Inside Star Citizen: River's Edge | Winter 2021

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:04

   in star citizen we have many of these huge intricate planets and the way that we've been able to do that is instead of storing each vertice of the planet like you would in a traditional level editor we store height maps and other data about the planet and then build chunks of the planet around the player but it did introduce the problem of us not being able to edit individual vertices of the terrain that is where the terrain modification system comes in [Music] so the terrain modification system works by placing modifiers across the planet and when we build each chunk of the terrain we check to see if any of the vertices intercept one of our bounding boxes and if we do that modifier applies a function to the z coordinate

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   of that vertices to offset it to a specific place that we choose so for example we've got here a smoothing area we can move this around we can see that it is smoothing out the ground we can raise it or lower it we can change its size and so on and here i've got a crater which we could flip and turn into a push pull we can change the scale and so on and that's all happening by intercepting the mesh building system and applying offsets based on a function to each vertex within that box we can use this on any scale we like so from a very small scale like this to a much bigger scale like this over here so if i decide i want to place my my outpost over here the first thing i do is i put a smoothing area down i integrate that into the terrain so that it looks good and play with all the

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   different settings to tweak the roll off and the radius of the smoothing area and then i can go in and i can put my outpost down and we can see that that's come in very flat there's no clipping with the terrain and it all looks very natural and embedded instead of kind of like terrain clipping over the sides of the landing pads so we can integrate our smoothing areas even more in with the terrain by using a noisy edge instead of just having a perfectly spherical one so this smoothing area here has a noise function applied to its radius so we get this kind of like crinkly effect and when i embed that into the ground we don't see an obvious circle around where our outpost is instead we get more natural looking crinkle around the edge of our smoothing area

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   the reason that we have both of these modifiers is sometimes you want to make it clear that humanity has come and shaped the terrain to be a certain way and sometimes you just want the convenience of flat ground without it looking like it's been bulldozed by a great big group of jcbs so using the same modification system we can actually add water meshes to the vertexes the first thing i did on this was a way to place river paths because you can't start modifying the terrain before you know where the water is going to flow so i've got this river placement tool here where we're going to be able to essentially start off by placing a spring or somewhere where the water might come out of the ground so i'm going to place that here and you can see that it automatically starts working out the path of where the water would flow now it does this in steps

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   it looks at the direction that the water is coming from it takes a step in that direction and works out an arc of points and then it chooses the point on that arc that is the lowest moves there and then continues on to the next step until you get this nice flowing path now over here we've got a white dot and that is because the lowest point on the arc was in fact higher than the water started with and if you look at a river you'll notice water doesn't travel up so here the point is white because we're going to have to erode down the path under here for the water to have traveled to this point we can't have it flow up on the terrain so once we're happy with our river path we can look at adding any contributing

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   springs so for example we might have a bit more water flow coming from there or i might choose to have a bit more water flow coming from there and then we can score and clean the rivers what this does is it works out a more detailed path between the nodes that the river is going to take and it also works out how much water is going to be passing through each point so you see if i click on this node here we can see the size is 5. if i go a little bit downstream where there's going to be more rainwater collecting into the stream the size is 17 and that will increase all the way down to the bottom where the reference once we're happy with the river system as a whole we can place the geometry modifiers now the first thing this is going to do is we've placed some brown decals down to show that the terrain has changed and we've actually modified the terrain to show the path of the river as you can

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   see if i just turn these off as you can see we've got a deep trench where the river is flowing and then banks around the river but usually rivers have water so let's add in some water now obviously this is work in progress this is just using the sea mesh but it just to prove the concept that we can have water in the basis of our rivers but it still doesn't look quite right if you look at a river in the wild going through any ecosystem whether it be a forest or some fields or a desert you'll notice that the terrain around it is different and that's because the water influences the ecosystem we get more vegetation and growth around places where there are water so in order to make this look as convincing as possible we're going to experiment with adding more foliage and more ecosystem changes around the rivers

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   so this is just a programmer's take on this and no artists have had any say in what i'm doing here so by borrowing a slightly more lush preset from a different planet we can see that we can create this really effective look around the rivers with far more trees and ground cover just to really sell the idea that this is a river that has been here for thousands of years and is flowing through the hills of microtech so now that we've added in this ecosystem around the river it really sells and looks like a river flowing through the hills of microtech this looks much more like something that's been here for thousands of years instead of just a bit of water that's trickling down some hills obviously when the artists take a pass at this they'll be able to get some much

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   more suitable foliage and vegetation instead of having this awkward merge between snowy trees and beautiful lush foliage but the fact that we've got the tools to do this and we can do it procedurally just with a few clicks means that these rivers could be cropping up soon on the planets as a reminder this is a working prototype not a finished product and these are all engineer art choices rather than artist art choices i can imagine someone screaming at me for the fact that we've got some beautiful kind of tropical trees here versus some snowy pines in the backdrop but the fact that we can modify the ecosystem around these rivers means that we're going to be able to create some really convincing looking ecosystems the terrain modification tool is just

10. 00:07:28

    one more way the planet tech team continues to create new technologies that help our artists and designers create assets for the star citizen universe better and more quickly than ever before now citizens that have been around for a while know that january is planning season where developers get together review the lessons of the year before and plan out their efforts for the one ahead now by the time that this airs that process is still in full swing for many teams but we took the opportunity to chat with some of the folks that participated in this year's combat summit to get a sense of where their conversations went and check in before they go heads down and the process of prototyping begins so the theme of this year's combat summit was really how we give the player

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    control over all the systemic features we have in the game what we want is an environment where things make sense that choice allows players to approach different missions and different scenarios in different ways and even the same scenario in different ways which really expands the feel and the options players have the main reason why we created a combat summit was to include more people from multiple departments of the company that have a stake or an interest in space combat it helps like gather outside data into one kind of focus point we can kind of figure out the core problems that we have and also you know to kind of come up with solutions for those problems it's very important to to go away and

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    come up with different solutions test them out see which ones are fun see which ones play well with other features since last year's summit was so successful we're really we're in a good position to go forward into this year's summit building upon the work we did on the last one and this is combat summit we talked a lot about combat geometry which is how ships fly around each other during combat how they're going to fight each other one of the ways we wanted to improve the current flight model was with the addition of capacitors which will make the actions players take during a dogfight more meaningful and have more of an impact on what they see and what they do and capacitors really do that by sort of capping some of the behaviors as well as giving you an instant visual result and instant flight

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    result we went into weapons and the different behaviors of weapons and how they interact with shields and ballistic armor we're not aiming for like a meter build gameplay right we want each weapon to feel different and to have a different role in space combat and then to add to this we're discussing how we kind of move the roles forward on the ships and make the most of the features that we have to you know kind of realize the rules on ships and for those to mean more in the pu you know as far as what choices you make of what ship you want i'm very excited to get some of those sort of ironed out and to get those feelings of those ships so that you know without looking at the label of the ship that you're definitely in something like a light fighter we're just focusing on how to make those roles

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    mean more to the players so they can make more meaningful informed decisions so it was a really important discussion on those things and they all kind of relate to one another and we have to move them together forward um in one kind of you know line really because that gives us the best kind of maneuverability moving forward to understand really the impact of these changes as well so now we have a big bunch of work in front of us right we have action points what we want to do so the next step for us is prototyping a big risk when you're prototyping several solutions is the fact that one might not fit with another solution but we cannot tell right away which of these measures are going to work and which won't so when we're testing it's very important that we're testing all these features together to make sure that we're picking the right solution and that fits together as a package for us

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    now we'll learn more about the resulting new features that arise from the combat summit throughout the remainder of this year as they're being developed can i show you one more thing that i've been messing around with uh sure will just uh don't get me in trouble uh so here i've put together our grenade launcher with a crater modifier just to see what we could do with this and now when i fire a grenade launcher we get a nice little dent in the terrain where i fired it we can essentially go and create some craters obviously this is this is me messing around this isn't something that's in game but just something that i've been having a little bit of fun with and hopefully we'll be able to use something like this in the future but no no promises this is just a bit of fun so

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    what did we learn about this week well we learned the plateaus can be a good thing when they allow designers to place outposts anywhere they want that a river may run through it but the next step is to always always always replace that programmer art that each summit builds upon the successes of the last and that the work of honing star citizen's combat experience continues for inside star citizen i'm jared huckaby we'll see you all next week you