Star Citizen: Around the Verse 3.14 - DE

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   hi and welcome to around the verse your weekly look inside the development of Star Citizen I'm Forest Stefan CG supervisor here at Cloud Imperium with a man you might know game director Chris Roberts thanks for our uh hi everyone thanks for joining us uh last Friday was our big anniversary live stream uh we tried a new approach for this year and framed it as The Intergalactic Aerospace Expo and infiction uh ship exhibition which I thought was a really cool way to do super super cool idea um so cool in fact that people in the forums kept asking about getting to go to that in game do you think there's a chance well you never know so you know me and infiction stuff but having in-game events like this or the Murray Cup finals would be amazing ways to make the universe feel alive so let's see longterm uh in the meantime though it gave us a chance to

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   see some new Galactic tour segments which are always fun and unveil our first avarian ship and the Taran and the Taran although we didn't quite manage to show him on the show we had to do it later in a Twitter due a small technical fa um but Josh Herman gave us a first look and we me and Dave hadock and Josh sort of talked about the tarian H and Nathan disley in the UK put together an amazing segment called the Big Guns of the uee which showcast showcase the capital ships uh and there were four new dog fighting variants as well as a preview of 2.6 Alpha with some exciting Arena commander and star Marine gameplay which I think was sort of the headline of the live stream yeah that's a ton of cool stuff um we also have a big sell on physical merchandise as well so uh check out the site to see what you might have missed yeah definitely and uh there was one other big announcement that we did

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   on Friday made some news over the weekend uh but you can now check out our brand new in-depth production schedule report on the RSI website uh so this breaks down the current status from all the Departments that are working towards the release of 2.6 Alpha uh basically this will serve as a direct fee from our production Department to let you guys know where we're at in terms of getting the build towards you there a lot of information there that will be updated weekly and uh it's a pretty big thing I mean we're doing this as an experiment not many people do this but I'm kind of excited about it um sort of a lot more transparency so uh let's see what happens yeah I'm sure everyone appreciates it it's incredible we will be talking plenty more about star Marine uh later on this episode but first let's now go to Brian Chambers in Frankfurt for a studio update take it away Brian hi everyone I'm Brian Chambers uh

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   development director here at Foundry 42 Frankfurt since our last update here the team's grown by another five people we have two new environment artists a tech animator regular animator and a producer so we're taking the time to integrate them into the team show them what they need to know and so on to hit the ground running uh let's kick off this week week by checking in with the weapons team and see what they've been doing over the last few weeks hello everybody so here's a quick update on what the weapon artists have been up to recently starting with ship weapons we've taken a look at all of our missiles and uh polished and optimized them we've also added a bunch of new ones for 2.6 the FPS weapons team uh has uh started to work on our new manufacture castc arms uh and created the first set of uh New Concepts and

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   white box meshes as for FPS gadgets uh David will now talk you through some of the new stuff he's been working on recently many of you have seen the multitool in Austin's latest ATV but today we want to take a closer look at it the grut industrial multitool is a pistol sized power tool with modules attached to the front in its current state it has two modules the first is a cutting module with lasers and a lens to cut through thin steel or open containers the second one is a Welling tool to quickly repair objects or patch up damage it's also possible that we add more modules in the future with different functionality right now there is no active display but we plan to implement it before it is available for

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   you we also made a variety of grenades with different effects and styles the first grenade you are able to use is the MK4 FR grenade which will make its first appearance in starmarine as part of the multiplayer gameplay but when it comes to pu and later on Squadron 42 we need more variety so we have an incendiary grenade cluster grenade EMP and radar Distortion I hope you liked our new stuff so maybe leave a comment and see you next time thanks guys uh the level design team uh last few weeks they've been continuing to work on the modularity system and surface Outpost that we showed a few weeks ago uh they're also working a handful of space stations um all focused towards

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   3.0 uh when they work with the space stations they're primarily working with white box and gray box while the UK art team in tandem dials in the visuals system design team has been focusing on usables and character actions for both player and AI uh how they interact with the world and the objects and all the details around that uh they've also been working on a takeoff and Landing system for ships and that's both from platforms and from other ships so a ship taking off and going in and out of another ship uh the environment team has grown by a few people as I previously mentioned um they're primarily focused on expanding the existing ecosystems uh that we've shown you as well as creating new ones uh all to be used with a direction of 3.0 uh they work extremely close with

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   the engine team on a daily basis uh they iterate both on the tech side and the art side back and forth until we get the visuals where we need them to be for AI the team's been working hard

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   advancements and subsumption system additional behaviors as well as pushing combat a little bit further uh we hope to have something to show you for our next update from Frankfurt so that's it from the team here thanks for the time for watching and goodbye thanks Brian uh those weapons are looking pretty nice huh yeah no they're looking really good I like also like the PO um some of the grenades looking good and cool concept stuff for C stack um also having expanded e EOS systems is really going to help a variety of potential environments and once we start populating with those modular sort of outpost and other stuff that we do it's going to be pretty awesome yeah for sure uh if you're interested in reading more about planet side there is an in-depth article about the making of Homestead demo in last Friday's jump point so subscribers go download it if you haven't already I've

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    read it it's awesome go check it out yeah now there's a lot of work everyone put together on that we're quite proud of what we showed off and I think it's going to make a great thing so also uh should check in with our incredible Community uh so let's go to our community manager Tyler Witkin in Austin hey everyone Tyler Witkin Community manager in the Austin Texas Studio here to bring you this week's Community update we hope you enjoyed the anniversary live stream we were super excited to see bar citizen viewing parties around the globe a handful in the states Canada France Sweden and more and we want to see pictures from your events so make sure to tag us on social media or add the hash Aerospace Expo so we can check them out now just as a reminder the anniversary sale is still going on with different themed sales

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    daily so check back every day at robertsspaceindustries.com to see what goodies are available leading up to the grand finale and now it's time for this week's MVP award a huge congratulations to xeron for his extraordinary efforts in creating a Star Citizen fan cinematic Vengeance of the Damned this actually involved 83 different citizens and if you haven't seen it I encourage you to check it out for yourself on our community Hub lastly the week would not be complete without reverse the verse so make sure to tune in live tomorrow at twitch.tv/ Sig community at 7:00 a.m. Pacific Standard time we're going to be talking about everything that you saw on today's episode thanks again for all the support and we'll see you in the verse The Intergalactic Aerospace Expo is going on the rest of the week uh so you can check that out on the website for details on the daily ship cells we'll also have a new Galactic tour segment

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    each and every single day yeah I know that fun I'm always watching that see what Easter eggs is put in there so you know there's a bunch of people that contributed and pulled that together sort of last minute was sort of a last minute kind of idea and it pulled out uh it came together really good um so uh I think it's been adding a lot of flavor to the Expo I agree uh so up next we talk to team members from around the globe to learn more about the long road to bring star Marine to life yes the long road and it's only just getting born and it's still going to have to grow a bunch when it gets up hi I'm Todd papy design director here at cig today I want to talk to you about starmarine and and kind of the iterations that it's gone through from IL phonic to even our current team so

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    what you've seen before with lonic and then when it was handed over to our current team there was a lot of adjustments a lot of breakdown of basic uh fundamental features so that we can use those as building blocks when we go forward um with our Tech as well as with persistent universe so when we um started looking at starmarine uh it was always meant to basically be a precursor to uh the persistent universe and and use this as a building block now what we did uh was we kind of did a little bit backwards where um what you see in Alpha 2.0 2.1 even through 2.5 is a very uh basic combat and navigation um for Star Marine so in 26 what we've done is we've built that up a lot more

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    we've added Vault mantle uh cover um as well as grenades and melee just to name a few features um to actually build uh what our combat is going to be and then from there in the future we'll be adding other uh new features like gadgets as well as uh breathing stamina system and this will give us a fully flushed out combats um firstperson experience animation wise in starmarine you're there's a whole lot of things that go into it you have your character animation which would be um say your body animation of your character running around you have your facial animation so perhaps the character breathes or or makes some sort of expression when he shoots you have procedural animation so

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    um we're holding the weapon and we're firing and that recoil that that is happening is procedural and then uh as the the hands squeeze on the trigger and squeeze on the on the weapon um that's another character animation but a partial body character animation that plays on top of that the first step is um that we sit down with the designers and sort of figure out what is what is the intent of of this particular Behavior or gaml that we're doing and we create a state machine for that which tells us if we go from say an idle stance and we start to move and then we need to jump or we're going to Vault or melee how those things connect then once we understand how they connect um in the case of larger action say u a stealth

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    kill or uh running we'll go and we'll shoot motion capture um and we'll grab the motion capture of those actors we'll bring them into motion Builder and into Maya and we'll work on those animations um to get them to be technically correct for the game uh we'll play them then in the product and see how they feel and we'll make adjustments within Maya or motion Builder or something like this to try and and really Bear Down on on the quality that we're looking for for the game um in the case of things like say reload animation because it's important in the firsters view for us to to

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    see the the weapon reloading um but we also have a a tied first person and third person view um we can't really motion capture those reloads fully we have to do a lot of um hand animation on those to make sure that they look good in third person and in first person um so depending upon what the asset is is will will give us a different track that we go on either we do it with map or we do it with key frame so as a lead programmer I um manage a team and our work is mainly uh player related so for Star

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    Marine you know it's been a big Advantage for us that we've been able to look at specifically the core FPS gameplay without this big um pu backdrop but with the with any features we do we always want to think about how they go into the Pu we don't want to we don't want to put a feature in just because it's easy to do it in Star marine and then three or four months later find out that you know that's that's one or two years worth of work to get into pu we want these pieces to fit into the final game uh Alpha 2.0 back at the end of last year uh and we've slowly been iterating on the features for that so we have two different throw modes with the grenades in Star Marine you can do underhand rolls or overhand uh throws

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    or lobs and currently that's uh selectable depending on The View angle whether you're looking above the center line of the screen or below the center line of the screen um and we can adjust that quite easily in on dev side but we're going to look to expose that to be a more user customizable preference So currently it's set at a fraction of under the center of the screen uh to decide between if if you're beneath that then do a roll if you're above that do a throw uh so we're going to see whether that's something we'll let uh users customize because obviously not everyone wants to do it like that or whether we can expose that out into two different throw modes uh and it's it's one system system so it's not just grenades it'll be for gadgets or any throwable

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    object you can also cook or prime grenades um so you just literally hold down the key to do that uh depending on how long you hold it for is how long it cooks for uh obviously let go before the timer runs out you have uh some some audio and UI feedback for that just remember that the grenades have quite a big radius on them so if you hold it down for too long and then don't let go see enough you will get caught in the blast radius we use data for to tweak all the parameters for grenades so the throw speed their Mass the angle you throw them at the rotation that they throw so you can or we can have different rotation rotational values for overhand and underhand throws so underhand ones we want to roll more on one axis than the other so they Roll Along the floor more overhands sort of

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    go end over end so they hit and bounce rather than hit the ground and just slide try something doesn't work go into State Forge move a slider around type a new value in in save that out jump back in game and you've got the new values there so it's very quick to iterate star Marine is a sort of simulation of FPS combat inside the game um so it's it's like we have Arena Commander as a simulation of the dog fighting uh it's functionally it's the same between Arena commander and sty marine and the Pu so what you're learning in both of them is directly applicable to the Pu so it's not like we're giving you easy mode for how ships handle or how the weapons handle it's it's the same so you're not wasting your time doing one and then you suddenly get ruined going straight into the Pu it's it's good to learn um and star Marine is obviously the the FPS

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    side of it whereas Arena Commander is the ships if you look at Arena Commander example the arena Commander is an amazing tool for the for the ship team to balance um how the ships work how they feel how they play against each other with the with Crusader having FPS in Crusader has been great for initial feedback but it doesn't have the Competitive Edge because it's it's you know it's you start always start out in a green zone you might have a lot of people that aren't interested in in in that aspect of the of the game whereas with storm Marine you know you're not going to jump into a game if you don't want to run around and shoot at people so this going to be amazing to to see what what we can get out of that so now we're going to give you a little bit more of a deeper dive on how we go about building levels as well as game modes

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    for Star Marine with that when Chris Roberts starts talking about FPS experiences and everything like that he doesn't want it to be a kind of a traditional open FPS World wait at the moment we we started off by using it as just a three a large 3D space you know like six degrees of freedom and just shooting that's not as interesting if there's nothing there so we need to kind of build things around it multiplayer level design is an iterative process you start with an idea and that can come from either concept art or just the idea for a scenario or potenti a top down sketch I prefer to work with rough 3D shapes which I can then flesh out into the basics of a white box so when the white box is play tested it requires a lot of iteration it requires perfecting

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    the sight lines timing the choke points and maintaining metrics a white Box's primary intention is to minimize rework later on whilst getting the balance and fun in the game as soon as possible parallel to of the initial play tests art and narrative are also working they're planning their treatment of the locations and spaces and they are very much informed by the white box but they do bring their own ideas from their own pool there's a lot of back and forth with that when maintaining metrics there's always the desire to make things look visually appealing but we always need to make sure that the mechanics will still work well with that so that's judging Heights of crates and mantling points and distances between doorways and and keeping routes clear as testing

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    progresses art are able to flesh out areas that have become a little more set in stone and over time the map changes from a textur shell to a more believable and aesthetically pleasing location what we wanted to do for this release of stor Marine is focus on two maps this is a mood board that we created for one of the maps it gives Chris a good high level overview of the visual stance that was going to do for the level this is one of the visual feedback sheets that we do for the guys so it's basically me screenshotting the level after it's been in production for a little while and kind of given more specific feedback um everything from uh base form read to the level how it's flowing um you know mood and character that one that we want to start adding

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    into the scene this is an example of one of the concept art pieces we done for one of the maps once the designer white box has been verified and signed off then we'll take an into concept to see where we want to visually push the scene this is a good chance for us to explore where we want to take it play with the moods play with the lighting play with the dressing to see what will work before we take it into full production once we got something we're happy with then the environmental team will take it and try and recreate that as the best they can and treat that area as a visual Target and then once it's in production we kind of see how well it's working and then expand those visual elements out across the rest of the environment this is an early example of what I call a visual feedback sheet for the guys so once the level's taken to about 80 90% I'll give them a final paint to where we want to take the level just that last

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    10% that last bit of Polish usually involves things like material read lighting V effects uh just so we get that final final view what's quite interesting is usually when you make an FPS map it's usually traditionally it's like a stripped down version of like the campaign level so it's usually a little bit lighter a little bit cheaper to run because you got a lot of characters but for us what we wanted to do is almost the opposite we wanted to make a hero location for specifically for FPS right so hopefully what the players are going to see is a lot more considered time a lot more considered visually uh so so they can get I'm hoping uh a good experience so

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    we have two marines and we have two slavers uh a medium and a light of each one in fact we're using the same assets that we're using in Squadron 42 and same ones that were using in the persistent Universe uh so the Marines that you are going to see here in starmarine are actually the first time that you're going to see these marines uh and we're eventually going to be putting them into the persistent universe as well the things that we use mostly for the Marines are going to be more kind of industrial um heavier bulkier suits but also trying to tie that into a bit of a Slicker streamlined feel uh so that they can feel powerful yet streamlined making an FPS and and indeed making Star Citizen is an enormous undertaking and it doesn't all happen at

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    once so as you guys are out there playing starmarine um we want to know your feedback both the good and the bad right what do you do you like the The Recoil speeds how do you feel about this this melee what um uh do you use this cover system functionality do you not use this cover system functionality um because this this is this is a big Community backed product and we can't do it without the community and this is It's a partnership between you know the game we're making and the game that they're helping us create well there you go there's a lot

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    of people have been working on all the various elements of star Marine there still quite a lot of stuff that will go but uh we while we have FPS currently available in the Pu Alpha at career and G hex it's a timec consuming process if you want to practice your FPS skills yes it is no matter how much I practice I keep getting sniped on the landing platform then have to go all the way back to LSR which I'm sure you have nothing you don't know anything about that right not at all so anyway getting starmarine out in 2.6 will allow testers to hammer a bit more easily on the mechanics and provide us with some valuable feedback uh what we learned from its development will translate directly into Squadron 42 and the Pu and uh so I think that's a really good way to approach things and people should realize that it's much like with Arena Commander we're getting it out there and we will constantly be working and improving it and iterating based on

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    everyone's feedback so please participate yeah most definitely uh and of course while we're all eagerly waiting on the release of 2.6 there is a lot for players to do right now in the 2.5 patch uh missions and combat in the Pu shopping and dancing in art cor always dancing and there's also Arena Commander with Battle Royale Vandal swarm and muray racing all available to play test so feedb or bugs you find while testing should be reported to the forums and the issue Council and that really helpful I think it's one of the sort of I don't know superpowers of our game and Community is we have this sort of symbiotic relationship in a lot of different way as a developer is such useful information absolutely so that's it for today as always we'd like to thank our generous subscribers who make the extra contributions that allow us to

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    make this video content yeah and I thank you guys and also a big thank you to all our backers and supporters without whom we wouldn't be here in the first place uh so you know big help from the entire team from around the world to you guys thank you so much uh and uh make sure to tune in tomorrow at 7: a.m. Pacific time for reverse ofse with bran Chambers from Frankfurt to talk a little bit more about what was shown today can't wait so until then uh we'll see you around the verse [Music] thank you for watching so if you want to

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    keep it with the latest and greatest and staff citizen of Squadron 4 to development please follow us on our social media channels see you soon