10 for the Developers: Episode 07

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] greetings fellow citizens welcome to the next episode of 10 for the dev Vel opers I'm elen Bachelor Jr lead vehicle artist in LA and I'm here with associate technical artist Patrick cerno and we'd like to thank all of the subscribers for making this show happen uh without you guys we wouldn't be able to put this operation together and you guys really help us develop the game um so Patrick I have a question for you it's from Earth

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   fire and it says what aspects of the development process do you enjoy or perhaps find difficult but rewarding what aspects in particular well I like the challenge mainly you come in every day and it's a different type of puzzle to solve uh you constantly learn new things and there's new tests I mean to be specific lately I've been learning how to put chips together and then tear them apart again and you know that that that's cool to me you go in you see the model you see how it's put together You Yank out the pieces put them in the XML and then you go in the engine you shoot it then it blows bark there's explosions everywhere and Stu so you like your favorite part is breaking all of the hard work that me and my team do basically yeah that's exactly that's great thank you um well for me the most rewarding part for me is just when when the whole thing comes together and you finally get to climb into your ship turn everything on take off and fly uh

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   ultimate I mean obviously I enjoy doing all the artwork for it and you know the struggles that you have to go through to make that happen uh but when you actually get to play the asset and everything works the way it's supposed to that's the most gratifying moment for me uh cuz ultimately I I want an awesome game right uh this is from cold gas he says hi Owen hi Patrick uh what have you been working on the past few days and any details you can tell us about yeah very easy uh the last couple of days I've very specifically been working on the beginning stages of development for the caterpillar so that means doing some white box work that means taking some concept work and bashing it in to make sure it all conforms with the game play uh it also means starting to do some work and research on how materials work so specifically we're uh putting a lot

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   of effort into developing how the paint wears on metal inside the Drake ships because they have a very different style than ages for example um so that's what I've been up to okay um for me in particular uh I've kind of been transitioning from optimization to helping create these uh they're called ship setup levels and it's where you kind of bring all the pieces together um in terms of optimization I've been finishing up uh just a level of detail pass on all of the flyable ships in the game to get a little bit more performance out of them um did a segment recently on that uh goes into more detail but yeah so putting all the putting all the pieces together trying to make the uh workflow in the pipeline a bit easier for other artists you know just go in check out the ship shoot it look at it in different lighting

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   conditions look at all the lights etc etc cool so uh beloth wants to know can you define what a successful ship is to you to me in particular I uh well to me a successful ship is one that has made it through the entire pipeline in an efficient manner uh what that means in particular is going through all of the different phases of development um from concept to maual modeling texturing lighting the whole destruction system and just making it into the engine and Performing optimally to me that that's a successful ship that means that it went through you know who knows how many hands and then ended up you know boom in the game going ready to go you don't have to go back and fix things that are too broken that's a successful Shi to me I I mean I can I can agree with that to

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   some degree I know you're really focused on the development part of it but I think to me a successful ship really is uh a ship that when I first show it to someone they're like holy I want to fly that thing right now that's basically a successful ship and I I hope we can develop a lot of those yeah yeah definitely uh got a couple questions that I decided to take on so I'll answer these uh this one is from Daz he says when optimizing are you aiming for specific number of assets or triangles on the screen in any given time it's kind of a multi-part question but and kind of related to that I'll just kind of answer it all at once but he says with backer keen on getting some big Space Battles how do you determine what's possible and what ship count to set and you know how do how do we work on a bunch of things a lot of ships in a close area you know and a lot of stuff

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   going on um it's kind of a large question there's a lot of variables that come into it uh but really really every ship is a bit different every ship is its own puzzle you need to solve and your your general goal is to get them down to roughly the same level so what I mean by that is at least just in terms of level of detail when the model kind of slowly disappears we'll focus on that that's very important that saves a lot of performance when you're up close to someone you see the ship it has all of its internal stuff all of his external stuff all that full detail stuff right but when you're far away you may not realize but you're not actually rendering all that stuff uh like things get cold the interior might disappear the model might degrade in quality a bit not noticeable that's kind of where it comes down to things like that are where we come in and we sort of look at the statistics and we say h how is this performing how many ships can we

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   have in an area you know how much detail can we get at various ranges and then we just optimize from there so I mean for a specific number really there's no specific number of assets or or like you know it's just more whatever people's computers can really handle based on you know what we use to work with yeah I mean the beauty of H of having this game Run on a PC is that the more power you have the more of the uh beautiful visuals you can have running at the same time yes so part of it is Hardware related but obviously we're trying to optimize as much as possible to make the game Run as smooth as possible for as many people as possible yes exactly next question comes from Far assault I don't know why I had trouble reading that uh he says hi folks uh has there been a particular time when you have had to make a decision to not

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   implement the most realistic version of a part due to technicaldesign limitations if yes why um interesting so I spent a lot of time working on the Merlin and I made that thing so that you'd be able to open up every single compartment to access every single component uh but for technical reasons uh I basically had to rip all that stuff out at the last minute and cap the holes to get the ship to run because it was pulling way too many draw calls um so that's one example of many that we've had in the game but the the process of developing a game often tends to be uh trying to go as far as you can with a specific type of idea and developing it as far as you can and then realizing oh man you know this is

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    this isn't going to work so how do we solve this problem with less resources um so that's just kind of the theme you know for game development in general and that's what happened with the Merlin it made me sad because it looked really awesome when you press the play button and everything just popped open S it was so cool yeah it was very cool so uh maybe we can get that back into the game at some point in the future but uh at the moment that was one example of what we had to tear out mhm mhm so the next question comes from amonti I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly uh and he asks you Patrick specifically uh how closely does LOD work tie into manufacture style guides well actually not really much at all the uh concept for the ship and the main base ship and everything that makes it up is based on the manufacturer style guides lods are based on the actual geometry for the ship itself and the best way to optimize

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    that down to a level where we can include it with all the other ships and maintain high performance so lods really aren't based on style guides I mean you might you might try and you you obviously want to keep the silhouette of the ship and keep it looking like you don't want to just look blocky so if like a ship has these nice curves along the edges you don't want the lods to just sort of block them out or chop them up you know you want it to maintain that shape so right I mean what that does mean though is that for lods there are some ship styles that are more difficult to deal with uh because of that so A Very blocky ship you know generally speaking a very blocky ship it would be easier to L uh because you wouldn't notice the changes in the surfaces as much as you would as a ship that's a little bit more rounded right um so yeah okay sty guides don't affect it but the style guide does indirectly affect the L how hard it is

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    to make the LOD for it correct uh from Wolf rocken uh hey ellwin it was mentioned by on in by Lando recently ly that the caterpillar will be somewhat of a benchmark for drape ships as long as far as design and looks go from your perspective could you expand on that more and how will it affect the buccaneer dragonfly heral and cutless also how could you see the designs changing based on what you've done with the caterpillar I know it's hard to live up to everyone's expectations without teasing too much how excited should we be about what is coming to the rest of the Drake Z you should be very excited for what's coming for the rest of the Drake line um and it is incredibly hard to live up to any expectations for the quality bar of these ships yes um but it is true that the caterpillar is going to be sort of the

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    first um I guess the flagship ship for Drake um I know we have the cutless already out there um and that one was developed with techniques that we've improved on since they were created so we will have to go back and sort of you know upgrade those to the quality of the new ship so we're trying to hit the bar of essentially what the Retaliator is right so the Retaliator has the latest and greatest technology built into it and uh I think the Gladius does as well and the Gladiator might have most of that in there so we have a lot of ships that are already starting to sort of set an example for the kind of quality bar that we want to go for and also the techniques that we're using for various reasons damage um variety uh making sure that we keep our texture resolution high enough requires us to build the ships in

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    a certain specific way um so ships like the cutless were not the develop that way correct and so it will have to get an upgrade now the caterpillar is sort of the ship that we're pushing forward to define the look of what Drake is and so when we're done with that one we will end up having to basically reuse some of the textures that we've developed for it some of the shape language um maybe even some assets you know whatever makes it makes it easier for us to develop the future ships and then apply that to the cutless uh do the same thing with the Heralds do the same same thing with the uh dragonfly and the buccaneer okay I wasn't sure those names were public um so you should expect that the lineup for Drake will look like a family of ships

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    right so if I look at a dragonfly I will I should immediately say hey that's a drake ship for this and that and that reason um so we're definitely trying to unify the looks which something that we've been working on all of the manufacturers um you will you should be able to see this now between the starf far and the freelancer the UK team did a really great job unifying those two ships they look like they're exactly from the same family um the Reliant also because it used a lot of assets that were developed in the UK um so we're trying to do the same thing with Drake and the caterpillar is the first one online yep and as uh was saying the as we build more ships based on our style guides you'll see a more cohesive look come together cu the more pieces you have from things you've already made you end up getting a giant like Library based on these pieces and the design aesthetic so it's easier for existing

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    artists new artists to just come in pick up go oh that's what that manufacturer looks like based on existing ships versus the hardest part is coming up with it you know you've got all these different manufacturers each one needs to have an you know unique aesthetic and we can hold it yep yep cool uh next question comes from Cav guy one of the fascinating things for me watching you guys build Star Citizen is how you pull it all together can you talk through the changes to the ship pipeline over the last year and how it's reduce the time it takes to get a ship from concept to flight also do you think there's still room for improvement uh yeah uh definitely I think you you might actually be a bit better answering this question per se but from what I've seen from the ship pipeline as a whole from concept to Tech design to implementation we've definitely made progress um because

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    we're working more closely with our other Studios uh we do a lot of the tech and the design and help with the engineering and it's it's all just sort of coming together and you're seeing things higher quality more complicated assets coming out quicker right versus concepting it building the tech putting the tech into practice experimenting on it breaking it fixing it rebuilding it right the pipeline Has Come Together which means assets are getting pushed out that yeah absolutely um to speak specifically about what some of the changes have uh what some of the changes have been to the pipeline specifically in developing the ships um we've moved slightly away from a paradigm where we had concept fully developed for a ship before production started going into to

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    work for it so now what we're doing is we're spending a lot of time upfront working with game design to make sure that all of the mechanics that the ship needs to comply with or the space that's required for the player to walk around and if it has an interior area is all blocked out ahead of time before we even give that to the concept artist to make sure that when the concept artist does his work it all fits with the game rules and we don't have to worry about you know having to to drastically changing the concept that's already been developed um changes will always happen but doing it this way allows us to catch any problems really early on before anybody spends you know weeks or months of their life developing an asset that then has to be reworked in the future um so for the Carrick specifically um we have plans to build

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    that soonish mhm that's the best I can say about that um but right now Anvil is one of those manufacturers that still needs to have its Library filled out so AIS for example because of the Retaliator and some of the other ships in their line they have quite a bit of content to draw from to develop the newer ships a bit faster yeah uh with Anvil we're not quite at that point yet and so when we get there we will be able to hit our stride and be able to develop ships faster what will most likely happen is that the Carri will probably help develop that library for us because it will be the first large multi crew Advil ship that we probably work on um and so that's how we'll develop our assets to then in the future be able to build ships even quicker mhm so I'll

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    read the next one from uh Johan 26 it's kind of two separate questions here says on the development side are there many manufactur whole pieces that are shared across ships of a single company like you know hatches thrusters seats doors panels Etc yes all right answer that one awesome on the game side visually speaking how customizable are the ships in general you know uh he's like I know the possibility to change the seats but we expect some more customizations like interior paint switching fancier skape pods beds whole dashboard more powerful headlights better kitchen Etc I think it's a tentative yes to that second part um uh just to hit on the whole manufacturers sharing assets uh that's absolutely a yes um it's it's almost it's absolutely necessary that we

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    do something like that in order to develop the number of ships that we have to make um so what that means is that we will have Escape pods that are common to ages for example and you should expect to see those Escape pods in other ages ships um docking collars same thing um so you may even see chairs that are shared among the same manufacturer so uh right now you will notice that on the freelancer you've got a specific type of chair which also exists on the starf farer which a very close version of that also exists on the Reliant and there's a couple of reasons for doing that one it keeps the the look and feel the same so you can identify what manufacturer built your ship two we can actually build the ship much faster right so sharing of assets within manufacturers is absolutely something we have to do um in

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    terms of customization uh we are still working on what the full range of customization is um the most obvious and uh sort of start of the customization process that we really want to hit is allowing people to change the paint jobs on their ships and we're exploring a couple of different ways of doing this uh we haven't quite implemented a full working version of it yet but it's something that we are building our current ships to support yep no definitely uh just just on Owen's note um I mean part of the development process is making something trying out different techniques for it and finding out whether it works so we do a lot of R&D into different ways to do it and some some methods make the cut and some don't um we used to have a paint system that was it was it was a bit harder to work with like we had we

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    had paints we had it working and it's just you know it's it's a Juggle you say does this help the pipeline is there another way we can do this faster that constant iteration is kind of why why we like working here as well is just like you can make changes to things and find a better way to do it and you're not just stuck somewhere you know you may have to go back and do changes to older stuff occasionally but in the grand scheme of things it's going to help the entire pipeline so we're making everything as basically as modular as possible Right within within sensical terms so you should be able to go out and get other parts so definitely modularity is something we already have and we can expand upon we just have to make sure that it's a good use of time management and etc etc right right and just to touch on what you mentioned of us previously having a paint system uh that paint system was harder to work

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    with uh but it also uh became uh it created a conflict with the way we wanted to do damage yes just because of the specific implementation method and as a result of that um we went in favor of the damage to find a different way of doing the customization on the paint the damage is so much cooler well yes it is metal melting away and everything you know you know so instead of saving basically the the way it works is you have uh UV Maps if anyone knows what those are it's where the textures get painted onto and um the way the tech works is the damage Shader kind of it it works over the UV Maps but you also needed the UV the paints in the uv2 so they were kind of sharing the same space right so we're like well what what what do we pick you know and then we're like well the the paints can probably be done another way and more efficiently and this is just the best way for the damage

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    system to work so that's how kind of how our opportunity costs work that also I mean that also kind of touches back in the uh what features have we decided not to implement um that is one of them yeah uh so yeah so we're working on a much better way of allowing customization which uh the goal is to let people not only change you know at least several different colors on their ship but also attempt to allow them to pick you know decals for their wings or whatever that way they have like a massive happy face or whatever they want to put on it um so we have some prototypes of that working um and I think it's going to be pretty cool but you know more work has to go into it okay uh so the last question comes from es chados Asados ashad guess es chatos um I have a multi-part question

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    about damage States so I'm just going to skip straight to the question sure uh when you're designing for this is the final damage state of the ship intended to reflect specific damage for example is the tail SLC cargo section being destroyed because it is where it was hit yes that is that is pretty much exactly how it works um what we're doing on this Tech design side it's going to get more in- depth than this as we go too but uh you hit a specific location damage can transfer from that location to another location there's probabilities so like if you hit like a wing and there's components under there like a shield generator or something that could be damaged and that creates like Rippling explosion that goes and blows up something else which so so like we're trying to create a very Dynamic damage system so yes for at a base level things break off Wings snap off Tails snap off body snaps in half the three main parts

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    well three or four is like nose neck body tail right so when your ship is finally 100% destroyed if your neck is destroyed you're just boom you know you just kind of blow up but if your tail broke off you you might still you know airlock thunk you know and try and Coast back to a b it it it depends on how it's going if you have like a critical series of events that happen that might destroy your whole ship yeah I mean if you trigger catastrophic damage it's game over yeah it's game over you know your whole ship's going to blow up so at the end yes there should be you know areas that you can see especially like in non 100% destroyed State you should be able to see exactly where you got hit during your fight you know but at the end when your ship is blown up well you know you got shot in the wing but it's missing right you know you got shot in the tail and at 100% it is a complete model swap into sort of the husk chunks at the

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    moment with like an overlay pfx that bursts out it's all Blended together so you can't really tell um but unless you're you know going back for repairs you don't really need to see that one area you got shot in the wing you know it's all about performance how how can we keep realistic yet persistent damage you know so yep uh his the next part of his question is uh is the intention that we'll be able to survive something like that if we're not in the damaged section of the ship if we have a space suit on I think you kind of touched upon that I did kind of touch upon that uh yes it is it is in the design board right now you kind of just you blow up and die your spaceship's blown up right as the the damage and how it transfers gets more uh in depth we can end up just probably saying you know airlock door close you

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    know you're you're all safe I I don't know honestly I don't really have 100% specifics on that but I do know conceptually it should be possible and that's kind of what we're leaning towards cuz that that's realistic right yeah I mean that's I think that's ultimately the goal um obviously game design is still working on the specifics of how that functions because as for example if the back of your ship gets blown off and that's where all your power plants are um and you're stuck in the front but you've got no power does that mean you are basically stuck in a floating husk right right so there's more than just the realistic aspect of the game we have to worry about what what the implications for the gameplay are as well um okay so his the last part of is chato's question is and thirdly do you have to consider the repair mechanic when designing damaged

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    States yes yes yes you do because you have to think of what's going to need to be repaired what's going to be left behind even if uh the mechanic isn't like fully you should still think how how how is the player going to repair this how what should the player see what tools are at disposable like it it the big it's a big difference like just think conceptually okay like you know this isn't how it is or anything but if you have a spaceship and it just flies into a hanger and a bunch of like Nanobots repaired or something that's one way where you don't have to be too interactive but if you're like a dude with like a blowtorch and you're up there the ship is in a completely different spot you know you're getting completely different visual all sorts of stuff is still going on yeah and and that that uh repair mechanic is still being fleshed out and I think it's going to be really cool uh it's a lot more Dynamic than what we had before but it it's important to keep in mind that our

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    damage system currently is not what we started with so we use the term damage States but it doesn't actually reflect what it is anymore right it's a lot more organic than that so previously we did have something called damage stage where you would shoot the wing and there would be four different versions of the wing in different states of damage 25 50 75 and 100 exactly that's gone m so the way we're doing it now is we're actually building the internal supports for that wing and when we shoot the hull surface it'll blow a hole through it to reveal the interior so there's no damage state it just is how much damage has that part taken correct and the only damage state is really the 100% at this point are you destroyed or not right and that's when you get the detach command and then boom the wing or the tail goes flying off but

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    until then it's mainly just the Shader doing the work and it's hitting and it's Rippling out and it's tearing apart and then it's transparent then you can see the the metal ribbing of the inside of the ship and then you know that that shows a more visual version of the wear and then so it's less memory because you don't have four different models per separate part of the ship you know anymore that just has to do with damage and it it creates a better visual um due to the way the Shader works so like I mean we're working on the pipeline all the time optimizing the tech coming up with new tech implementing that and uh so far it's looking really cool yeah it's it's very awesome and it's also a lot more satisfying to to see the damage happen where you shoot yes whereas previously that wasn't the case you could shoot the tip and then the the base of the piece would start to break off mhm um so thanks for joining us on this episode of 10 for the developers

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    I'm eln Bachelor Jr lead vehicle artist in LA with Patrick slno socio technical artist and thanks again to all the subscribers for making this show happen you guys rock take care hey guys thanks for watching um temp for the chairman uh if you guys would like to uh see more episodes go here if you guys would like to subscribe to our YouTube channel and always keep up to date with all our video content go here and uh if you guys would like to watch episodes around the verse go here please and I will see you in the [Applause] verse