Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Mocap, Mo' Light

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:03

   [Music] welcome to another episode of around the verse I'm sandy gardner and i'm chris roberts today we'll dive into scramble race lighting guessing up restaurants audio and more but not before checking out the latest from the in-game activities of our community yes so in a time we move and all called overdrive from our russian community some in the spirit of ever catty last weekend using fifty seven gray cat buggies a crew of eight invoke the star citizen frontline playtesters by spelling out their name

2. 00:00:51

   on an epic scale good timing on their part without the 3.3 testing released to the avvocato test group this past weekend now they continue to test the new 3.3 features and concept preparing it for a wider PTU release they are also getting ready for OCS testing to make sure it's ready to go as soon as possible happy testing to you all now on to development updates here we are again at these scramble races as the devs get these missions ready for primetime a lot of fine-tuning is underway so right now the mission team has been working with the lighting team to dial everything in here's Callum Hancock with more so in the old set with the astroturf ins we didn't use to have any kind of lighting at all problem was that

3. 00:01:39

   the minute the Sun went behind yellow was shaded in anyway the players had ended up running into asteroids they had absolutely no chance of seeing you can see over here where the player comes around this asteroid and even though the sun's out in the shade they come around this corner and they've gotten no chance of seeing this other side of the asteroid they're going straight into it don't even realize it's there into the last minute so to try and solve this we ended up first trying to put in a cube map to add in lighting we thought it looked good at first but the lighting guys weren't too happy with it it was putting out too much light and ended up making the arena glow a little bit too much to try and solve this and justify it we added in these bits of cabling here and the antennas trying to add in some practical lights to try and make him feel justified that still was overparenting the scene a little bit too much so after that we had to go back to him speed him again they came back to us

4. 00:02:27

   with another solution which was having these low intensity low attenuation bulbs dotted around the outside and because the lights are set really really low it's not making a glow or anything it just adds just enough lighting to be able to see it's still night time it still gonna be a challenge to see most of it but the player never really feels like they're being cheered and they're not gonna run into anything they had no chance of ever seeing at all so that's pretty interesting so what other areas of the game are there that we have challenges lighting up the dark so we're looking at sort of both kind of more automated ways where we can sort of real time do sort of physical almost sort of global illumination stuff building cube maps on the fly and stuff because what you want to do is you want to have at least a small amount of light or light bounce around so you can see things even when it's pretty it's a challenge you have and then of course we'll do specific things

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   depending on locations but it's it is a challenge I mean we're trying to light a whole universe with in the game so you don't run into asteroids you can see very cool it's been a few weeks since we checked in on rest stops and here we see work that the procedural tech team has done recently on various libraries the procedural generation varying color schemes go a long way along with varying obviously shapes sticking with the rest dots here's a look at recent testing the procedural feature team has done on the approach to stations like this from a pilot's perspective the prophecy continues to turn out more loyal conversation pieces here we see hanging clothing trash cans

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   and a lot of little details that really land the city personality now let's look to vehicle features ship teams have been busy getting onboard power plant systems up to spec junior gameplay programmer Jonathan young can fill us in so we've also been working on making the power system more consistent for a player to know what's going to happen when the system doesn't have enough power we discovered that this meant that the items turned off in order as dictated in an XML which meant that if a dashboard is first in the XML then all your FD is going to turn off to fix that we've added per item priorities so the designers can set which items are more important than others for example you might want the shield's to turn off before the thrusters so you can escape and you want the dashboards to turn off

7. 00:04:53

   quite late so that you can still manage all your systems and still see what the status of your ship is so tell me how this system affects your overall flight experience well I mean basically it's the power management and the management of the different items and so you want to manage your power in a way that keeps your ship working at a optimal capability and then you could turn off certain systems so you would then four have more power available for your shields and more power available for your engines and it would sort of go down the list and you as a player can go in there and tweak what you think the priorities are I mean you probably wouldn't want to put them but the idea is to sort of manage it because you don't have to do it all you don't have to micromanage all this if you don't want to it will take you know we already

8. 00:05:41

   have priorities and and the rule set for it but if you do want to make for manage it then you can sort of maximize your experience out in space or in combat and so I think that's kind of the the model we're going for is you know you should be able to get in and it should be kind of fun and simple but if you really want to learn all the systems and tweak things and these stuff then you can be a better pilot or a better trader or a combat fine or whatever so that's this is a one of the aspects of that I think I would let the ship do its thing the audio team has been here fine-tuning the sound effects for the karna rifle from Cass Tech arms as well as tweaking weight distribution to make footstep sound more realistic distinct sounds are now being triggered

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   when a player walks backwards or sideways footsteps now get noticeably quieter while the player is crouching and each foot has their own separate audio identity for more dynamic sound in all of these cases the focused audio feature is applied here with footsteps amplified when the player is looking down at their feet finally we go to narrative director David haddock and senior motion capture specialist Joe Hunsford for a look at a recent mocap shoot that was just done in the UK what we're doing here is we've come out to grab some performance capture for some of the generic NPCs that the players will be sort of coming across in some of our landing zones this is where we certain motion capture audio and facial

10. 00:07:20

    simultaneously in one complete system so we're using LTC timecode to basically create a sync between the four separate systems and then we have a private own application where we look to sync the facial with the motion capture and with the audio so when we press trigger it passes the record it also passes it a claim as well what we do is we record video reference at the same time as we're shooting we try to take stuff being made by direct selects these are based on timecode so we can ensure that as soon as director says okay I want it from this time point we tracked it from there and then we pass it on to the animation team the animation team then do a complete polish and then this gets put straight into the game engine that looked like fun I miss mocap yeah and I was a little weak shoot that was done at the very beginning of this month

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    Dave was over there with will wives Bom we had some stuff that we needed to pick up four three three and now what we're calling a three point three five some general stuff for some of the FPS AI as well as stuff lawful for this up-and-coming quota that won't do start at citizencon I like it yeah speaking of this three three part four citizencon there are less than 50 tickets left for citizencon 2948 and we would love to see you there on up to our 10th in Austin so Greg one while you still can and if you happen to be in France the weekend of October 12th and 13th our French community is organizing a fan driven event in Orly called Patti vests and it looks like it's going to be a great event similar to community organized meetups like British and cotton in the UK and con 42 which was just recently

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    held this past weekend in Germany they have activities and tournaments planned and tickets are still available so if you're going to be in the area you should check it out and I think there's a rumor that brian chambers may go there on its way back from susan concen there you go very popular as brian chambers and that's it for us this week don't forget to tune in to reverse the verse live tomorrow at noon pacific on Twitch yeah and thanks to all the subscribers as well as each and every backer until next time we will see you around all of us you thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in star citizen the squadron 42

13. 00:09:43

    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 www.uvu.edu/library