disable that separately - do I want to be receiving that's something that will probably default on because of course you'll come into the game and most games usually will default there boy poor there those kind of systems - on at the first run because you know you'll be walking around in the verse and you see a guy reacting it's like Oh what what's that I want to go enable that but you don't want to enable necessarily the webcam capture right out of the gate because if somebody doesn't know about it and and we had this experience when somebody was kicking up
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their editor their webcam was returning on and they freaked out yeah who's watching me work and I told them I just want to see their faces they're hitting different bugs and you know I want to see the reaction as they were that wasn't at all what it is at all so we don't send the video data of course we just have these little I did that at Gamescom I i remote it into my computer and turn my webcam on the Homewood access I could see I've accessing them I was talking to them so I totally got off on a tenant so the answer yeah you're fine from the chat what working Tech is being implemented for character damaged states will arm or have real-time damage with our characters themselves have any visible damage shooters black eyes
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bruising just tossed it over here yeah it's something we're definitely thinking about but right now we're not really planning to implement that right now part of it is the fidelity aspect because you know especially when you get into things like black eyes and bruising and cuts and stuff like that you need to make it look good especially with the quality of our assets so if we don't come up with a solution that's not gonna look good I don't think we're gonna implement it sure and otherwise it's a lot of time invested into something that's maybe not worth it when it comes to damaged states on armor it's definitely something worth thinking about and I know like even the audio team is being able to recognize something that's cloth versus something that's leather and metal but if as far
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as like being able to put a bullet hole through something that's significant asset and geo changes also performance issues yes so like for the ships for instance release is called damage maps which is allows us to use shader tap to get really cool procedural kind of damage applied to the whole so you can see holes you can see burns and stuff but it's incredibly expensive and to a certain point it's fine you put it on my ship so it's okay but if all the characters all the items all these things in the world have it we're gonna just kill her performance so putting it on every single armor piece is probably overkill so we need to figure out some kind of happy medium for these things maybe that's just we have this thing called a wear and dirt shader that we can use as something becomes damaged it can look maybe more burnt-out yeah exactly yeah I was just gonna say that's
00:35:36
something we're playing with now is we're actually getting adjustments to that later to add additional features to that and so that would be you know we're and dirt and age or the three that we're gonna start looking at because those are all separate and that would can be it could I would say substitute but in at least what we progress and see if it's something we really want to advance into it'll it'll work in kind of the same way how how far are we thinking again can I start out looking like Jango Fett and then end up like Boba Fett yeah and that's actually how all of our assets are made now so all of our assets are made now like the way you just say is like on the showroom floor so they're gonna be like super shiny super pristine no flaws in them that's kind of how we build most of them and then as they can
00:36:25
either get dirt which is you know walking around and dirt or justice or soil or whatever like that and that will accumulate a dust on it or a dirty affect to it where is essentially chips or being used or being deemed or banged up against something or you know that's what that is and then aged it sorry to just go back where also usually shows materials underneath the layer so think of like a car paint like if you chip off your car paint its metal or fiberglass or something like that underneath so that is essentially what damage is and that age is a separate element to that which is like again going back to a car if you leave a car out in the Sun for a couple years and it just gets Sun bleached it changes the color of that but it still affects the same material so all of our assets are already built to do that yes
00:37:15
but when it comes to the additional elements like burning or things like that that's something we're not totally into right now and to that point I'll say form a game code perspective I've already worked on something called degradation which is maybe not going in 3.0 but there's already been a significant amount of work towards it where we can have things aged over time and that will not only impact the way they look but also impact their behavior so if you have a power plant and you use it a lot you know over hours of gameplay it's gonna be a less performant power plant then the new one that you bought if it takes some damage it also perform less it'll make it actually aged faster if you over here it's and stuff like that it's a active I think place and development that we're working on and I think for post 3.0 is gonna see a lot more attention yes it's important it's
00:38:04
like and exactly what's happening here is that it's it's bringing the game code and the art together so like done on Josh's side it is a single material what's cool is all shader effects that they actually apply it's not a whole separate material so it's all just parameters within a shader so what these gotta tie into on the game code side is those parameters so we're just gonna drive them from some sort of persistent game code function that's saying oh these things you know how long is it lasted in the university exactly you know all these sort of rule sets that go into that so that's step one before we even consider doing damage on the characters because we want it we want to we want to at least implement what we've done the art for already and if we can get awesome stuff like UV to sort of damage shader damage on the character is great but you know like like chanted described you know that's a render target for every single yes one and that's kind of and it essentially as
00:38:53
soon as you had a second UV set it's almost doubling the cost of your character yep so realize that that's that's why we want to get the wear and dirty in first because you're already eminent yeah and because it's all like Sean was saying in parameters it's the same cost as the default character so there's no difference in the performance no we want as many people to be able to gather in one place as possible if the choice is you know the choice is between you know twenty people I'm just pulling a number yeah you know with what damage shaders getting together or forty people we just the wear and tear we're gonna choose yeah and that's a real thing we think about all the time it's like coming you know every time we you know want to add a new pieces something on the character we want to add another attachment to the character that's performance so how do we maximize the amount of stuff that we can put on and increase the visual fidelity the customization all that kind of stuff but
00:39:41
also have as many players in it's possible and workflow yeah anyone like and again because it's in one materials parameter it takes way less time to author that and then you know take advantage of it from the gameplay Sutton but we've got a lot of in star citizen that we've not yet taken full advantage of and it's you know it's just time didn't takes time when you were talking about the wedding terror dreading the eight hour polisher are more minigames I think going back to just really briefly it is cool cuz all of it is gameplay elements yes dirt and we're an age can all affect your items in appendant Lee - yes it's a visual read on a gameplay element yeah just to me a always that is already yeah we already use it on the up for season and and to
00:40:28
make it even better what we want is you know different tournaments of the the dirt and we're depending on if you've been on damar for you know whatever 20 years yeah you know if you've been a damar for a certain amount of time then you're gonna have more of the the yellow kind of you know is sandstone versus being on a snowy planet or something I think it's also gonna add a really cool element to character customization which I don't think a lot of other games have done which is persistence with your item like you're saying Jane go to bubbeleh like those items on Boba Fett are way more worn and they're way more aged - it's two separate things like they've had that for a really long time and so you'll see be able to see players who have had stuff in the game for a long time and it'll be a different look than even somebody who just purchased it from
00:41:15
a shop which would be super cool I'm excited Sean a Titan suit a question mark wait no suit oh we were so close we were so close we're so close every flippin show because he all right so how like yes I love max Amex is a big thing you know Titan kind of kind of is mech ish sort of thing it's more of a battle suit kind of structure so but you got to know how this last one went so we well Josh specifically contacted up and 3d concept like proper you know model high poly model and we gave it to the riggers and we put it all together and we had you know whoever was it was like a hundred and twenty different Pistons and things like this all the runtime for a gaming was very very cool except for when it
00:42:04
held the weapons so of course Steve had some some input on there's the animation director because of course we want it to look a certain way when you're in the Titan suit in your home's weapons and the way this the the first concept worked and it wasn't the first calm day it was the way this 3d this would have worked it was the weapons went at the end of the arms so then you would hold them forward right it would look cool all right and it could be kind of down with your elbows down like this or even out a little bit but the design currently is that can carry ship size one or sometimes size - I'm not even sure if everything with the size but even a ship size one weapon and so everybody knows I mean most of the ship size one weapons are like a meter and a half two meters long a real big so the issue here is is a hallway will easily defeat a Titan yeah now opening you will end up with yeah
00:42:52
it's like with the guns out in front of you you know what and I think we measured it was like 15 feet of distance from you know the back of the Titan to the front so literally he couldn't turn in the hallways right he couldn't turn it just it did not work with the metric the turning radius of having any weapon out and then spinning around the radius of that was mess right and and you know people have obvious answers I'm sure where they're like oh okay well just mount them on the shoulders knowledge yeah totally yeah but we've got other stuff to do too so we had a small sprint around that we spent a little bit of time we figured out a bunch of things and so we'll revisited again when we need it but yeah it is an important asset we will be doing it um it's just stuff yeah the first sort of design implementation it happened exactly as you would expect but it did bring up a lot of really good design questions
00:43:39
which is like okay if we want this look if you want the size in this field what kind of things work in this things suit go yeah like what can it go into rooms can it fit into a ship is it supposed to fit into a ship is that cargo in a ship or does it just walk in like and those are all questions that were not really even thought of they were kind of thought of but it wasn't like until you saw this is what it should look like on a guy and this year what it should look like and then it you now you put it next to other elements and you're like okay we need a maybe so just describe game development yeah it's an iterative thing and like it's you know yeah you don't you don't see these things until you get into the situation I mean I don't think the the concept necessarily is gonna change that much it's actually quite cool and already the idea is that josh has come up with with trying to reduce that size so that we can actually move
00:44:26
around in our hallways and ships and these kind of things it is really good and it is interesting I don't know how much we've talked about it but there's a there's a frame you're I don't know I don't know if I can well it is in the future and we can we can talk a little bit about it but you know I don't know do you want to do um we don't have I think we see the first video later save it for a special data so it's cool though anyways and it's big let's talk let's um it was cool to see it next to the vanduul as well with the human right next to it because you would jump in the game and have the Titans in it and it was actually totally right it was pretty intimidating actually and that's the idea it's meant to be intimidating it's a it's a shock trooper it's a you know we're almost ahead of time really yeah
00:45:16
will there be an option to orbit a moon or planet from like a yeah don't just me personally okay you will everything that's outside of the planet at the moment will geosynchronous Lee rotate and orbit with the planet because you're in the planets the zone now if you want a synchronous orbiting that is not in right now but if you were just like you get outside of gravity you just hang out there and the planets rotating you won't rotate with it yes and as it orbits you'll rotate you'll order it with it while we rotating so that works how will weather on planets affect players in the ground well we talked a little bit about the dirt wear stuff so
00:46:04
that's a visual tell maybe it'll have something to do with degradation so there'll be a gameplay element to that I'm sure visibility would have a big part of that a lot of these are conjectures and just it's something like snow slowed down character movement is sure I mean we have different co g kind of movement so yeah I don't see why snow couldn't slow in I mean we have different movement for the different gravities on the planets yeah I mean if anything and we can just start with there being some kind of gravity modifier on the movement and I mean the obvious is some of the obvious some of the things that we'll do is probably you know things with the gas component anyway so so what the mix of the atmosphere is if it's you know storm that carries with it some kind of you know noxious gas or whether there's real hazards within that storm yet to be seen
00:46:54
let's get you guys flying around the planets first and then we'll see how much harder we need to make it for you there's a question I like it but be careful not to commit designed anything can we have wingsuits parachutes if I eject an atmosphere I need something to survive you're probably talking about our our suborbital yes I don't release are you talking about this one are we talking about this if you're caught the planets gravity any with you ejectors there's no way for you to survive at the moment so we know nothing's in three point over that we've we've stated there are no parachutes and anything we don't know but is that having anybody you know it by the plan for later patches I haven't
00:47:43
but I'm not on the player to yes I'm not as plugged into the future designs for that team yes superhero landing you guess superhero landing in jetpack yeah it's like a tiny game superheroes David they've asked about some parachute stuff on the and the environments but those are for like sitting on the ground yeah going in the wind so I'm not sure if we have ideas for parachutes I think the thing that since you have a thruster pack and just like no jet pack maybe but then again it's that's not even close to strong enough no I think the thing that it's safe to commit to is that we won't leave it at this no definitely no then collect then colliding with right and and again considering you know games like Crysis 1 had a parachute it wouldn't be a
00:48:32
dramatic departure to put one in but again it's just a priority thing that I bet you that'll become a much higher priority yeah the minute you guys are jumping out of ships and splatting on the ground yes yes so you can shorten well yeah don't jump out of your ship especially if you have passengers a lot of fun in a strong challenge no it's cool but i yeah i mean as steve has mentioned this million times like he even did a bunch of motion capture for the christmas one stuff where he you know there's a bunch of skydiving rules and these kind of things that he wants to do yeah again it's just a matter of priority yeah okay and again everything we add on the animation side delays the female so okay we saw character creation an early version of character creation
00:49:21
back in march how is that coming along any possibly easy on when we might see more about that can we say the ETA i'm gonna i'm gonna avoid the ETA but there is a sprint there is a feature team around if right now that's that's working on it so and again our plans are very staged in the approach stage one is not going to be a black desert or a GTA level sculpting in this kind of stuff the first step literally is just to get you guys to select the items that you want your character to represent so that means i think we said nine phases select styles coupl eye colors so because what we have to solve with that and there's nothing you know super complex but we have to do it is we have to write all
00:50:10
this to your persistency so that end we have to also figure out how many different character slots that you have on an account because there's been talk of that is a ship package a character slot or is it multiple ship package just give you multiple character slots you know with all the future where it's those those fundamentals are so important to address before you're you know spoken either face those oh yeah these kind of things we have to get the proper persistency in place so i really really hope that this is very soon it but it depends on how we're how well this feature TV goes we of course have a goal to get this out to you as soon as possible even in the just a simple selection set of do hair eyes face and just selection yeah a bunch of different ones once we have that email comes next
00:51:01
hopefully if the female doesn't come then we go straight to sculpting but yeah so first up that females and then I hope that answers question anything well that's it guys cool you survived thank you guys for tuning in for our September monthly subscribers townhall we didn't have one last month because of Gamescom there won't be one next month because of cencon so what system cons already yeah it's like my mom so I thank you guys for watching and that I've got some notes there were some FPS issues whatnot during the broadcast we'll take a look at the local recording and if it's better than what's on YouTube we'll replace it so this will just live on in posterity with the best
00:51:50
possible picture and sound so with that Thank You Sean Thank You Josh Thank You Chad for taking time out of our busy repo no rush to get it'll say be here on the show but today we'll see you next time everybody you

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