Star Citizen: Calling All Devs - Everything Flight Control and More

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:10

   hey everybody welcome to another edition of calling all Deb's our weekly Q&A series where I take questions from you the star citizen backer and posed them directly to our star system developers usually over Skype it's your a chance to submit your questions and have them answered immediately and directly by the folks who are actually working on our game for our first call today on this week's show we are going back to Manchester UK and our own Johnny just Sirius tech designer weapons designer looking I don't do titles Johnny how you doing man I'm great job thank you how are you I'm doing well there's a reason the title is like right below Johnny's window right this yeah Johnny I got a question for you now we're gonna break with tradition just a

2. 00:00:59

   little bit this question isn't actually from from the front of spectrum that I know I just got done doing that big whole spiel that's what the show normally is but but but today I want to talk about this week I want to talk about some topics that I think will be interesting to people that questions that have come from other places in spectrum that aren't necessarily in this thread for you your question this week we've heard a lot about you know item poor items system 2.0 we've heard about ships 2.0 with the new pipeline that would we feature every week or every other week in shipshape what is weapons 2.0 god I'm hearing that I'm starting to see I'm sorry missing emails talking about weapons 2.0 what are we talking about here yes so it's it's it's actually very similar to what we've been doing with

3. 00:01:47

   the items and ships 2.0 and it's essentially making things easier for us going forward making everything a lot more efficient especially code side as well and in the case of weapons making like kind of bespoke so much more of like a thing of the past so kind of previously using our like old xml's we're now moving over today to forge our I'll give a little shout-out to tossed in Frankfurt who's been working very hard on this for months he's the coder who's been working on the system with me a lot yeah basically so we're avoiding bespoke setup on weapons now because there were cases where we wanted to make some really really cool weapons for you guys but we were really hampered by what we could do with our existing system so we were very limited to like just is it

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   rapid-fire as a burst fire as a single shot and if we want us to do something special we would have to get a coder involved and jump in and kind of do a bunch of work for us whereas now as we kind of go further down the line and we might start investigating some damage types and things that start to get a little bit more weird we might want to have a lot more interesting behaviors on like the new set of it it it just it's difficult for me to kind of formulate how much it absolutely does it in two words but it's now we can combine different fire modes in different ways so the custodian as an example as a weapon we've got live at the moment and I think a lot of people know that in 3.1 a second fire mode might have slipped in and that was because we were testing ready for weapon 2.0 which is it always was planned to have a charged burst on

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   the weapon so that was something we could never do previously but now we can use a charged fire mode with a burst in cider and we can do what we need to with the charge to make the burst better so that's just an example of kind of how robust the system is in that we can and do all of these strain things with the strange things without needing code support any more specifically on FPS weapons we're also looking at recoil so we just been kind of like using a simple reasonably simple recoil system that we've got in our mannequin editor at the moment and that's all being moved to dataforge as well so it's a lot easier for people like me to use and edit live while I'm actually playing the game so I can do a lot more fine-tuning on there and we're getting a lot more kind of

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   like camera movement involved in everything to make the weapons feel a lot more punchy because we've been been listening to you guys and a lot of people think that we're not going we're not rough enough with the weapons they're not they don't feel punchy enough so that was one of the things we took on board were when we were redeveloping this stuff and one of the very big things for FPS is the attachment system we we really want to start pushing on that and I'm not saying it's gonna be coming anytime soon but we've allowed for all of the stats on the weapons to be modifiable so we can start to think about adding things like silences compensators different scopes and all this kind of thing that you can kind of change in and out and you PMA and you'll be able to see your weapon stats change and feel an affect on the weapon overall so yeah we're we're really leaving it open on the FPS side

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   basically for all of our systems going forward so we've really kind of future-proofed our system here ship weapons specifically as well we can we can do some new interesting things on there now that we've got ship an item 2.0 or it's kind of a currently in process like you say we can now tie weapon behaviors a lot more into the heat and power system and they never been before like previously we pretty much only really had is the weapon on or off or is it overheated we can now kind of take a look at like how much power is it receiving and then like kind of curve the stats a certain amount like oh if it's only receiving half power then it's fires half of half as fast it's only half as damaging and stuff like that so we can even start investigating something like the hotter the weapons running the more like damage it does all the faster it fires so you kind of

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   skirting that line between overheating and kind of reaching your max firepower so yeah like there's a kind of like the main points that I really wanted to cover so I'm pretty excited about this going forwards and actually getting it into game but I'm not sure I can't say when it's actually coming at well luckily for our backers we have a lovely RSI public roadmap where so when you have an idea like I said not said a number of times not everything is on the roadmap things you know that will come out after quarter 1 2019 certainly aren't down there but some things that we're working on now and that might even come up this year are not on the roadmap they're not in Rohit because we haven't developed it farther enough for us to have a really solid idea of when it might be implemented cancer or its waiting on

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   other but let's throw a dependency it's waiting on other dependencies and step like that but uh this is another great example of game development versus game construction you know you started with a weapon system based on XML like so many of our systems did that was a CryEngine staple back in the day yep now as we've progressed through the lumberyard and through our own star engine improvements and Karstens work with with a data foregin stuff we can now iterate and make a system that that really suits our needs so that that's what that's what you're seeing here and you'll and hopefully you'll see the you'll reap the rewards of this new system in the coming months yeah yeah all right man thank you so much Johnny io I wanted to want to

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    pitch you a weapon well I've got a weapon guy you're seeing how about you ever seen Howard the Duck remember that the neutron disintegrator well half the I've seen how the duck I'm not familiar with that gun it's it's the gut it's the gun they they use at the end to kill the dark overlord of the universe sort of try to kill the dark over there it wasn't very effective actually it was it no never mind don't do it thank you very much see ya alright thank you so much Johnny for our next call we're going right back here to the Los Angeles studio and our own cherie heiberg archivist extraordinaire on the lore team here sherry hey dude oh hey Jen welcome to calling all this mmm golf glad to be here I'd say it's better than the response I

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    get most times um I've got a question for you this is a question from the backers submitted by the backers voted on by the backers okay it says will there be an in-game way to to research the lore and history of the star Sasan universe something diegetic like a museum on various planets or what well um that's an interesting question I would very much like I'm just gonna put this others like an idea that I've been batting around and something that I'd really like to come to fruition one day you know we have the Ark in game I would very much like that to be a destination where players can go not only to explore a really cool museum like space but to actually access the collective PDA through it there are other ways to that I would like players to be able to

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    access the collective PDA like through your mobi glass that's one of the biggest goals that I really really want to see realized so that players can access galactic pedia both through their browser actually like some some kind of app we have on the website or through your mobile glass in game and what is the Galactic pedia itself or anybody that might not know well the Galactic pedia is the in progress in-game encyclopedia documenting the history and lore of the star citizen universe oh I have imagine that probably takes up a fair amount of time it does but we're doing active work on it right now we had we've had a couple of meetings with turbulent to talk about it so it's in the work on the tech side and on the lower side it's been in the works for quite some time now it's cool well thank you very much I'll let you get back to

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    work okay thanks all right thank you so much Sheri up next we've got our own Chad McKinney a gameplay programmer with a question about quantum travel I think he's perfect for Chad how you doing man hey man how's it going I'm going well for me I got a question it's kind of curious seems like an obvious thing but you know who knows this question says will quantum travel be blocked inside asteroid fields it seems silly to quantum direct quantum travel directly to and from grim max yeah it does and the reason why it's like this is because of a combination actually have some optimizations in code so one of them has to do with the fact that we don't want to do long raycast which is how we kind

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    of figure out something is within a certain distance of something else in physics doing that over cosmic scales can other leak rush your computer so we do some smart optimizations to only do intersection testing against celestial bodies for quantum travel so this skips kind of smaller things out scale we do a near field raycast check against something that you're directly in front of or close enough to be in front of the other there's actually another optimization actually prevents this from working which is the asteroids themselves are physicalized at a distance anyways it's even if they were wouldn't work long story short the game is more efficient because of some optimizations we put in however this is not an unsolvable problem we just haven't spent the time yet to come up with a good methodology to include the

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    intersection testing for the asteroids in the case of quantum trouble that is a solvable problem and it's something that we do want to do and the relative near-term it's not on the schedule that I have seen for this particular release but we know about the problem and we know that we want to fix it so it's it's it will happen that I have absolutely no doubt all right channel let's get back to work man thanks so much cool no problem all right and finally but you might notice I'm not in the office right now our last question of the show is to good friend john pritchett who works out of his home office so I figured if he if I got a call the guy at home I'm gonna take the call at home why not it also doesn't help that it's like 10:30 at night here and that's just I'm not gonna be in the office at night

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    so we are calling like I said john pritchett a physics guru extraordinaire John how you doing man doing good thanks for working me into your schedule I know it's late thank you for taking it for working me into your schedule you're not the easiest person to get a hold of I know you're very busy you got your fingers on a whole lotta aspects of star citizen so thank you so much what is your title I'm terrible with titles do you know you know what your title is yeah it's just physics programmers is it for you I don't know what my title is half the time a community veteran community it's all over the place I got a question for you it's from the backers it's voted on by the backers the question has to do with grab Lev basically this person wants to know what the deal is with hoverbikes in their current implementation is this how

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    they're supposed to be is there more work to be done now I knows a bit of a loaded question because you've recently made some posting on spectrum so that's I think the timing of this is perfect why don't you want to start us off well what's going on with grab live well I mean first of all when when it came out in 3.0 obviously it was completely broken I haven't really seen much evidence from from the live version that it's it's doing anything that I wanted it to do so you know we did our best crunched all the way down to the end but I think we had it working pretty well up to about a day before release but still didn't make it out there in good conditions so now you're talking about one of those things where you've got the individual system working and then when you start pulling all these other systems together and a big patch yeah but when you say you had it working the day before start putting all the pieces

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    together that's where come from right right so yeah and really a lot of people if you played the game you know I have CS itself has been in pretty bad shape since 3.0 came out there were just so many changes to the engine and there wasn't time to really do a proper fix so that a lot of those things affect grab live as well as general ifcs there were some some greater issues really with grab left so yeah I mean if you can get it to hover at all you're lucky right now but the changes that I've made that work I've been doing on it since the start of the year it's really coming along and we've got it up for testing on PTU and I'm getting you know good results good testing good feedback with that and you know we're hoping to I don't know if it's gonna be

19. 00:14:46

    something we can get into a 3-1 patch you may be gettin too late for that but certainly 3.2 is definitely what we're aiming for yeah I know I know you were just we were talking before we were setting up the call that you said you were working on getting at getting a patch out to p2 you to test some of these fixes everything so so yeah it's it's still too early to know whether we're gonna have a big improvement in the 3-1 branch or whether it's going to have to roll into the 3-2 and of course let's be completely honest with folks it's possible that what happened with 300 might happen with 3-2 as we start combining things together but we're not going to give up it's not a sign of course throw our hands up and be like oh well it's just fine the way it is yeah we got you and and and other programmers and engineers you know all working to make this a enjoyable experience right I think it's safe to say the when we first

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    introduced the very first space bike the dragonfly you know however long ago now that really captured a lot of you know of backers imaginations and it's definitely an experience that that we want we want to be as enjoyable and awesome as possible sure what can tell us about what you want to achieve with grad level like describe to me as best you can obviously we're on a Skype calls late at night but describe to me how you want this what's the goal here okay well one of the real challenges you know for a system like this is I don't want to implement something that's a very specific hover behavior I want it to be a very generalized system and then turn that over to the designers and give them a lot of flexibility for them to decide you know this is a bike or this is a tank or whatever and get a lot of variation out of that you know so there there's some you know specific

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    approaches that I've taken or for how you can you know implement or tune hover for for all these different vehicles so for the the dragonfly and the NOx really not a lot of variation there I kind of see the dragonfly as being more of an off-roader and the NOx being more like a road bike you know a street bike so you tend to want the NOx to hover fairly low and require fairly you know flat terrain not a lot of variation without it I'm starting to bottom out and things like that unfortunately right now the NOx for there are a few issues with it it's not even behaving as well as I would expect it to even on a straight flat ground it's dragging so but you know the dragonfly you want that you know be able to get out on a little bit more rough

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    terrain and kind of feel the bumps and and you know have a little bit more control over over you know rough terrain and so really to achieve that III have a system where the hover by control hover vehicle control system basically is determining based on the terrain that you're over and also the terrain that it sees coming what it wants its elevation to be and so it's it's constantly saying okay well I need to be you know you know 10 meters off the ground right now or five meters off the ground or whatever if you're if you're on nice flat cruise then it can be right down there you know have a meter off the ground right so it sets a goal elevation and then the the physics of the system is a you know basically essentially a spring

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    simulation is going to then determine the the the rise and fall well not actually the fall the Falls is generally going to come from gravity but but pushing it up you know to achieve whatever elevation the the control system is looking for so I think that's that's basically what we're seeing as the main issue is that control system isn't getting enough data really to be able to make good decisions about its elevation and and as opposed to the system not being able to achieve the elevation well you know that it's desired right so anyway getting back to your question you're asking Wow go man go yeah so how have I implemented it in order to achieve you know the

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    vision that we had for right for for heavy vehicles correct so what your vision was yeah well that's basically it I mean I I just wanted to essentially be as close to physically realistic you know acceleration driven hover being very very careful not not to you know that the the gravel of itself is only ever really pushing you up right so then like if you go up then the gravity's going to pull you back down so you feel like you're kind of you know catching air if it feels like you're jumping as opposed to a system that's like managing your full elevation up and down and then of course grab grab Lev is really

25. 00:19:35

    frictionless when it comes to lateral you know so when you're turning and things that's when thrusters from the vehicle are going to come into play and and that that's I think something different that we do then you see with a lot of hover bikes and games is the fact that it's a hybrid you know atmosphere / space vehicle so it has full thruster control when it needs it we go into hover mode really I think more as a matter of efficiency because you know then you're not having to burn thrusters to stay aloft and and and you can say it save on fuel and all that you're still using those thrusters for a lot of maneuvering how much does the overall atmospheric flight model plane to this I mean it the the atmospheric flight model then you know we want we want ships to we want all ships to function differently a Jungian a mo than they do you know in outer space that's not a

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    hundred percent you know either at this time how much of how much of this work is is just grab live and how much is it you know work on the atmospheric flight model yeah well I mean the thing is really holding it up is I'm fixing a lot of things I have CS itself the atmospheric flight model grab live I have to have all that done before any of it can be checked in so I actually have made significant progress on the atmospheric model I talked in a recent atv about you know where I wanted to go with that and the main thing was I wanted the the control system to actually utilize drag and gravity as part of its control as opposed to the initial implementation which was just that it would compensate for those things and then its control

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    system was essentially the same as it is in space you know the compensation gets you to the point where it's basically zero drag and zero gravity and then the control system it's similar to space except then you have less thrust available because those things are being used for compensation so at this point you have that right so like if you're pushing into drag of course you have less thrust available for accelerating forward because you're expending a lot of that thrust just to overcome drag but the part that was missing was then when you start to slow down it's actually using drag that's pushing against the vehicle as part of you're slowing down force as opposed to nullifying that out and then using thrusters to slow you down so now when you when you turn and you Bank into a turn you'll feel a much stronger stopping motion you know on that slide

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    than if you were just doing a straight wrong turn and not bringing as much of the surface area of your ship into the drag right so of course when you're you're you're falling you're going down you're gonna have a lot more acceleration to to drop down because gravity's helping you but as you're going back up it's gonna work against you and so you know all that variability that you expect for atmospheres it's gonna come into play and it's that's all in there now and seems to be working very well actually any how does that a how does that affect the maneuvering thrusters versus you know beat all like we have we have ships like the reclaimer the Terrapin have specific VTOL thrusters sure right now ships are using their maneuver through nuvaring thrusters to basically you know hover around in atmosphere what our future plans yeah that well it's still evolving

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    right now what i plan to check in for this version is that for vehicles that have VTOL those those thrusters will be utilized strictly for countering gravity that that's their primary role and so that leaves your maneuvering thrusters free to give you as much acceleration as you would normally have you know because essentially the beatles have nullified the gravity as opposed to you know if you don't have the tall's then you're taking at least one g out of depending on the planet out of your your your upward thrust and then whatever's left you can have for maneuverability so with with a vehicle that has beat all's you would expect that it's plus zyy maneuverability would be close to what

30. 00:23:39

    you you have in space but without beat all's it because significantly less gotcha and I know other developers have spoken that if you're flying in a ship that doesn't have be tall and you're using your maneuvering thrusters to hover and wanna that when the wear and tear comes in four components that that's going to wear a lot more on maneuvering thrusters trying to hold your ship in place and rights and heat that will hopefully be a factor as well yeah yeah so while you may be able to float like a butterfly in a hornet or whatnot in atmosphere you're gonna burn those thrusters out a lot quicker than if you have a dedicated ship with meat all right like a Terrapin er yeah well the plan we've talked about and I haven't had a chance to really bring that in yet is that your thrusters are going to really have two modes one's gonna be like how do you generate sustained thrust like you would need for

31. 00:24:28

    gravity you know for a long period of time versus what thrust can you generate and like a quick hit like a quick Delta V you know to get from zero to max SCM velocity or whatever those are going to be two different acceleration levels basically call a sustained thrust versus impulse thrust so the threats that you have available for you know combat maneuvers which are like quick impulses to change velocities right those are not going to be the same accelerations that are available for oh okay I'm staying up in acceleration I mean staying up in gravity so yeah that'll make a big difference even without V tall's because you know a lot of our fighters aren't necessary going to have devoted feet all's yeah alright one last question you know where I'm gonna use you while I got you here man you're wrapping up the show here okay let's talk about ifcs it the latter the

32. 00:25:19

    last of the things that you're working on we touched about the atmosphere of flight model we protect about the grav lab ifcs where is it right now and where do you want it to go okay well you know if you've played ifcs and played the you know there's the game with you know flown the ships in 3.0 you know that ifcs basically has been drunk for a while it's really about it was me some people can't tell but yeah you know just a lot of the changes in the engine optimizations and things hit it pretty hard and it just wasn't something we could just do a quick fix on so you know it wasn't until after 3.0 that I could really take the time and dig in and and fix these things right so you know the main thing I had to do was one of the optimizations we did was moving a lot of things off the main thread or in my case

33. 00:26:08

    the physics threads a big blocker on the physics thread to do all the processing for ifcs so we moved basically the entire off ifcs off the physics thread into a lazy batch update which depending on load will get called you know more or less frequently and unfortunately that puts I have CS out of sync with the physics simulation the physics tick could run you know through two or three times before ifcs gets an update and and you just can't have stable simulation that way that was my question all right right so basically my solution to that is I had to go in and and separate ifcs into two parts one is the control system logic which is really where all the load is and the other is strictly the physics simulation part where the the control logic says this is

34. 00:26:57

    what I want the ship to do based on you know player input and all these things and and you can update that state as quickly as we can get it but then the actual physics processing you know generating the the accelerations and everything that's working every physics step in order to achieve whatever the requested goal is from ifcs and so that can remain you know as smooth and stable as possible and so yeah I've done that at this point and that's working very well I'm still working on trying to get ESP to work properly with the new system that's why in the PTU right now combat is terrible so hopefully i'll get that cleaned up here pretty quickly using opinions if john pressure do not represent those of platinum paring games robert space industries or its

35. 00:27:44

    subsidiaries that's the feedback yeah that's actually that's actually last question i you're one of the you're one of my favorite devs to be complete candid because you spend you spend a fair amount of time in spectrum you know in the ask a dev threads you know engaging with our backers getting their feedback it's one of the reasons i wanted to do this you know this when this thrust when this question came up you've been pretty active in in spectrum talking about gravel if talking about ifcs is that it for we give that a lot of lip service but is that information actually helpful is it helpful when backers go to the spectrum and actually post their experiences and post their feedback well it definitely is for me you know there's only so much I can do because I'm very specifically involved in simulation you know and how we

36. 00:28:34

    achieve the design goals and not so much in what the design goals are of course I pass everything I hear on to to other devs you know as well but yeah as does everybody on the community 200 now I wish I could be on I haven't been on spectrum very much I spent a lot of time on discord with you know the the epic aadhi people or how do you say it right but yeah I got to get got to get out on spectrum more well John thank you so much you made you made an epic wrap-up to this week's show so I appreciate you taking the time I know I know it's late there it's like here so thank you for

37. 00:29:23

    fitting me in and when I have something else for you I'll give you a Holly great well thanks for including me all right thank you sir thank you bye all right well thank you so much to john pritchett and that wraps up another pisode of falling all dibs hey hey Jared yeah John you still there yeah you know what I just realized there's something I wanted to get into with with gravel EV and I totally spaced it off well you know I wanted to talk about basically the the main thing that's left to do on that so I really have the system functioning pretty close to the way I wanted to function when it's running you know on a single-player game or a load load multiplayer game but you know unfortunately right now whenever there's a heavy load on the server you know gravel it just isn't getting enough data about the the terrain to really be able

38. 00:30:12

    to make good decisions about you know its elevation or whatever and and I think that's that's why the performance just really significantly drops off based on server load and so that's really the last thing that that I need to get cleaned up I think before it's going to actually be out in live and and and performing in a way that that you know hopefully players will be happy with optimization basically yeah definitely that's a good chance to remind folks that you know it's it works one way on your computer when you're doing it then we go to evocati and they've got this many people and it starts very different ways then we go to wider PTU and we've got even more people and it starts to work you know like yes and then when we go to our live alpha environment then starts to you know to kind of go sideways and that is the process that we're in that's it's important to remember that every

39. 00:31:01

    star citizen environment is a testing environment so even the live alpha environment so you guys helped you guys helped us tremendously get in there to hammer this thing because that's where we see the real data there's virtue and what we get from evocati there's virtue and what we get from p2u but the best data we get is live so play the game file your issue council reports go to spectrum and tell john pritchett you know what's up you know it's it's that that's the best thing you can do to help us make this the the quote-unquote best damn space ever yeah I can finish it by closing John yeah sorry I mean interrupt all right so that's it for calling all deaths a remember you can submit your questions for consideration each and every week up on the thread up on spectrum and don't forget to vote that's the two-part process you got submit your

40. 00:31:48

    questions and you got a vote your questions I say it every single week even though I'm at home I'm in my pajamas I'm still gonna say it so for calling all deaths I'm Content Manager Jared I can be that was john pritchett we'll see you next week everybody or at least I will thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in star citizen squadron 42 you can subscribe to our Channel or you can check out some of the other shows and you can also head to our website at