Star Citizen: Around the Verse - The Sound of Fury | 3.4 Ep. 5

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:02

   [Music] hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse I'm eric kieron davis and i'm shawn tracy today we'll get updates on character animations and continue our exploration of the developing flight model with looks at improvements to ship AI and audio but first let's check out a recent ship centric community skirmish our community continually pushes the envelope on showing star citizens potential and wrecks Zillah recently put together one

2. 00:00:50

   such example with this 42 person Gladius battle it's really cool stuff I don't know about you but I'm I really get inspired whenever I see those videos right like same here absolutely I even I think I even made a response to Chris I guess we can all just pack up and go home now yeah because they you know they're gonna they're gonna put together these really exciting things and coming from a modding background myself I really love the fact that the community kind of sets up some really exciting events for themselves and it gives us tons of ideas yeah is that inviting us yeah Chris is that is that is that so is that what we saw there something that only you could do in 3 4 3 or is it's like you know like when did was that yeah we could probably have put that many ships together I think in earlier releases but whether or not that would have been still really playable or whether you would have had rubber banding things going on just having that

3. 00:01:38

   many entities right in vicinity of each other and doing you know the formation flying around the different hills and things like that that would have been a lot harder to do in early releases but now that we've been able to kind of knock down some of these performance hurdles I think we've been able to really give them the ability to do this totally that's super cool over the past few weeks a TV has been looking at different aspects of the new flight model in development that's right and soon players will get to begin their training in this improved flight experience but did you know our AI pilots have to be retrained to its specifications as well here's Andre Becker with more over the last few months the ship AI departments has focused on two primary topics the first one was porting all the existing behaviors for ships into ifcs 2.0 when the I FCS system switched from 1.0 to

4. 00:02:30

   2.0 change how you request certain movements from the shifts it doesn't matter if that's a player or that's the AI but for the player that's mostly on the teams that do the controls but for the AI it is on us so when they ship in I ship decides to fly from A to B it requests different kinds of things from the I FCS so we had to change the way it phrases those requests in order to get to the point he wants to go to there were two aspects to this the first one was the code side so things like fly to a position or takeoff or defend an area needed to be converted under the hood to use new type of interface that ifcs 2.0 provides the other part was on the

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   balancing side since the combat is now a lot more momentum driven the parameters had to be tweaked so the ships behaved properly the other big topic was gunships since we were touching the gunship behavior anyway we decided to give this a makeover for 3/5 so gunships for us are ships that are heavier than the average fighter and the pretty major part of the damage is coming from turrets so there were several goals for us the first one was we want them to behave in a pretty realistic manner and we also want them to play quite differently from fires and it was also important to us that they play to their strengths so new behaviors that they are going to circle the targets

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   roughly 400 meters that's enough to see them clearly and it's close enough for them to hit reliably but it's still far enough that you can't easily get on their tails and then they will try to bring the maximum number of turrets to bear on their target and some of the time for variety sake they also do a frontal assault run and they will use their front-facing weapons and also missiles when the player is fighting gunship the critical importance is that he gets into the gunship the blind spot to make sure it's outside of all the firing arts where as chief is fighting against fighter it's more important to stay on the fighters tail because fighters weapons are usually all facing forwards so yes this thing on the tail which is quite difficult since fighters are very agile but for the gunship the

7. 00:04:57

   tail could very well be a very dangerous spot to be and if it has rare turns on the fighter side we want to focus on two main things the very first task will do for this is to make them more fun to shoot at after an attack round so once they're done attacking you and they are breaking away we want to give the player more opportunity to get onto the tail chase them and chasing them will become progressively harder the longer they are on the tail and if you decide to shoot them and you actually managed to get some hits then they will try to become more and more aggressive with their efforts to shake you off so they will present themselves to some degree for you to get its in but you will have to work for it so to sum it all up gunships are a lot more dangerous than before and they take a

8. 00:05:47

   lot more brains to beat fighters are gonna be a lot more agile and certain under I've cs2 photo and will enable your players to get into their tail and get Hollywood star movements out of it and we can't wait for the backers to get their hands on it along with controls and systems the entire ship audio experience is being overhauled as part of the new flight model let's go to the audio team for more we've been looking to rework the ship audio engine for quite a while now as the system that we had while it was great at the time hasn't really scaled with the game and it doesn't take advantage of some of our features such as automatic inheritance inside dataforge it's quite restrictive as a sound designer as well because we could only play sounds on the thrusters and not anywhere we wanted to on the ship so with this new system the players will see much more positional detail and

9. 00:06:36

   accuracy and where the sounds are on the ship as well as allowing us to bring in the audio vibration component and the environment feedback component to give the players even more feedback on what their ships doing in the state it's in so this is the Gladius after being set up with the new audio systems in the new system we can place emitters that represent the movement of the ship anywhere on the ship itself rather than being restricted to the thrusters themselves as in the old system this is useful for properly placing the sounds of additional systems that were produced sound when the ship is moving all these sounds are modulated by different parameters coming from the ifcs so spreading the emitters throughout the ship in a low friendly way like this results in a much more dynamic and believable ship soundscape while this has benefits for stereo speaker users people play them of headphones or surround sound systems should hear

10. 00:07:23

    massive increases in positional believability and detail because of the more advanced audio features in the new ship audio system we can also modulate the sounds of ships over long journeys to represent the sound of the ship settling into a certain cruise speed so because of the improvements to the thruster audio system we now actually have sounds on the maneuvering thrusters and the retro thrusters on most ships which we used to have August we didn't have the audio features to properly work with the ifcs thrust output which tended to be quite spiky which is offering you SFIL for audio so now if we line the ship up with damar we can hear these working we've also added thrust and afterburner

11. 00:08:15

    one shot sounds to the thrusters rather than just using loops this really helps to sell the power and the weight of the ship during large accelerations now if we enter the atmosphere of damar we'll be able to hear the vibration audio and environment feedback audio components working the vibration all your component works by calculating the physical force acting on the ship at the vibration points that we place these will be after weapons fire impact collisions thruster force explosions and

12. 00:09:03

    so on but one of the main causes of strain on the ship is atmospheric entry and atmospheric flight so as the drag acting on the ship increases so too does the physical force at these points so they trigger vibration sounds these will be more intense as the atmosphere is slowing us down and we'll settle down as we reach a suitable speed for the atmospheric density so first developers the new systems

13. 00:10:19

    offer a lot of advantages and it's mainly down to iteration time so it now takes about roughly a minute for the initial audio setup of a new ship which is extremely fast and all the time that we save by that we can just put in two well details right into detail work and focus on the really nice cool things in the game now let's shift gears and check in with a Steve bender for some animation updates take it away bender for animation 2019 is not just about putting in new features right 20:19 is a focus on taking the features that we have in game right now polishing them up and making them triple a quality shippable things

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    that are competitive against any other game on the market when we're dealing with future development we often get to a point on on some of these things where it works but it's not it's not really shippable it's something that while you may be able to say pick up a box there's all sorts of bugs with it right glitches things popping moving around and stuff like that and to that extent we have a couple guys who are focusing on closing down those sorts of pickups picking up the boxes how all of the pops and the things that happen right now when you try and do that we're getting rid of all those glitches so that the team can then lock that down and move on to whatever the next important feature is

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    in vaulting and mantling so we want to make sure that the player is able to freely move throughout the level he's able to run you know walk run jump vault over objects jump over evolved objects climb up on them and things like that now with how vaulting has worked before in the game when the character would come towards an object and he would execute a vault if he was too close it would it would kind of work them backwards and then have them go like this where as near vaulting allows us to actually have assets which are related to when he's close enough right so he's not running necessarily towards it but he's close enough and he's going over

16. 00:12:46

    and the style of those animations is different than this sort of like a sliding style over or something like that ship sequencing is extremely important from both an animation standpoint and an efficiency standpoint so the ship sequencing idea allows us to now create enters exits and the control situations and frees up art to be able to mix and match those so the animation team is working closely with tech art to be able to set these things up to be able to get the enter working smoothly with now he gets into the seat and then from there he chooses which control system he goes to and same thing in the exit as I was playing the game last year

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    and I was talking with a lot of community members we have a lot of community members that are hard of hearing or maybe deaf and they don't interact with with the game in the same way that someone who hears hears voice would do so so we engaged one of our community members to work with us on coming up with a series of emotes for American Sign Language so that our community members who are hearing-impaired can actually interact and roleplay in the world like how they would want to be doing so one of the really neat things that happened this morning is Brian Brewer our animation lead in Austin called me up and said hey you want to see

18. 00:14:22

    something really cool and I was like all right when he got and he showed me the characters actually playing the American sign language videos and I said you really want to see someone smile you need to send it to one of our developers who's hearing impaired and just you know show him this because we've talked about it I've talked to him about it and he was like super excited about this about this being in the game and sure enough Brian called him and they looked at the video together and he was like I know exactly what this guy is saying so that was I think that was really exciting I'm really happy for the the community to have this opportunity to be able to role play and to express themselves in in the way that they see

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    fit and that perhaps more is is related to them adding the American sign language is pretty awesome and the team wants to add facial animations for emote so those will be really cool when they're complete and that does it for us this week so remember tomorrow's the last day to enter the tumbrill cyclone commercial contest so get your submissions in thanks to our subscribers for sponsoring all our shows and thanks to all of our backers for supporting star citizen's development so until next time we'll see you around the verse it's like thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in star citizen

20. 00:16:06

    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 www.uvu.edu/library