Star Citizen: Around the Verse - A Cyclone of Color

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:01

   killer this years to skip we got a blockade up at the asteroid field here over Roger Roger don't call me Roger over Dark Side of the Moon running Karen to win a Lancer Hollen or got a caterpillar killer with the belly full of bangers at a whole Depot and more we was heading for trouble than an asteroid belt but to skip away from OB Heller I said killer this here's a skipper bug of a paparella interstellar convo [Music] hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse I'm Shawn Tracy and I'm Chris Robbins in this week's updates we check in with the devs on the evolution of scramble races asteroid mining core tech and more but first let's see what's

2. 00:00:50

   been going on in the game yeah so as we've seen over the last few weeks our community loves to race and recently the Citizens Coffee Company hosted a huge contest spanning the entire Stanton system now for this particular event racers had to compete in starve fare not really a traditional racing ship is it well five organizations entered the joint task force provided security and a good time was had by all except the Starfarer that finished in last place they came in awfully hot and salty someone left yes well speaking of salty Jared and the rest of the star citizen community team join several developers in Cologne Germany to greet backers at Gamescom 2018 hey guys

3. 00:01:39

   Jared Tyler we're here at Gamescom 2018 Tyler we've been here all week was a pretty good week right it was an incredible week and the star citizen community just out dust themself every single event we go to now throughout the wreaths they interacted with star citizen fans gave out exclusive crusader industry pins coinciding with the mercury star runner manhunt and mixed with backers at four consecutive bars citizen events around town it looks like they have a lot of fun they also also hosted a special games condition of reversal verse it's up on a youtube channel now if you missed it now let's march on to development updates starting with the PU mission team their continuing work on scramble races honing this new mission type into

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   experiences that are equal parts harrowing and hilarious here's lead mission designer Luke Presley with more just a quick update on the scramble races we've prevented gravel air vehicles such as the dragon flying NOx from being able to fly in gravity which is really led to some exciting races this is because you get more time to focus on combat rather than avoiding obstacles we've also catered towards for more combat heavy focus by allowing you to steal the points collected by leaders of joint leaders when you kill them this leads to some really unpredictable races when you know the leaders can swing this way in that and we've also continued to improve a space races by crafting their own arenas inside the asteroid rink of

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   yellow this has finally got as bad density of obstacles but we were lacking and with what makes for ground races so much fun that's right when I first saw that I mean I'd really want to jump in and yeah yeah this stuff's pretty cool so yeah no I I think it should be fun to see people playing it and we're gonna be expanding that going forward as well checking back in on mining though the gameplay feature team has been working to get our current asteroid tech to spawn my noble asteroids with proper composition and appropriate materials so it's gonna be fun to see how asteroid mining compares with the planetside mechanic I suspect will be fairly similar and how it expands the mining experience overall which I suspect is

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   mostly about having more places to mind so Vega and for all you miners and aspiring filmmakers out there we have a contest going on right now calling for you all to make the ultimate prospector commercial yeah so we did one of these for the 600 I a few weeks ago and got some great content from our community and we can't wait to see what you all do with the prospective taking another look at Laura Ville here we see the city's gargantuan outer walls currently in an early design pass yeah so the devs are working a lot of different elements for Louisville from big pieces like those city walls to

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   smaller details that sell it as a living breathing kinetic space let us go to VFX artist Aaron Anderson to find out how these more subtle details are implemented into the environmental design so I've just been primarily working on the VFX for the industrial and downtown buildings for the Louisville city so just trying to get that very dirty gritty industrial environment and try to sell at the Hurston has so here's some steam I've been placing in just trying to get the smoke and steam rising from the environment trying to make it a bit more subtle rather than a bit over the top so you're not just engulfed in smoke when you come to land in Hurston placing lots of flashing lights on top of the roofs as well to try and sell it and lots of moving traffic to make it feel a bit

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   more like a moving city and feel a bit more alive when you're coming in to her stuff I'll show you what it looks like at night I was a distant shot this feels a bit more alive from a distance when you come in to land in Hurston becoming denounced something like this the main challenge is that it's a prefab system so it's just try not to make it so repetitive as it's trying to dot some effects around rather than just being one big smoke plume around the whole city yeah I feel like the city is coming on pretty well as a whole it's a bit more alive and a bit more bit more fun and you're gonna come to land and see the landing zone it's cool to see all those little details getting in there it will be a

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   lot more I know well I know those being lot more since I'm sitting on some reviews but sure I really love how it looks at night that's richer at the transition night it's quite cool sticking with environmental design code improvements for the oceans and bodies of water that will be found on the planets and moons are also being worked on as the planetary feature team gets these environments ready for Hurston they're adding functionality that lets the artist tweak the wave strength colors opacity of the water and how the ocean interacts with the beach line and terrain they're also looking into future components that will allow for the global weather system to influence the way oceans behave yeah that's gonna be actually pretty cool super exciting notice a bit ways off but oh that's actually one of our only things that I'm most excited to have dynamic weather systems on planets so the ship art team has been working on revising and improving new liveries for the tumbrel cyclones variants adding a welcome pop

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    of color for the off-road sets and here we see we're continuing on the lower decks of the 890 jump checking in on the audio team let's listen to the first sound effects pass for the karna assault rifle from Cass stock arms we're hearing early work on the rapid burst and charge firing modes you can hear a strong mechanical element in the sound that emphasizes the low-tech nature of the gun and particular attention is being put into getting the right sound and timing for all the small moving parts within the weapons body so much respect for their weapons let's

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    go boys ya animation map well the charging animation is accompanied by a complex sound that grows and evolves while you hold the trigger the objective here is to create an intuitive sound progression that clearly tells the player how charged the gun actually is alright well let's keep the demo train rolling - - and check in with director of graphics engineering Alistair Brown for a look at some new tools that will make level design a much smoother process where rendering is concerned so this one for the graphics team has been working on some new coloring features for the renderer that should hopefully give us some nice performance boosts in both the PU and squadron I'll give you a quick demo of what we're talking about so what the artists currently do when they have a

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    level like this which is the Idris hangar they have to chop up each room into small sections here like you see and these are typically boxes or other simple primitive shapes and the renderer uses these to work out which rooms should be visible and which rooms we need to render and you can see here the highlighted rooms are the ones that will actually be rendered it gives us a huge performance saving we can here see here that we barely have to render any rooms in the address women outside of it only the ones that have large windows on them however the simple shapes we have to use is really limiting for the artists especially when you have such a complicated ship and especially when they have to pack them in so tightly inside the hole so one of the improvements we've made is to allow them to have overlapping shapes and if we can show you how important this is for us we have sections like this here where we

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    have this overlapping area that sticks out into the hangar and previously what the artist had to do is to chop this not out the windows where they would like to but earlier into the room and this is causing some quite complicated issues for the artists they end up having to duplicate geometry and lights and and cut things along this border to make the culling work efficiently and for the new sir they can now put the boundaries between the rooms exactly on where they at all boundary is in this case in this glass I got an example of this over here so this is the new setup for this area where you can see that the windows correctly the walls are diagonal and the windows correctly stupa Trude into the hangar so these new culling features should really give us a nice performance boost and both the PU and squadron 42 and be in your hand soon I think it's

14. 00:10:27

    pretty cool and I think it'll help for the artists because I know they've always struggled trying to solve the puzzle of getting the VIS areas you know visible or not hi glitching yep I think people have seen as spots demo or occasionally when they've been playing the game and various releases there'll be places where you'll walk to a certain area and all of a sudden everything just everything disappears and that's partly because it's not easy for them set up viz area so being able to actually have shapes that represent the areas accurately accurately well I think really helped out and helped them solve the puzzles so good definitely an ally will give us nice stuff - if we're gonna improve performance and be able to just setup better going yeah so finally we have some big citizencon news if you head to the website you'll be able to see that we've added details about the

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    presentation schedule and we've really sort of expanded the show this year so we have two separate tracks as opposed to the one track that we have last time so it's much more like a GDC or a con I mean we've basically doubled it doubled they're over doubled it in size there's a lot more going into it there's a whole bunch of really cool in fiction stuff we're doing as well so I'm really excited by it I'm excited by the presentations so I think it's gonna be certainly something that you definitely want to come visit and in person because there's also some goodies we're giving you if you come in person and tickets are back on sale mm-hmm that's right we have a handful of premium tickets available a digital streaming option for those of you who can't make it in person and I think the digital streaming up should also get some visual goodies get some digital goodies so everybody's getting

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    goodies even new junior copilot tickets or younger star citizens can attend yeah now that actually gonna be kind of nice because I know some of the games conchos we've done and the citizen conscious cuz we've done them in sort of you know nightclub venues if their insurance doesn't let them have underage people in but the long center is a family of any one of the reasons why we chose it so we can have younger folks come if you know with their parents that'd be great so you can check out all the details on the site and we've provided a handy link down here in the episode description to get there and for even more on citizencon to a ninja reverse the verse live tomorrow back on twitch yes do that yeah thanks to our subscribers for sponsoring the shows and thanks to all our backers

17. 00:12:50

    for obviously making all this possible so alright and until next time we'll see you around the verse thanks for watching for the latest and greatest in star citizen 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