Star Citizen: Around the Verse 3.12 - Austin

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   hey everyone welcome to around the verse our weekly look inside star citizen's development I'm your host sandy Gardner and joining us in the studio this week is chris roberts welcome back thank you good to be back and just in time to vamp it up for Halloween yes we did and you were visiting both UK and Germany offices correct yes I was catching up with our to foundry 42 offices in Winslow by Manchester and in Frankfurt and it was also overseeing some performance capture four-30 along with Dave haddock who actually did a lot of directing on some of the 3-0 stuff did a great job very cool and we'll actually be discussing how performance capture goes from the stage to in engine later in this episode but before we do let's take a quick look on what's going on right now in the verse okay well the super hornet free flight just wrapped up it's pretty cool to see

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   the first impressions from new people attested arena commander and the Alpha PU during these free flight events mm-hmm and a big welcome to all of the new backers joining us and thanks to all the veteran citizens for helping them get settled in yeah thank you very much they make a community special they do looking ahead to our next release 2.6 from all our studios they're checking and stuff every day you care to share in the hot seat pressure okay well we're playing star marine internal QA every day I had quite a fun session actually with Tony Zurich Arin todd papy and the German QA team last week I was in Frankfurt we have map and game-mode adjustments based on internal play test feedback we're working on which would include bone of course we're also working on networks food correlation to reduce lag and make the smoother sort of client remote animation in addition we're making sure the structural pups in

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   glasswork property of the network helmet 2.0 which is item 2.0 so implementation the helmet it's just gone in with a new HUD and widgets combat emotes have been hooked up as well and will allow you to trigger them from the keyboard to allow you to signal your friends 20 your enemies without having to break your FPS flow there you go and on the arena commander front the designers are pouring through all the feedback we got from the last evocati build and are taking another pretty big pass based some of their feedback and some of our thoughts together yes I think people gonna like what we're doing we're gonna do go quite a bit further on the next iteration of flight changes and on addition to that we're working on missiles to give them so much needed attention to give more variation and personality and how they behave very cool missiles are now persistent between respawns and we're working on the game mode pickups to rearm or refuel mid combat and the UI team is

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   hard at work on the new front end four-star marina and Iranian commander so there's a lot of work there that one's gonna come in very hot and of course we're getting the new ships in and tested for both Crusader and arena commander I know you're all eager to get your hands on 2/6 don't worry well okay gotta finish up the content and features so you can release 262 the PTU and then live now let's head over to our austin office for a studio update hey guys jake ross here previous to the austin studio and here with you this week talk about what's going on here in Austin hard at work working towards 2/6 3.0 and beyond first I want to pass it off to Emrys wit sir lighting artist here in Austin to talk about lighting updates for this dar marine maps so with lighting and sir marine we're not specifically looking to highlight the players one of the elements of Star Marines fps is we're trying to build a more tactical gameplay

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   experience and so while another first-person shooters you can use lighting to contrast the player and make it more visible with the lighting star marine where we're looking at it from a very realistic standpoint so we're saying okay there's this pirate station which has been abandoned for quite some time pirates of when in all the original lighting fixtures have probably have been to some extent destroyed or they no longer functional so what would the Pirates do how would they go in and actually light this environment for their purposes so there's a lot of temporary lighting there's a lot of lighting that's not what was originally there there's a lot of flickering lights there's a lot of very moody lighting this again means that that players are gonna have to be a little bit more cautious when they're entering a new play space they're gonna have to cover their teammates they're gonna have to to be a little bit more tactical in how they approach these situations they can't just go in there guns blazing and

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   hope to survive ICO 11 has a lot of these different rooms connected by these tight intricate corridors and so each of these rooms have their own unique feel maybe they're owned by different factions or they're iran by different people but each of these rooms has a distinct feel that it's also gonna help with with the teamwork element cuz you could give call-outs pretty easily so you oh I'm in I'm in this blue room with all these crazy monitors and all your teammates we know where you are so I'm really excited for storming I can't wait to get in there with all my friends create a squad if you know six guys and run around running on one of these maps and shoot up the enemies alright so now we're we're gonna pass it off to the QA team and game support team here in Austin talk about testing four to six and working with the avocado two point six will bring about a lot of changes in

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   new content some of which include a refactor to our lobby system some new missions an addition to grim hex and also the new ships the hoplite and the herald QA has also been heavily focused on testing ship model changes which includes a balanced pass to shields weapons and missiles this has been a heavily edited process where QA will provide feedback design will make changes thank you a will test those changes and provide additional feedback each day we have a live release sync for two point six where we'll get together discuss any new blocker critical issues any outstanding issues and also get an update of the build alongside with everything that's going in in two point six we're also heavily focused on star marine myself and my colleague Brandon Crocker both FPS specialists that work on star marine all day every day

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   basically what that means is we utilize checklists we use something called ad hoc testing which is kind of exploratory testing when my favorite ways of testing would be the cross studio play tests and basically what that does is word goes out that we're making this cross studio play test everybody from all the studios come in and play against each other after the play tests we all get the feedback get the bugs I take all that information put it into a single area collate it down and send it out to people who need to know about it we are very excited to get starring into PTU soon that will ultimately help us get one step closer to the live release there's a lot of new stuff coming in 2.6 of which like our flight model changes are already in the hands of our voluntary vacati testers which have been

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   a huge help so I have a CAUTI test flight is some program that a program that we started in February of this year and it's been hugely successful it's made of 800 volunteers right now they're from 20 different countries they speak 18 different languages and they cover from there they're from five different continents around the world so it's actually pretty cool and so what mo kadhi does is take a bill that is out of internal QA but let's just say it's not ready for primetime it's pretty busted and it's unfinished it's broken and a lot of times the people who play are kind of masochist because they crashed a lot a lot of bugs things aren't exactly as fun as they they should be before they get out to you know a wider audience the evocati process is a pretty difficult process we vet all of them

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    through a algorithm that we use to make sure that they're active and dedicated and testing through the issue council we also double-check them ourselves to make sure they're also you know not just adding contributions randomly and it's a it's pretty hard to get into the evocati test point you have to be quite dedicated and everyone there really is working with the evocati has resulted in an enormous amount of feedback via the issue council and via the PTU website we've just had to pour through a massive amount of tickets provided to the ice issue council and they are miraculously not duplicate so they find just an enormous amount of bugs that we can actually find and fix and make sure that the servers are more stable for when we move over to our way one PTU process in addition to that that we have been

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    provided so much feedback on the gameplay that we've actually had to find creative ways of going through the just sheer amount of feedback that they've been providing so that way we can distill it down and provide it to the producers and designers to make changes to the game thinking about some of the successes of vacati I think back to two point 3.0 if you remember that was it was a long time in waiting and once it got out it was terrible it was just crash e had lots of bugs and literally was not fun but it also wasn't ready to go out public and so that was I think it was a fun time for the volunteers because they had you know a common bond that they all went through but the the the reality is that it took a long time to get that build ready before it went out to the PTU and ultimately to the public so that

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    was I think a good month of pain for the volunteers but they hung in and they gave us lots of feedback we were able to get that stuff fixed and out the door okay thanks guys now we're gonna hand it off finally to Jason Ely and the backend services team to talk about the updates that they got going on in their world so lately we've been working on a number of things we have a en who's been working on well he built our service discovery platform which allows the services to easily connect to each other identify and connect to each other and now he's been working on like admin and customer support tools while Tom's been working on you know a lot of things he's our number one firefighter and he also has been working on like leaderboard and matchmaking you know modifications for the upcoming badge

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    I've been working on let's see so far it's been the hub server rewrite has been my biggest chore lately that's been quite the audio took about a month to do from beginning to end so much of what we do in the backend has never really seen directly by the players but in rewriting the hub server what we did was I took time and simplified the threading model and converted it over to support our new architecture obviously which adjusted how we handle messages and routing which greatly reduces the amount of memory moves we have to do from one point one network point to the other Network point we've also removed some of the state and isolated some of the state into one thread which makes communication a lot easier it I mean performance wise it's it's nothing that the player is going to know

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    it's more of a throughput issue from an overall you know larger perspective we can move more data to more clients without exhausting the machine that's running on originally it was the first service written actually by tom sawyer back a number years ago and it was the most reliable server at the time around like three and a half months solid with no problems over time before I got here you know it grew it went through the growing pains I had some you know too many cooks in the kitchen some complexities that were introduced that were unnecessary and so it didn't grow gracefully so when I came on you know we started the new service architecture which brought us persistence and Jim we always knew that we're going to have to address hub server but it was so it grown into something that wasn't meant to be had a lot of state and so it took

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    a quite a bit of time to address it so we just never had that opportunity so we saved the best for last the arena commander and star marine us are getting a major facelift this round and we're really trying to polish up the US as much as possible and make them fully functional the thing that I work on the most is the C++ code that has the UI system interact with the server back-end and there's information in lobbyists that need to be shared between all players when they're in lobbies such as like what map they're in you know what game-mode you know that character you know loadout four-star marine or their ship selection for arena commander so I focus on you know propagating that information and syncing it up between all the clients I kind of consider ourselves like a second generation you know matchmaking system it's where you form a lobby or a group of players or a

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    party of your friends and you know you you can you know chat with each other but at some point you hit you know match me into a game and at that point then you know your request goes to the backend servers and the matchmaker is taking a look at all the game instances that are currently running and tries to do a best-fit match you know for for your group to join a game if there's no game mode obviously then you know the the general instance manager will pull a server from the open pool and assign you to that and then other players will be matched to that over time like a third generation you know matchmaking system is kind of like what you see in like battlefield or you know Call of Duty where you just get this you know massive you know super Lobby and you see players you know coming again matched in two and you see the

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    timer you know going from two minutes to zero and if it's got enough players and you know it then shout told the players to game it's this we're more like you know like overwatch or heroes of a storm you know where you form your group first then you match into the game alright thanks guys it's all how we have for you this week we're gonna get back to it thanks and see you around we've mentioned the backend servers and lobby system a number of times recently what makes these updates so important for two point six and beyond well we're really focusing on sort of the user experience so we're trying to make the ability for players to connect with their friends to play matches customize the shape or the character much easier and quicker as well as check out the standings and do it all from the same place so it will just be a better experience speaking of connecting players it's time

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    for this week's community update take it away Tyler hey everyone tyler witkin community manager in the austin texas studio here to bring you this week's community update first and foremost I hope you all had an epic Halloween and I want to give a quick shout out to Kin shadow in Red Fang 87 for their star citizen themed pumpkin carvings which were posted on our website earlier this week very cool stuff and just as a reminder the espera prowler art contest is still going on we're gonna be accepting submissions through November 11th and announcing the winners at the anniversary livestream on November 18th we're really excited to see what you guys come up with in other news star citizen has been nominated for most wanted game for the golden joystick Awards there's only one more day to vote so if you want to follow the progress

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    you can go to GamesRadar comm slash golden joystick Awards and now it's time for this week's MVP I want to get a huge congratulations to lund for SCI for his extraordinary efforts in creating starship 42 calm this is a one-stop shop where you can go in and explore the ins and outs of all of our ships in a detailed 3d viewer I encourage you to check it out and you'll quickly find that you're losing hours of your day exploring this website so congratulations again lungphu SCI you're this week's MVP lastly the week would not be complete without reverse the verse so make sure to tune in live tomorrow at 10 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time at twitch.tv slash sig community where we're gonna talk about everything that you saw in today's episode thanks again for all your support and we'll see you in the verse thanks Tyler awesome stuff for more on the latest make sure to check out our

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    community hub on the side there you'll find our social media feed featured forum post links to star citizen streamers information on up-and-coming bar citizen events and much more lots of stuff and at the top of the show we talked a little bit about the most recent performance capture session pcap is a big part of making this star citizen universe come alive recording voice face and body all at the same time gives us a new instance from the actors that we couldn't get any other way even if the head cam gets a little uncomfortable yeah you know comfortable so anyway it's a great tool but one of the valves a lot of attention to detail to get right so it's not just capturing someone it's about understanding the precise metrics of what they're interacting with so the animations will work together with the props and the sets that natural in pretty much any situation for

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    more on that let's go back to our austin studios for a behind-the-scenes look at how we create all these animation assets today we're going to talk about missions and how we get them from concept into game and the process of which we do that is design comes to us and says hey we want something so we say okay how can we do this one of the things that we have to think about whenever we shoot motion capture or something that we need for the universe is our metrics how what are the measurements are is this character interacting with an object is this character interacting with other objects is the character interacting with the player there's a lot of thought processes that go into this to figure out exactly what we need for example if

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    a character is sitting at a mess hall we need to get the metrics of that mess hall table we then have to go out on stage and we have to build out that mess hall table to approximate dimensions that you see in game this leads to a standardization across all mess hall tables and games so we don't end up having you know 20 different mess hall tables that we now have to instead of 50 animations for now you know doing you know 150 animations in order to accommodate every mess hall table that we have or bed or chair or bench or locker you name it whatever you can interact with there's a metric for it and a standardization so we go out onto stage we build out these props or set pieces and then actors are given very specific directions on how they're

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    supposed to approach these objects these are also part of the metrics for example when you want to sit down on a mess hall table the actor has to approach that mess hall table and their left foot has to hit at approximately 100 centimeters out or one meter out from the from the bench once they hit that mark which actors are usually pretty good at hitting marks they can do whatever they want to sit down onto that bench and that's where we get kind of the fun acting that you see on the NPC's hey guys I'm working on squadron 42 these are assets that are going to be in squadron 42 but eventually we'll be able to implement these into the persistent universe so we had to do a couple things just like Ryan said we've you know made sure that you know all the tables are now to a proper metric so that we can we can reuse

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    the performances but now that we've got this stuff in place but it's really cool because you know and these obviously these are these are bought these actually come from one of our more organic cinematics so even though maybe this this one wasn't intended to you're intending to use this for a frame game there's always an opportunity to look at some of this stuff and go oh you know what I can extract that and make that something that's that has some real there's a usability and we can apply this to the persistent universe so here's another one this is the hungry guy comes up and there's waiting in line for the mess hall so this is all from an initial shoot we actually have another one that's coming in that has a lot more

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    a lot more stuff in it once we get the data back the first thing we have to do is we have to go through and we have to analyze all the data we got to make sure that the data handed to us from the mocap stage is clean and that there's no problems with it we then go through a process of usually cutting the animation apart into different segments when you use an object like if you want to sit down in a chair you have to break it into at least three segments and enter so you actually sit down onto the chair a cycle where you're cycling like I am right now on a chair and then an exit where you actually get up and you exit away from the chair and these are what we call animation sets these animation sets are very important to have a complete set in order to have an AI fully be able to go and use an object and these animation

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    sets are definitely expandable we can we don't have to just have one cycle the guys sitting on the chair the guy can be like leaning on his hand or you know scratching his neck or picking his nose or or adjusting his ear buds or or whatever you whatever we can come up with that character can do in that chair will will shoot or animate or or create whether it's motion capture or whether it's hand key and then whenever it goes into game code we'll sit the character the AI down into the seat and then randomly play these actions that you see hi my name is Vanessa and arrows and today I'm going to show you what we've been working on and this guy will look a little funny because he

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    doesn't have his textures on his hands but he's basically this is what you're gonna see when the carrot background characters are in their beds just kind of sleeping or fussing around like tossing and turning here and there little fun stuff we want to make sure we get a real experience as real as we can get in the games though we have these little minut details which probably wouldn't see any other normal game but but this is what kind of makes our citizen so so real and and we're working towards something really really believable yeah and then the NPCs are gonna be able to get in and

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    out of their beds - so I'm gonna be able to walk in and lay down and the player will be able to get to do this - just we need to make sure we get ins and outs also some of every angle so we can capture those possibilities the character if he wants to enter from the front he can enter from the front all those need separate animations gonna be able to see a janitor in-game use a mop and a bucket I'm just gonna clean up after all the star citizens yeah potentially this guy is gonna have a walk cycle of his own he's not carrying his bucket right now

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    but you'll just see him kind of dredge a bucket round with his mop be fun once we get this guy up and going just that little extra detail that kind of really makes the game as it fullscreen way in there when he's done with this area he'll just pick up his bucket and he'll go so when we passed these animations off on design design has something called a usable which is a an object that's placed in the universe that has these little entry nodes and attached nodes and we have usable for pretty much everything that you can interact with a I will say I want to use that chair so design will have placed

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    this useable node on a chair a I will navigate to that chair a line it's by time it gets to the chair love lined itself to the entry nodes attached sit down and use that object until it's ready to get up and leave and while that objects being used other AI will be like I want to use a chair well that one's taken what's the next available chair and then they'll they'll have to wherever the next usable chairs or the weight or they'll change your mind and go off someplace else sometimes we get requests that we don't have motion capture for or we don't have time to go shoot motion capture or maybe the motion capture stage is tied up doing cinematics for us at the time and it'll be something that we have to get out right away so what we'll do is we'll

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    go and we'll hand key whatever that motion is sometimes it's temporary and we'll replace it later with proper motion capture sometimes it's not super significant so we'll go in there and we'll just hand key it and make it look really nice so we're started working on Panchal animations high work zones low work zones and we have floor work zones so with this character we've got we're going through and he's still working progress so we've got transitions that we need to clean up and things like that but here you can go through you can see like here's a full performance we've got finger animations this is actually one of the performances where we didn't have time to shoot the mocap so we've actually gone through and hand keys so this is the high work zone just so you see there's a little bit difference like he pulls out his pod - and flicks it and what's cool about this is that this

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    isn't a unique one-off animation this has high reusability you can use this on ships you can use it on buildings you can use it pretty much anywhere for weapons vendors you want it so you can actually pick the weapons up take them off and look at them so from third-person this is what you would typically see so that you know it looks like the characters picking up and examining it some of these we didn't have time to go through and and vocab or we just needed you know there's something we've some things we you know we realize after sure like oh man we need this but we gotta get this thing turned around so that's the situation where I'll have to go in and I'll have to I'll shoot video reference I'll get in a general idea of what we what we need here's where I'm just checking a weapon and then this is the pan key result of that and so this is this is tailored towards for first-person for a

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    player I'm gonna say the probably the most challenging aspect of all of this is consistency in whatever it is that we're doing for example if a character needs to go and use a data pad and go around and inspect things with that data pad that that data pad becomes a metric and it becomes standardized and that all data pads in the game now match this in particular data pad it's letting design know that when a character is going to sit down and use mobi glass that that animation can be used across the board and that everybody's aware of these animations so nobody's re-request Ingush t' and that's just a taste of what

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    players will see in the upcoming releases hope you guys enjoyed I'll do it for this episode's remember the tune in tomorrow at 10 a.m. PST 5 p.m. GMT for reverse averse and we'd also like to thank all of our subscribers as always you guys make it possible to produce all of this content from a TV our TV bug smashers lure makers and more thank you very much for your continued support and guess what we are in the Guinness Book of Records records all right third time in a row very exciting do you recognize this ship yes and also like we're like that this is a bunch of nice gifts we got during citizencon so I'm very cool model of x-wing there and some alcohol that I'm scared to drink and belt buckles from my operation pitchfork and a very God

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    frequency and all these very cool and a very very cool challenge here so thank you all guys and yeah thank you for supporting us we couldn't do this without you guys and I would say until next week we will see you around thank you for watching so if you want to

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