Star Citizen: Around the Verse - The Physics of Atmospheric Flight

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:15

   hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse our weekly look behind the scenes at star citizen's development I'm sandy Gardner and I'm Steve bender in today's episode our designers will discuss how we're implementing atmospheric flight and differentiating it from space travel but first let's check in on the development team and take a look under the hood in this week's burn down welcome back to burn down our weekly show dedicated to reviewing progress on the release of star citizen alpha 3.0 we're getting close to live release so let's check out how things are going so we're on target now with the issues we've got we're getting quite a few and the issues fixed up and the ones that are propping up a more feature related issues which are a

2. 00:01:03

   lot simpler to fix most of the time than code issues and so it's good to see that we're moving into this this transition of feature issues rather than code for the rest of team we're now into book fits and polishing mode for 3.0 so the remaining issues after I've gone through I've moved the tasks will leave us with any outstanding bugs 43.0 obviously the world will come in as some of these features are tested a bit more heavily and keyway are focusing more on on hammering those the mission givers they went through a full QA TR I did my my review last week however that was not in the game it's it was a multiplayer so now we have a

3. 00:01:54

   review set this week for the full in game and basically being will switch between all the different reputation and virtue variables so that we can see all of their lines and then once that's good that will be sign-off but we're more basically in the final 95% of it on the mission giver side of things we are turning attention to the feedback that todd papy has given this week he's given some feedback in relation to the animations having issues where the character is looking off a certain direction and then we'll sat back and and look at you when he's delivering his lines we're also making sure we're putting the final finishing touches on on ruto to make sure the the the overall effect of the route of route owes coming out of the hologram looks really really

4. 00:02:43

   good so we're getting those final details locked in and should have those characters ready to go soon one of the strange issues that popped up last week was all a I and NPC ships were spawning in without pilots they responding completely empty and which meant the non of the missions that involve those could be completed or you couldn't leave and all swans the shits just didn't do anything so Rob Johnson and spent some time and he was able to fix that one up again before we went to beat you so we received this bug regarding whole objects from de we're basically shadows from whole objects were being cast on to the main scene hollow objects are basically invisible to the main player camera and we resolve this bug by bassy during the shadows zone query we have a bunch of flags that we can say ignore

5. 00:03:31

   these types of objects or take these types objects and we basically resolve it by saying follow a shadow zone query ignore all objects from coming through and therefore it won't render in the shadow pass and you won't get a shadow appearing in the main scene today I'm gonna show you the bug that we calling the ghost of grim hats this is the room we'll meet who tow one of our mission givers is no it looks nice and empty everything is fine look what happens when I turn on the flashlight there's a ghost it's not a shadow as a volume what it actually is it's actually Ruto himself to create this hologram we are putting invisible

6. 00:04:22

   and NPC into the world then we animating it and projecting to the to the hologram and apparently this this invisible NPC can be illuminated with a flashlight at the moment bug is on the graphics programmers we're hoping to fix it soon so you could have grim facts without any ghost so the NPC admin officer I reviewed last week and that's from a behavior standpoint was good now we were doing the final step of that which is integrating that into actual missions and so once those are done I will review it from start to finish in an actual mission and then it will be signed off we have just started balancing of environmental missions so

7. 00:05:13

   these are the probability volumes that you may have heard of but Tony certificate has been working on so these are in our dev builds so you'll be like you know quantum traveling along and be pulled out you know there's an asteroid kind of rogue asteroid flowed in via the path of a thing and they make maybe it's caught a few other people involved you know into in in there as well and it could be pirates it could be something smashed into it so there's a little to explore or interact with and while your quantum traveling as I say these are not obviously released yet but work because we're trying to balance fees so it doesn't feel like an a final fantasy constantly being pulled out by a bad guy kind of thing as you're trying to get from A to B which it currently does so

8. 00:06:02

   yeah we're ballot we tune in though until we get something that's kind of rare and but like so it kind of shocks you when it happens our admin office worker our designers are still continuing to work on that and we've pretty much closed that out now we're just now implementing those into the mission flow so that you're able to interact with them in that you get mission markers specifically denoting them and one of the issues we've noticed for a while as well as been raised by some of our best pilots in the community is a an ESP book where ESP was not being able to pull you onto target after several of our team looking into this this actually seems to be part of a bigger issue with ifcs and ifcs oscillating so slightly moving around and overcompensating and under compensating in particular circumstances

9. 00:06:50

   both John and David have been looking into this this week so they can get to the bottom of it we fixed one of the bugs with this which should improve it slightly but the team will continues to work on this so we can make sure that ESP and I FCS is is as good as it can be for r3 or release while the ship set upside we are just in bug-fixing and polish mode now we are fixing bugs left and right bugs to do with 300 series animation issues where the player is getting up into the 300 eye and being shoved out through the bottom of the ship somehow we're fixing up landing gear issues on the glaive as a glaive is not really landing properly and tipping over we're fixing up issues with the herald atmosphere there's certain parts of the herald where if you stand at the specially right spot you

10. 00:07:38

    can suffocate and die so that's a problem we're fixing that up also we're also turning attention to some balance things as well we have shield balance in QA testing right now we've got four four-sided shields or you can actually divert power to various parts of the shield's and stuff like that so we're testing to make sure that looks good and feels good for each ship we're also doing that across the number of a number of different ships as well and items to make sure that the balancing effort is going smoothly we will be doing some final work on the EMP to get that ready and for the most part it turns off everything in the ship already turns off the MFE turns off the power however there were some still 2d layers of the HUDs that were not being turned off we'll get those turned off and so I view

11. 00:08:29

    that those is kind of minor bugs but that should be good to go as well this week I've been working on a lot of ship issues they've been multiple numerous we have a lot of issues with the doors coming in you notice the caterpillar doors slamming shut and a wall of collision preventing you from getting out we've also had problems with the constellation cargo bay calling and lighting issues a lot of this is because if we've now separated the doors as items now to better communicate and do damage in the future the systemic damage work so this is going through different processes some art related some technicals sometimes I'm passing it to an engineer sometimes I'm fixing it myself and

12. 00:09:17

    there's also rigging issues so there's numerous issues going on caused by the itemization but we're working through those problems so we've made updates to the shields the real update that was made was that we have actually balanced all the shield Health's which we'd have an opportunity to do that in the past and so I'm sure a lot of players are frustrated with how difficult it was to take down ships so what we've done is we've taken all of the size the vehicle and the size one two and three shield generators and then bounced the health so that they're a reasonable value for the four phases on each of the ships that we have so far the recharging time you'll notice is much more reasonable - and that they'll take some time to charge all four and this results in the each individual face taking some time to

13. 00:10:06

    take down and without allowing them to charge to wrap at a pace so that it's impossible to take down a face a shield you're hitting with your guns the shield screen consists of indicators for your power your regenerate the actual amount of health in each shield face the distribution of the shield health across the shield system as well as the the status of the hardening system whether it's active how much cooldown time there is and also it lets you know when you have when your regen is is broken when when you're when you hit zero health it has to recover from

14. 00:10:54

    that so you also have a standby button to let you trigger that so this week I've been working on overall damage and debris there's been some changes on the engineering side for how our ships break apart so I've just been going through all the ships with a fine-tooth comb and making sure that all the pieces break apart in the correct order and you know the overall ship dies and everything flies away correctly there's been some ghost debris that kind of hangs around afterwards and we have various issues were working through to make sure all the ships look as cool as possible and actually work correctly with insurance integration there's just minor bugs right now where it's just not showing the players balance or or how long it has to remain as soon as we get those bugs fixed then everything will be we'll be good to go

15. 00:11:44

    and this week in our burn down we've fixed some issues with grab Lev so one of the issues that we've been seeing on the PTU build is the bikes dragging across the ground we've severely reduced the amount of times this happens although there's still a few user cases where this is still occurring and these it will we'll continue to investigate these so with item 2.0 balance as well as the atmospheric flight tuning we've finished what we consider kind of first pass on those with the the balancing and everything that will continue until we actually ship three Oh as far as the atmospheric flight we feel that's in a pretty good place we've we've just recently checked in some some new fixes before that and some new balancing for that as well but with the item 2.0 we've we've gone through and we've done some

16. 00:12:34

    more fuel adjustments and and we're getting that to you the place where we see so it really depends on how the players hammer on the boost button and if they're if they're flying conservatively then they the fuel will actually last longer and and it's getting to the place where from a design standpoint we feel it's right then going through and adjusting the power the shields that those will be kind of a constant ongoing thing until we actually ship 3.0 we've gotten some more atmospheric flight issue fixes in which include fixing turbulence when the ships are stationary so one of the things you may have seen in some of the previous PTU builds is even when the ships are stationary they'll still wobble as if they're being impacted by turbulence

17. 00:13:22

    which most of you will know that that isn't even vaguely realistic so we fixed that ship item UI integration we're on the second of three QA TRS so ideally bone gets the third one in today and then once those are all in we should be good to go and at that point we'll we'll set up a review to to look at it make sure that you know everything is ready for the players then from there with the PMA that is finally entered in QA TR we have the the category the categories the way that we want them to be

18. 00:14:09

    we were finalized in the highlighting so ideally once that finishes the QA t are then won't be ready to to flip the switch and say that da does feature complete the VMA is is being worked on right now as we speak since most of the work that is being done on the PMA transfers directly over to the VMA so then from there we'll will probably need to do some minor cleanups and and the way that we sort through the the list of the items that are on the ship and but that's pretty minor personal inner thought went through an impromptu desk review with Chris yesterday and that is is basically in designers hands now to implement it the way that Chris wants it

19. 00:14:57

    and so I think from feature standpoint that there's just minor fixes on that one we've had loads of work going into the persistence warning right now in the PTU people can use the beds as a safe point to log out and then come back to they can use a personal inner thought to do this when they get into the bed and we've been having some great feedback about that already as for performance we made some good progress especially now with the feature log in place so the the features are locked and now we as a performance team can go in and really see okay this is the set of features we want to ship with and we can go in and see okay where can we improve even more because prior to that of course new features were coming in and we had to go over and over again because new features

20. 00:15:46

    might of course cause some more performance trouble for us so but now with the future lock we can really go in and see okay where can we improve on the other side what what helps us as well is people now stop working on new features and do have the time to go in and actually fix what we point out to them so instead of working on features we can now work on performance and actually polish what we've already got last week we had David Coulson working on the ranged based I realized variable update culling and which is a an amount of work that should improve performance quite significantly across the board especially with larger player cuts and going up to 14 50 player cuts and he checked in that work on Friday but it

21. 00:16:36

    has created a few issues which keyway highlighted in a test request that they were doing for this work and so since then we've had David and Clive of the network team and Chris Balti over Andy all working together on and trying to resolve these issues and some of them include things like desync and performance spikes and issues where you're spawning incorrectly and so things like that they've been working together to try and get them all fixed so we can get that out to the public and test it on the large scale that we needed for last week we've been fixing issues and probably most notably there was a bug where if a server being running about six hours physics time and start going backwards one of our network guys spotted the issue put a fix in and now

22. 00:17:25

    time always goes forwards which is which is good to know personally in a thought has passed its final review now so that's also in the PTU for people to use we've been getting some great feedback about that as well there are still things we want to change and to polish as the the final pass before we're okay with it being the final implementation for 3a but this is very very close now stress testing the game with thousands of people playing continues to throw off tremendous amounts of information regarding both performance and stability daily updates using our Delta patcher are allowing us to charge ever closer to this live release as of filming this we're at 176 must fix issues for our live release candidate of star citizen alpha 3.0 the team has checked in over 518 updates to the branch and closed

23. 00:18:16

    dozens of issues every day as leadership continues to hone in on what's absolutely necessary to address to go live as quickly as possible see you next week he run burned down don't forget to check out our weekly production schedule report on the website for even more insight into the development process now as many of you have noted in the forum's piloting a ship in space should of course feel very different than flying in a planet's atmosphere that's right aside from gravity did contend with wind and weather will eventually be factors while flying planetside our team has been fine-tuning the functionality that will help make atmospheric flight feel convincing and distinct let's see what they have to say about the unique design challenges associated with introducing these new mechanics

24. 00:19:11

    so I'm Mike Snowden the VFX director I'm David Coulson I'm a junior gameplay programmer here that sort of ended up specializing in flight control and ifcs sort sort of tasks I'm Andrew Nicholson and I'm tech designer at foundry 42 my name is John Pritchett I'm a senior physics programmer here I specialize in the vehicle control systems flight model missiles you know any place where we need control systems when you talk about the atmospheric flight we're talking about the long-term goal and implementing a short-term goal as well long term goal we want to have thrusters performing differently in space and an atmosphere in space you've got way more thrust to use and it's gonna be like an impulse effect so you have these really

25. 00:20:00

    high accelerations that are very short lengths of time so the pilot can manage them they're not really high g-force but for a very short at the time and the opposite to that is sustained thrust and that would be what we use in atmosphere so you have to always be firing these thrusters to stay above the planet to say gravity you're fighting gravity with these thrusters so you get much less performance and so that being the long-term ambition of how thrusters work in the short term we're trying to implement how would that feel so when you enter atmosphere come to any of the planetoids in 3-0 the the ship is using what would be sustain thrust which means lower acceleration and to do that we're kind of switching to a different state like an atmospheric flight state which

26. 00:20:47

    means you cross the threshold you enter atmosphere and now you've got less acceleration to play with there's more to do there when we want to do the asymmetrical effects of drag on stop times and performance but right now that's not there so my role is taking the numbers that we have for Space Flight looking at the performance of the ship and then translating that down into atmospheric which as a general rule is like I see as being two-and-a-half times less performance so you've got less acceleration so I basically take spaceflight run the numbers in a big spreadsheet and then translate that into what we need for third arc third order motion so we've got the velocity the next in the stock time then we need a jerk value for that

27. 00:21:35

    and so I have to put all these numbers into a spreadsheet get the jerk value out and then put these into a ship EXO now get them into the lumberyard and and then and then run like an output which gives me all the tuned parameters and then I use those to put back into the ship XML it's kind of a laborious process the fun side of it is the back and forth play test you know you get these numbers and then you go oh this this ship is way too sluggish it's too slow I'll tweak them here I'll raise the the accelerations here and do the retune of the ship in some cases with the larger ships you have the problem R of right now you switch them to this atmospheric tuning they've gone below in some cases below 1g acceleration so we'll start to fall in atmosphere so

28. 00:22:23

    then it then it's a case of alright I'll shunt I'll take power away from some of the maneuvering thrusters and power them into them just the thrusters on the bottom of the ship for said and once you've done that I mean then they can then they can enter atmosphere and not just crash into the ground I had that problem with like the Star Ferry the caterpillar just plummet and you just siphon it off from the other thrusters basically to get that performance and future ships like the Starfarer they'll use VTOL thrusters we don't have them set up to do that just yet so today's kind of like let's just take it off the maneuvering thrusters and make sure it flies okay I get to basically design the the physics you know the flight model itself and implement that into the game develop a system that allows the designers to to tune the ships to get

29. 00:23:15

    the behaviors that they want out of them in our game all of our our vehicles will be spaceships but we want to have the ability to bring those spaceships planetside and atmosphere and when we do that we wanted to include additional forces in the the flight model to include drag lift some turbulence from wind and and different factors like that so previously the atmospheric model was like counteracting for gravity and drag so it would just use the thrusters to basically balance out gravity and balance out drag which is you know if you were making a spacecraft or a fighter plane in real life that's what you'd want to do because it makes them it makes it fly really precisely but what it means is that it sort of feels like you're flying

30. 00:24:03

    in space because you just can't feel the gravity because the flight system is just trying to counter active and we got a lot of this sort of feedback from the gamescom presentation particularly so the new model tries to use gravity and drag to help it so for example if you are trying to slow down downwards you can use gravity to help you and you can use less thruster force and it will come easier so you've got gravity to help you when you're going when you're trying to slow down going off words you'll slow down slower and so what happens in the end is that you sort of have this like asymmetric imbalance in the ship that you can feel and so say for example if you're like if you're trying to slow down with your pointy Gladius ship going in towards the wind you're gonna slow down a lot slower then if you angle your thing up like this and

31. 00:24:52

    try and fly like this and so you can really feel like it feels like you're in the atmosphere and it feels like this air that's pushing on your ship so we've been working on that pretty much since Gamescom but our immediate goal for the PTU release is a little bit more of a turbulent simulation so what we have now is turbulence and wind that sort of affects the stability of the ship I guess so if you get if you start flying really fast the ship sort of shakes and buffle about and you can sort of feel like you're right at the edge of you know the aerodynamic limits of the ship which feels really good and it it again separates it from feeling more like you're in space when you you know you can't really feel anything because you're just in nothing that's pretty much so this is what we have now and

32. 00:25:40

    it's pretty much in the game now and running and it feels really good you can feel a lot of difference between like aerodynamic ships like say the Gladius can go quite fast and it's sort of just a little bit shaking around and then you know something that's shaped like a brick like the aurora it's like shaking or on you can't really control it super well and it's really hard to fly which is good some of the the tuning that Andy's been doing is like been trying to find this line of what's to uncontrollable and what feels good but is uncontrollable like under control levels too too strong of a word it's more just that we want you to feel like you're at the limits of this ship and if you push too hard you're gonna lose control but we don't want it to be that you can't control it in the

33. 00:26:28

    atmosphere which is just not fun we actually have had some of those issues with really small ships like the Merlin and the gravel of bikes because they can now fly in the atmosphere as well and they're really small and light and you really get pushed around a lot and in like you know in high winds and and you're moving really fast it feels really strongly that you're not quite in control anymore it feels really good and it makes it really separates the the flight from being in space to being in the atmosphere which is what the goal was the way I approach that actually is more through the control systems which is what interfaces the the player or in real life the pilot or whatever with with the vehicle that sets limits on what they can do with the vehicle and how the vehicle performs or whatever so you can still have realistic physics

34. 00:27:17

    while at the same time creating more of a traditional gameplay experience through the way the controls are interpreted and and vehicle response to the player we basically have this this ability to specify goals in position or velocity or acceleration and the ship will try and achieve those goals so that look the most complicated one is position which isn't used for a general flight it's more used for AI and stuff where you say I want to get to this goal and the system will try and figure out how much to Perich thruster and everything to actually achieve that goal we use the velocity goal and the acceleration goal for when you're actually flying around you know you are controlling the ship and those controllers now basically include drag and gravity in their predictions so if you say hey I want to

35. 00:28:06

    get to 200 meters per second in this particular direction the algorithm will look through all of the current forces that it has available it and go okay hey gravity is is helping us in this particular direction that we're trying to accelerate so we don't actually need to give as much thruster force or maybe if you're going the other other direction you need to give extra gravity to counteract the other side of gravity which maybe your thrusters just don't have enough thrust actually to give enough force to counteract gravity plus what you actually want to move in that direction and so that's now included in that core model which is the one part of it and the turbulent stuff is a second layer that we have on top of the flight control system so you know we have the the control logic which is you or an AI give input into the system and the

36. 00:28:55

    system will try and figure out how to get to that configuration and then after that we have all the extra stuff which is things like turbulence just random air and and stuff like that that gets added on top which is you can think of it as like the external forces that are moving or attempting to move the ship that you are not in control of and so obviously turbulence and wind is the big part of that one so when you're flying around you'll have your control input and you'll say hey okay I want to get to this configuration and then on top of that the turbulent system is going to calculate some turbulence based on the atmospheric density and the wind and everything and it's gonna say hey I'm gonna add this extra force we're just gonna move your ship and then the ship will obviously have to react to that you'll have to

37. 00:29:44

    react to that and the reaction systems will try and kick in to keep you on the goal that you want with it you know so as the ship just won't have enough thrust to do it and you'll get off course or you know the chivalry bustling around or something like that we dynamically calculate the cross sectional areas for for each ship so the amount of surface area that comes into play in drag will be unique for every ship and not just for every ship but based on the state of the ship so if it gets a wing blown off that's going to affect not only the amount of surface area that it has for drag but also the center of drag where that is relative to the center of mass on the ship and that'll you know result in torque based on I'm dragging and things like that so it's it's a very accurate drag simulation so the thing about atmospheric flight specifically with the

38. 00:30:31

    effects is there's always going to be a transition when you're on a planet or a moon that's actually got atmosphere that's when we're going to get the contrails instead of engine trails so the key to it is it's it's a visual thing so it gives people a sense visually the there's different things happening here and obviously that's just backing up the actual what the ship's doing and how people have got to react to that so yeah contrails you're gonna see all the players contrails so if you're chasing or you're in a park or if you're in a dogfight you're gonna see these contrails based on the fact that you're inside this atmosphere we take a little bit of unrealism just out of practicality like for example in real life the atmosphere doesn't really end it just sort of extends ash arbitrarily into space getting thinner and thinner and thinner but we actually have a line

39. 00:31:19

    where we're like past this point there is no atmosphere of past this point there is but the but the atmosphere below this line is really weak and so when you get into that sort of part of the atmosphere you'll look first of all you'll start seeing the atmospheric reentry effects particularly if you're coming in from like orbital speeds as you get lower and lower you start to feel it more and more and more and when you start to get really low it actually we're still sort of tuning this but what we would like is for right on the surface you actually feel it less you don't have the turbulence of wind blowing over hills and mountains that you have a little bit higher up in the atmosphere so when you get lower it's actually a little bit a little bit safer and a little bit more stable than if you were to try and fly a little bit higher

40. 00:32:08

    we actually had some issues when QA were testing the system where they reported that you could fly like extremely high speeds in Yalies atmosphere and immediately we were concerned that this is an issue and then we went and actually looked at and realized that actually the atmosphere on Yela is like 1% of de Mars atmosphere and as a result that there's pretty much no air resistance there's nothing to slow you down which is completely realistic so we were like well in this situation this is not a bug this is an actual feature and so we have that already we're still working on things like weather and storms and stuff I think we saw that at last year's citizencon with the sandstorm stuff like that will affect the handling and stuff but we're not

41. 00:32:58

    quite there yet but we already want particularly the atmospheric density effects the handling and then weather changes will also affect it but that's a future goal that we haven't quite got to you so the flight model that we have today I took the approach of where it's basically the same control system that you have in space but then we have the addition of drag and turbulence and gravity forces so ifcs will actually work to remove those forces you know allocating thrust to to countering gravity and countering drag and then having removed those forces then it uses the same motion profiles that it would use in space to control the ship so the result is you you feel like you have you

42. 00:33:46

    know less thrust available because it's being used for other things and and you've definitely feel the turbulence but overall it's still the same flight model that we have space whereas the the new model I've actually already worked you know worked out the calculations for it I just need to get into the engine will actually include these additional forces lift drag and gravity in in its calculations to carry out whatever actions that the you know players is trying to achieve so for example if you're sitting here and you want to go down rather than countering gravity and then pushing you down it'll just generate less upward thrust so that it just drops gently down you know using gravity to your advantage so that's the main difference the player in the game will be able to start taking better advantage of those additional

43. 00:34:35

    forces of lift drag and gravity it's been developed pretty much to separate the the feeling of flight from space and atmosphere and it's it's partially you know a gameplay decision that it's nice to sort of have your your general moment to moment moment gameplay be refreshed so you know when you're playing the game and you're in space you you sort of are inclined to get used to flying in a certain way and then when you get into the atmosphere we would like you to sort of feel different and we would like you to change your gameplay style and to to feel that you know this is different then you need to adjust your gameplay which is sort of like you know you can take the analogy of you know when you're watching a movie or when you're writing a movie you pace it so that you have moments of like this high intensity and then we're going to give the audience a break for a minute and do something it's

44. 00:35:23

    sort of like that but with gameplay so you're gonna be flying around and then we want to change it up a bit and just you know give you some different experience for a few minutes which keeps the keeps the gameplay a bit more interesting but on top of that it's really important that this meets the expectations that a player would have about flying in atmosphere and this is where the feedback from games come came from people would see the ships flying in atmosphere and they would be like this doesn't really look right you know like the ship is just like it's like a fly just darting around and moving around like this in atmosphere I mean it's realistic if someone were to make a spacecraft in real life that had the power that our ships do who would behave like that but it doesn't look good and it doesn't feel good and so a lot of that is to also make it feel better and make it look better so that you know players get

45. 00:36:11

    into the atmosphere maybe you're like sitting on the planet and you see your friend fly in with some ship and you see like bustling around in the wind and everything rock you know it looks really cool that's also what we're going for I think most of the challenges have been figuring out where the line is - it's sort of like less of a technical challenge and more of a design issue of where is this line between being realistic and being suitable for gameplay that's really difficult to do it's really easy to make this perfectly you know hyper realistic simulation but that's just not fun unfortunately and so we have to like you know we do things really realistically and then we go hmm this might not be the best way to do this we have to actually go back and and

46. 00:37:00

    try and you know adjust the system to be more fun and to consider how we can accommodate the players you know needs and wants out of the system we've had issues as well particularly where say QA or avacado you're testing the game and they have some feedback that isn't really specific like they'll just say oh say gravel of bikes for example they don't handle well and I'm like what does that mean like what it why can you can you not turn quick enough are they losing control too much like there's so many things that could potentially contribute to it doesn't feel good and in the case of gravel EV you know it's it's usually lots of things so we have to sort of try and figure out what in this system could actually be giving you

47. 00:37:51

    the behavior that you have and how can we fix that that doesn't sound like too much of a technical issue but from a design side it's really really hard to do that and it's a thing that we're constantly sort of learning about as people play the game and test it we're figuring out you know this isn't working or this isn't really fun we need to try and reconsider this and then we have to again convert this like fake it's not fun feedback into actual like hard technical feedback of oh this bit of force is being applied too much or where you know we're rotating the ship the fraction too much here whatever it is and that transition is hard it's really hard one of the main challenges we had was the afterburner deceleration yet 1200 meters a second

48. 00:38:39

    when you hit the upper atmosphere and you need to be able to slow it down before you crash into that planet when we first put this upper afterburner speed in everyone in key way including design which is flying into the planets crashing exploding being furious with the whole thing so we have to come up with another approach the initial idea was you'd have less acceleration but you'd be able to hit higher velocity so when you went in to cruise up through normal SCM afterburner velocities into cruise afterburner you'd have less acceleration so it was slowly pushing up to the high velocities but we found with that as soon as you hit the crossover threshold from an SCM afterburner to the cruise afterburner you lost control on

49. 00:39:29

    the ship it became too hard to move because everything was scaled down to lower level acceleration he'd cross over and then you try and turn you'd feel like you're just drifting forever it's that week we we wanted to fix that immediately I mean that wasn't the intended goal we wanted to have it slower to get to their velocities but still keep control so I had to play around with all of the different scaling values to make sure that the maneuvering thrusters weren't affected but it was just the main thrusters that were affected so it would take longer to get there and then also give like a buff to the to the retro thrusters if you imagine you were shunting all the power with a thrust capacity to the front to stop you faster that's kind of the idea we're going with you it's when you cross into the atmosphere you'll you'll feel like you've got more control to stop whereas the terminal velocity in the max safe

50. 00:40:18

    speed will also restrict your velocity and slow you down it was also the afterburner scaling that would that would help you get there faster so while big ships like the caterpillar will still have an issue coming into an atmosphere and stopping in time if you're pushing it because it's cut such limited control once you get into the atmosphere smaller vessels should be able to get in there and stop and not have an issue but finding that right balance was the challenge not making them too powerful not making them too weak we had to have a lot of back and forth or QA on that and probably more with PTU to come the future plans we do have things that we want to do so even things like the thruster effects which went without long standing thruster effects in our game we want to bring in some visual differences to them when

51. 00:41:05

    you're in the atmosphere so one example will be we've got shop diamonds in some of our those three effects that you actually see in space now technically speaking you would receive shock diamonds when you're not in atmosphere so for a long time we've wanted to actually play around with that and actually have little details that only appear when you're in atmosphere so not necessarily really clear like really obvious things but just sold iffen PSA's so there's all kinds of things we want to do along those lines here in the future at this point we don't have the app the full atmospheric simulation which includes weather systems in place so I've put in a placeholder system that simulates wind initially actually had storms for what an earlier demo but I pulled that out for the three oh release we won't need that but we will have some variation of wind based on altitude

52. 00:41:53

    and and wind direction which is consistent based on your location you know within the sphere of a planet so everyone will have the same wind as well as wind gusts you know that can reach you know fairly high velocity so if you're flying along and you know wind is flung and going in one direction you're going to feel stronger drag in that direction but if you're flying with the wind you'll feel less drag the ship will be work nobody's working as hard you know in order to fly with the wind versus against the wind there definitely is wind turbulence and so the more the wind blows you know kind of shake the the ship gonna push it around a little bit you know when you get into really high wind or high gust conditions which you can at places you'll feel it more now this is all based on the kind of pristine state of the ship so a ship when it comes in it's

53. 00:42:41

    it's designed so that it's center of drag is fairly aligned with its center of mass so there's not a lot of drag that comes from from a lot of torque that comes from the drag on the ship but if you blow off a wing or whatever and it shifts the center of drag relative the center of mass then you have this moment arm right so so when the drag forces is applied to the ship it tends to push it you know to torque it around you know we have thrusters which aircraft don't have we have we have thrusters available and so they're always countering that and they'll try to keep you as best as they can it would keep you from from spinning around and just going out of control which is what you would do if we you know if it was just an aircraft but at some point when you've taken damage your thrusters you're not gonna have that ability so if you fly slow enough you'll be fine but if you fly too fast you'll find yourself just completely you know spinning out of

54. 00:43:28

    control Chris really wants it that you can basically hit aerodynamic limits like if you take a plane in real life and you like fly it at high speeds toward the ground and then pull off the wings eventually we'll reach a point where they're like no we can't do this anymore and they'll just break off and I think that's what Chris would wants us to get towards it's quite complicated to try and work out where those forces are because we don't have like a full-on fluid simulation that you would have in like professional flight simulator and in simulations like that it's quite easy to be like well you know this force here on this point but we we do that so we have to still come up with a solution for how to do that you know you know in a realistic but also suitable for the game and suitable to fit in with the rest of the game and

55. 00:44:16

    then we'll have will pretty much have that air dynamic like failures where parts of the ship just can't take the pressure anymore they'll just break off right now we're kind of in between with with the atmospheric model we did a first pass on it that got the ships flying in the atmosphere fairly quickly but it's not as accurate a flight model as as we want after 3.0 is out I'll be introducing a new flight model which will improve it quite a bit I think right now the main thing that players will feel when they're flying is the difference in the amount of acceleration available because of drag and things like that right and the turbulence that's applied to the ship but it still won't feel as different from spaceflight as as what we want and that's coming next as you can

56. 00:45:06

    see the physics and control systems are going to make for a very visceral in atmosphere experience that's all for this week next Thursday tune into our holiday a TV special focused on squadron 42 streaming on Twitch at 12 p.m. PST speaking of squadron 42 check your inbox for a dedicated newsletter that went out today and don't forget jump point vol 3 hardcover is available for sale now to subscribers as always thanks to our subscribers for supporting shows like the atv holiday special we encourage you to although in our poll collecting feedback for your perks you can access it via the link in this month's subscriber newsletter or by visiting the subscriber forums finally thanks to all of our backers your dedication is helping to make star citizen the best

57. 00:45:55

    damn space sim ever until next week we'll see you around [Music] thank you for watching so if you want to keep it with the latest and greatest in the star citizen a squadron 42 development please follow us on our social media channels see you soon