Star Citizen: Around the Verse - CitizenCon 2947 Retrospective

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse our weekly look at star citizen's ongoing development I'm sandy Gardner and I'm Sean Tracy today's feature will take you behind the scenes of citizencon 2947 to reveal all the work that went into making the show but first on today's burned-down not only will we be looking at the issues the team has been tackling this week but we'll be sharing our alpha 3.0 closeout schedule let's go to Eric for all the details yeah yeah welcome back to burn down our weekly show dedicated to reviewing progress on the release of star citizen alpha 3.0 last week we were at 17 remaining must fix issues to close down our next game loop of shopping cargo and commodity trading because we've been making solid progress on that

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   game loop we now want to share the other aspects we're focusing on for PTU they are missions ships and vehicles traversal moby glass and performance and stability well we've been closing down shopping a number of remaining issues have been going down on these categories as well so let's jump over to the team around the globe to see how we're progressing so this week we focused on shopping as well as other bugs that we had we've worked on commodities and basically the kiosks associated with that the cargo and also the physical shops we had quite a few fixes in commodities for example you're able to now buy stuff from the from the shops and able to equip your items for your personal manager we also

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   had all of George's Network updates and changes went in as well in terms of the evocati shopping push there's only a handful of issues by the looks of things right now before we can call that feature sort of Eva Carson I think as it were we're having shopping syncs daily on this with the team at about 4 o'clock which involves Todd as well to go over any issues that they come up with and any any problems they just need to talk through which seems to be pushing things along quite nicely so today I'm working on a try on bug where when you try on clothes like t-shirts and shoes and stuff like that if you're wearing your flight suit you do try on the clothing but they're being hidden by your flight suit so it's not really useful at all you've caught me at a pretty good time

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   where I've got this unintentional side effect when I try things on my character is naked except with our helmet um and that's because I'm trying to hide the flight suit so that you could see the clothes you're trying on underneath I realize now that rather than just making the flight suit invisible we're going to need to detach it and then make it invisible that way the clothing underneath does not get occluded by it so the problem you're seeing here is the flight suit is invisible but the code is saying well it's still there so it's still covering up the other clothing so it's invisible the other clothing is covered up but it really just makes it look like you're naked I've also been chasing down a lot of bugs with missing assets for the icons and images used in the shopping kiosk things like the icons

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   that represent each item in the store some of them were missing so I've had to go go and hunt those and hooked them up and some of the other things were that we're missing were a few of the images of the cargo boxes that were used so I've had to basically track those down and just make sure that everything's using the right asset kaga is in a really good state at the moment at the start of the week the LA guys who are working on the cargo system and they've they'd reached a point where they couldn't go any further and now the directors are back from citizencon they've been able to give them a heading to take philosophy tasks so yeah it's it's looking really good now there's just a few last problems we've been having with how much cargo to put on the cargo grid in the back of the

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   ship and things like that now we're all pointing in the same direction that shouldn't take too long to get fixed up this week this kind of been a little bit of hang-up with they have these counters here that have items in them that you can purchase like ammo and grenades and things like that and the way the shopping system works is that a raised cast from the player camera to the item and that's what makes it high light that's what gives you the shopping a our display and well they're behind glass and right now the glass collides with the Ray that shoots out and so you can't actually interact with anything behind it but if we take out that glass collision then you could just walk right into the glass part of the counter and people could stand in it and that just be obnoxious so we've had to kind of last minute come up with that we've got

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   art and engineers all kind of like scrambling to to make sure that we have a separate colliding surface for glass that will properly Brock block players from walking into it but will allow ray cast to come through so we can still see things purchase things and do that whole spiel now I'm dropping in the finalized shopkeepers and their loadouts making sure they're all working as they expected to and getting everything exported for what should be the last time for three oh we want to make sure that when we say to the evocati group ok shopping is now ready for you guys to you know run with it we don't want to have the instability that we've got at the moment so people are only getting sort of like 15 20 minutes worth of game time we want to see that come up we've done this week has included

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   getting about 59 of our 60-ish missions actually playable we let's say content complete if not polished although we have now got dialogue into at least one of them and we have an it little issue that currently that only works in single-player so that's that's one thing we're gonna have to fix but it's all there and once for code is fixed it's ready to go and another massive thing we've done this week is get all of our missions that are given by mission givers we've got those all behind a gate as it were

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   so after we designed the MFDs to work in the ship so that you can have control over the various items and the ship's including all the power laiden items the shield related items the heat and the Webber related items that went to the UI team which now includes calyx and he's implementing those screens to be useful as far as putting them on MFDs and the ships the bug that I'm working on right now is for the heat screen and it basically is that the buttons that we have on the heat screen which are to suppress your IR which does so at the cost of actually increasing your item heat per system as well as a button to allow you to do that globally that is well for one it's not telling you what

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    it's doing which is problematic and for another problem is that when it does activate there's actually a delay before you're allowed to interact with it again to toggle it on and off and this prevents edge case behaviors from cropping up of what happens when you flip between a suppressed IR State and not too quickly so we just don't allow you to do that however at the moment there's nothing letting you know that you can't do that so one of the things that I am doing is making it so that when you select it it'll turn on and let you know that these are the ones that

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    are being altered and why they can't turn on or off and then making it so that when you turn it off it tells you that to super simple those the question Chris is what what we want to tackle for 300 with the afterburner now what are the specific tests that we want to I do like the suggestion of the thrust management that I guess you are putting out that we sail it basically where you can go and choose your thrusters so you could like you know have more finer control yeah and you could maybe even have a pre preset on your first stuff we knew we had the issue with the Contin trouble overshooting you from your location from your intended destination that seems to be something that Mike Dillon needs to take a look at over the next day or so

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    we had an issue come up with quantum Drive where it was dropping us out effectively seven and a half million kilometers before Hurston prior to that we hadn't really had a jump that many millions of a kilometers to worry about it's usually just jumping from moon to moon that's all that we're really worried about so the math issue wasn't a huge deal but once we got larger jumper coming much further out and the last frame of quantum puts you where you should be so you had this jump from nothing to Hurston right there solution can be we were simply doing our math off the wrong acceleration values so we have an initial acceleration of some slow speed by accelerating your car up to better refer to it going to 88 miles per hour in the DeLorean at which point you hit the max speed or your max acceleration as we accelerate up we were

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    using the wrong value there so when we were calculating how far you should be going it was much shorter than you actually would go which put us in the wrong spot once we slowed the the ship down to that final point swap those values around and we finally would start showing up as we saw in a Germany citizencon the ship coming right up to the planet like it should [Music] issue on auras opening this movie glass in the ship's bed will cause the UI to look through this you okay to clip through the ceiling becoming unusable entrap the player and then the next one is the movie classic anime is missing all assets and

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    functionality future santa cards yeah as for the qtr we had yesterday when I was sick while the day dynamic Knapp point system caused no issues related to your code so if you're happy with what was done there I can over the last view evocati bills we've been paying attention to the feedback from the guys in the evocati we've also had people in Austin and over here as well monitored the server performance and trying get as much information as we can client-side as well from what people tell us we have noticed that performance as we've introduced new features as I've said previously you introduce features

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    but you also then potentially start to see some instability come in and that's exactly what we've been seeing over the last few evocati pushes that the the performance is not up to what it was when we first pushed evocati through you know some various crashes that have crept in and there's been some server instability as well some server crashes so what we've done is we're prioritizing those up a little bit higher up the list so we need to get back with Austin and say look I understand that's a weekend a surfer would be a massive someone gone in over the weekend so when we clean the first for the Monday that basically we could have that we could have had that information so we can then be passing out to people people looking back if you need to know on the server side why the performance is going up or down if we now have to wait for a key way to do it this time zone and we're not going to

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    look at the stuff of the lights today well we need to at least get if Clive George whoever did get access to that information if at least doing that it's a bit of a problem with what they need that needs to be the number one thing on the for that team it was basically going and breaking down and just work out this issue John case we're now getting down to fewer features stuff which is typically what breaks the build we need to get the need to get the performance so we need to get the stability back so we have that and then that means that we can just keep on working towards it from you know making choices willing to live and so forth it's great that you're doing the dailies Todd something that really helps forget the feature stuff done but we just need to get this build working so it's fast and so for things like that just number one on for me on that side at the time of filming this we're at 15 issues and

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    we've checked in over 529 updates on to our 3.0 branch across the categories of shopping ships and vehicles traversal Moby glass and performance and stability tomorrow on our production schedule will be showing the remaining issues needed to finish to release to Pt you don't miss that update and come back next week to see the progress we're making here on burn down you'll be able to check out the production schedule report tomorrow on our website now let's head back to Frankfort last week the star citizen team took to the stage at the Capitol Theatre for a full day of panels a keynote address from chris Roberts featuring our procedural city tech from Sean and much more pulling all these pieces together whilst also working on Alpha 3.0 and squadron 42 took a lot of planning and coordination let's see how

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    it all came together in this exclusive behind the scenes look at citizencon 29 wouldn't talk Allah

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    welcome to citizen pond 29:47 in Frankfurt Germany so without further ado we hope you enjoy the show [Applause] ladies and gentlemen Chris Roberts

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    right hello Frankfurt so we're really excited to have you all here in Frankfurt Germany at citizencon 2947 so let's see what the box delivered so here we are so the octane 900p which is the fastest SSD on the planet and we've actually been working with Intel for quite a bit of time on this one and it's some really really cool tech and yeah I'm gonna throw one to the audience here who's gonna catch all right here we go yeah so it's a little wet for the dry ice david blundell from Intel come out so

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    David it's good to talk a little bit about the obtain and before we kick off everything today yes thank you thank you very much for having us here today we really appreciate this opportunity and today at citizencon we're actually launching the product that Chris just tossed out into the yes so that's a big deal of stuff is into the fact that we're actually part of a launch of a major piece of hardware that's very very cool it's a major launch for Intel of the Intel octane 900p SSD and really it's the first SSD for desktop and workstation users that uses Intel obtain technology we got together over a couple years ago we started talking about the attributes of this technology and we thought this was a perfect connection so what do you I think you can get out of this in the upcoming release you know it's the first generation of the

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    technology and it's gonna improve and you know the operating system is going to sort of embrace it better and there'll be it'll be pretty cool but it's definitely helping our development now and I think it will be good for anyone playing stuff with them - yeah we definitely look look forward to working with you on the future and then as part of this collaboration some of you may have noticed something new out in the atrium did anybody see anything new a little small thing no seriously what we thought is hey you know there's a technical collaboration we'll make the gameplay better make you guys have more fun with this thing try new experiences but also we thought we I translate that into a ship hi everybody welcome to citizencon 2947 exploring new worlds we do have the big savor every model right here it was done by jr. fabrication it's not a life-sized one as I told you before but it looks

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    super amazing and it packs a punch let me tell you that my name is Jason Cole I'm the lead cinematic animator for squadron 42 and today I'm gonna talk to you guys about look I care or pcap look transformation alright so the left is look like a the original system always on and then the right is look like a with a little bit of polish and the animation tool kit or the look like a tool kit and I'll let this run a few times but you can really see the differences pulling through now see see he's looking right and left and he's constantly looking back towards Seto and we're getting a lot of smaller things in here like head nods and little head turns so this video was showing only a few issues we have with stairs and random obstacles but this list can really endless

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    one way to solve this is to tell tell animators to make more animation assets but I think that won't because this is one of those problems you can see with animation they have alone there way too many unpredictable situations that we just can't consider all of them the only thing we can do is try to find procedural tools but in star citizen it's it's really not that simple as evil is showing here I've never seen this planet before and you have situations where it's possible what you'll see throughout the day today where you could be on a mountain on a planet that potentially nobody else has been on the floor or I've never been to

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    no queue a guy has seen it up in some corner of this world and you get into a gun fight for your life and in those situations the animation system needs to hold up that panel you know when we put up the summaries like animate you lose the discovery enhancing mocap data with procedural information not exactly the sexiest default ILC but I I think I think it was a misnomer you had slid it under the radar that was an amazing presentation this is your citizencon is it yeah it is Austin Los Angeles Manchester Los Angeles and now Frankfurt is temple techniques basically work by looking at the previous several frames of motion in our case we look at four frames fire and

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    we work out from than previous four frames what the results should have been there so we type of we wobble the image ever so slightly which is impossible to you and then over the four frames we type of work out what the details should have been but in that one pixel and we can recover that and get a nice soft result but the problem of using the previous four frames well there's all sorts of problems to be honest it's caused us a lot of headaches so we have we also have we have a lot of moving objects awfully we've got you know spaceships that move we've got planets that are moving we've got all sorts of things going on that we might not have an in normal game and we also have a UI transparent UI a transparent glass screen a transparent visor all of these things make it quite difficult to account for the previous four frames motion because your visor might be spinning this way the cockpit might be going that way you know there's all sorts going on so we've recently done a

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    change that hopefully will work around them but yeah you'll be able to see this in fleet ones here once again okay so that's our final frame looking nice I think you'll agree how many members are in your team so we have me and five others in the UK and then we work really closely with a Frankfort team so there's two or three guys there that do a lot of graphics but it's very tightly coupled like the CPU optimization and the planetary work why don't you tell me about your experience at citizencon what do you think of it so far this is a really great event I have seen many people I have seen many new technologies coming and many new technologies integrated in the project it's really appreciated all the old community I think it's all appreciated by all people who came tonight basically the first moment of being tasked with creating a civilization

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    there was one question that sort of popped into my head immediately which was that and abject fear and terror but once it ended basically it was a very simple question of who are they I mean it's that sort of thing seems like a very obvious and an silly approach but it actually can give you a lot of good answers this is our lineup of our big four plus one and so we have this is kind of the current of where everybody is so we have our Vandal warrior we have our Ronin and the Tabar and we have our traders in the band we have our humans there and then we have our Jean today it's important as we progress that we don't necessarily make like a drastic change right we want to keep true without what everything's going if we

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    need a retcon something we can do that but it's not something we want to do it every opportunity we want to keep it consistent and I think that's you know going back to the Marvel way that you were talking about how you work in a bra you work in the broad shape first and then you go into the details and that's something you do for a whole race as well you know we're not gonna try to nail it on the first shot we're not gonna go and maybe try to make the perfect image the first time we're gonna do a lot of images and see what sticks and we're gonna go back to those see what we're successful you know with was SONET layer or twiddling yeah yeah Tipu yo yo we to war what's your way with

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    what possesses somebody to go into that kind of field to sit there and say I want to create a language that's that's my contribution it's an amazing contribution don't mere on its I just I have no relation I can't relate well it's not really a field yeah I would say you know there are a handful of people getting to be two handfuls of people who've done professional language creation for entertainment franchises we set up 24 gaming pcs and people can enjoy the planetary play go on demo planetary play go and demo you might have heard about that we already had it at Gamescom but it's a new one we got rid of some box and we put him new stuff one of those actually the cyber Raven so people hear the citizencon can already enjoy the sabre Raven fly it around so you might have heard about this before

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    but hopefully there be some new stuff in there so we always talk a lot so what this means is it's always like the best on in point for visual design in the Shores that our ideas sit within like a system tapestry kind of what we said before because if we're working in the corner like yeah we're gonna have some blues and reds and whatever then we'll get to like the rest of the system and we'll just have like skittles you know taste the rainbow so sure about the fact that we were able to make terrain it's a sphere spherical and just holds up and work that's that's been a challenge in itself so even when we got to that previous slide where I was like this is terrain and it's like on a sphere and it's it's it's connected and that was something new completely

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    brought it brought its own set of challenges obviously just the idea that you can walk on forever and you end up at the same place at some point couple days is a very long walk I never tried and then there's a bit of improvement some more detail we have to add another layer of detail on top and yeah this is what you should see here then in the front you still see it's a little bit of blurriness like how the textures go into each other you have like snow going soft into a rock that was the next thing that we had to work on so you see some early shots of how the terrain was blending so you see this gallery map the splat map doing its work saying here's here we have some soil rocks now whatever and then we just iterated on how we blend

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    the textures together to get more variety and more variety until you have something something more nice-looking and in the end you end up with something like this and you can have some two completely different ecosystems right next to each other what if I offered you the ability to build your own settlement to bring civilization to the most untamed frontiers a colony ship in the truest sense of the word and I'm not talking about just transporting people no I'm talking about an all-in-one solution designed to build modular structures based on your needs capable of building a farm or a habitat a trading post or a mining operation I mean not to be crazy right allow me to

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    introduce pioneer so uh we're here to talk about the Pioneer and other things that are associated with it so right off the bat you know that you're dealing with function over for it's it's not gonna be like super sexy it's not gonna be pretty

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    but it's still gonna have a really good sort of well-thought-out industrial design feel to it so you know even even as you're walking through this thing you're still gonna appreciate it and you you know you've got your we're essentially flying factory knowledge information within star citizen is very often on an analogue concept you don't necessarily know something or not know something but rather you know things to to varying degrees and the easiest way that I could you know give for an example would be to consider a car that you're thinking about purchasing if you if you're being asked to purchase a car and you haven't actually seen it you're gonna be very conservative in terms of your estimate of what it might be worth

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    if you're able to see it even from the exterior and verify there's tread on the wheels the paint job looks okay except then that's going to increase your perception of its value if you're able to actually turn the car on make sure it's running or better yet have a mechanic you know take a peek under the hood then that's gonna basically bring it you know even farther up the scale and so a lot of what we're doing you know with the value of land which ties over in the pioneer because you're going to be setting up these outposts ideally in optimal locations to exploit a lot of this value that's sitting on the surface of these planets talks about knowledge what it all means but to get that knowledge you've got to go and find that area to to figure out what's there is is it right for you and that's where all

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    the exploration ships coming in you you could take your Pioneer and do all this with your Pioneer but it's probably not gonna be the best ship for scouting locations we've got a whole wealth of exploration ships the design for finding that information out know what you're building so that you don't do five trips to horn Bock to build something so if you know what you're building and then you know the resources that you you're going to need for that you'll you'll save yourself multiple trips or it will be one of those things where you will need to have these resources brought to you with the great speed comes great risk and you've only got half the weapons so if you messed that up you're in trouble we see your mouth moving way

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    your way answering my question though that that's really amazing itself and I really like this that you can unlock your face and on Halen minor Basava costa chris Roberts all right so it's a pretty loud music

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    there so thank you very much for nice entrance we are now going to give you a bit of a preview of what we've been working on beyond 3:04 star citizen so this is the fun bit as you saw it took an incredible amount

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    of effort to bring it together and we'd like to thank everybody who volunteered or worked at the event that's all for today's episode and a big thanks to all our subscribers for your support on our shows November subscriber ships on the month are the misc Star fair and origin m50 log into the game to test fly them today and thanks to all of our backers as well because your dedication to star citizen is what allows us to make a game that pushes boundaries we could not do this without you and until next week thank you for watching so if you want to

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    keep up with the latest and greatest in star citizen a squadron 42 development please follow us on our social media channels you