Star Citizen: Around the Verse - Universal Interaction

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   hello and welcome to around the verse our weekly look at the development of Star Citizen I'm Eric Kiren Davis and I'm K to tomorrow the April monthly report will be shared with the community as you probably know by now the new monthly report is basically a collection of each Studio's updates over the past month yeah and we really look forward to sharing all of our progress with everyone and starting the cycle all over again here in Los Angeles next week but first let's go to wilmslow and see what they've been up to hi and welcome back again to the UK Studios for our latest updates on our progress over the last four weeks everyone is focused and busily working through all the tasks and bugs for squadron 42 and of course the anticipated 3.0 update for Star Citizen which we're very excited to get out to you all as soon as possible so let's kick off with the gameplay feature Sprints which we've been working on the

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   player interaction system has moved along quickly over the last few weeks further Improvement of the personal inner for system will allow you to select functionality which is not directly tied to a particular object examples of this would be selecting an emote or exiting your seat although there will be of course still be quicker ways of doing this you know through default actions for experienced players next up is the air traffic controller Sprint which deals with managing the flow of traffic to a location for both takeoffs and landing in particular is is responsible for assigning out and reserving a landing pad when a player wants to land as well as freeing up that Landing Pad once theyve landed and cleared the area similarly it will deal with reserving a landing pad and spawning a ship when the player wants to take off the initial stages of the implementation are now underway and we're working on the underline structure of how the system works we've been finishing up functionality on the character status system which includes

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   bringing the procedural breathing and soup punctures to final implementation once this is done we will focus on getting the system switched on by default in the game we are also working on pickup and carry which is a bit of a mashup between the player interaction system and our usable Sprint the usables were more concerned with getting the AI to interact with the objects in the environment whereas a player interaction system is more for the player UI to interact with the environment we're now bringing these two systems together to get the player to be able to pick up carry and then Place objects in our universe the conversation Tech has now completed the initial development of the subsumption tool and to create the conversations with is much more easily it's has been handed over to designers to prove it out by setting up all the different conversations they'll provide feedback to code on any needed further

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   improvements the audio team has been working on procedural planner audio processes including R&D and planning for systems to map and modify audio automatically also work is continuing on the audio propagation system the breathing system audio for the character status system and also a dialogue tool that's been called word up for weapon sound effects the ship weapon toolkit is in progress which includes reload sound effects for the Gallant the weapon tail refactor and multi-positional code support for weapons which will handle summing up the audio for many of the same weapons mounted to a single ship for ships the prospector audio is done with work on the gray cat and cutless black which is continuing [Music]

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   landing gear to the music department continues to work on the dynamically leaping cinematic ambient music system clean up dog fighting music logic the addition of tension system prototyping for the Planet Side procedural music and have also added more music to the launcher meanwhile the graphics team have been working on many separate pieces of tech this month the first is the integration of realtime lit volumetric fog from Lumbard which is going to be a huge boost for the lighting and environment art the render texure feature is progressing quickly and the initial version is in the UI team's hands to upgrade our 2D uis and will also soon have the feature usable

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   for 3D holographic projections to power of various holographic displays the real-time environment probee is nearing completion and allows fully Dynamic bounce light and Reflections on a planet where traditional light baking techniques are not possible the visual effects team have been working on several sprints atmospheric flight effects have have completed the first Sprint with a pass at planetary entry VFX the effect is controlled by speed and Atmospheric density values with the core functionality in place for this as well as engine Trails we're now merging these two sprints as we further Implement design and art feedback while optimizing and Bug fixing we have also been working on lighting entity effect improvements this is where we are attempting to create realistic lightning and other electrical type effects in other areas we've completed the first pass for the misk prospector

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   including fruster improvements in damage for weapons we have continued initial work on the APR Scourge rail gun including the charging and charged effects since finishing off the Bano Defender the coner team has been busily developing the origin 600i which is now in its final stages the weapons team have completed the preacher Distortion scaton and the apocalypse arm scattershot and made good Headway on the clus and wner lmg the UK ship team has been hard at work since since bringing you the javelin for Ship Shape the reclaimer has made a lot of progress since our last update on the exterior we've completed work on the hull and the team was excited to see the huge claw come together we've now moved into the damage phase of development splitting the mesh up and getting it ready to use the damage Tech on the interior we have fully fleshed out habitation and Tech

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   Decks as well as enormous Salvage processing room and now the team is working on finishing the Drone room engineering deck and cockpit work has also begun on the deric ships

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   so that design can start laying the groundwork for Mission specific scenarios encompassing ships and wreckage an initial batch of ships that include the Connie caterpillar sta era and the freelancer have been broken down to their structural elements and made to look destroyed material work is being pushed alongside to give the ships a far more deteriorated and aged look a wreckage component is also being worked on so that we have a library of nondescript ship parts that will be used to help embed and integrate deric scenarios into the environments the razor artwork is now complete with the ship and it's gone through a full damage pass some cool work has been done on breaking this one into pieces and we're really excited to show you the results currently lods are being finalized on

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    the hull and art are working closely with tech design to get this one flight ready the whole SE is also moving along nicely the whole mesh is now largely complete with maneuvering thrusters being Incorporated and polish work matching up the interior and exterior a detail pass is also ongoing adding all the finer details you've come to expect from our ships the interior has gone through blockout phase and is now well into art production by utilizing assets from other Mis ships we've been able to create spaces quickly and efficiently with the intention to use these across the whole series

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    the environment team are continuing to explore ways to create volumic forms in space with the graphics team we've been baking out simulations and doing some initial renders the surface outposts are finishing their interior visual benchmarks for engineering habitation and hydro ionics these will then be distributed to the various Outpost layouts and configurations the team is continuing to set dress light and polish these interior spaces to build character while also exploring exploring options for navigation and branding based on the law and fiction the truck stop space stations have moved into the final art phase so the team is busy building out the Shader library and working up some example pieces to final quality as it's a modular system we are also

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    continuing to refine the building set to explore potential build configurations which will make sure the set is as flexible as possible the animation team has been working on the cover AI work with the aim to improve all animation assets Beyond functional breathing State improvements are now in line with back-end code improvements this involves getting curved data out of Maya and into Data Forge which will allow for more more refined procedural breathing Curves in other areas the team started implementing multi-directional takedowns for killing enemies that are within close proximity to the player characters also there have been further improvements to to weapon setup and reloads across the board including the Devastator shotgun the arrowhead sniper rifle the Gallant laser rifle and the PSC ballistic SMG as well as me m improvements for pistol and stock

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    weapons finally the Derby Foundry team has been busy with face and body animations from 3.0 Mission givers and has handed over 500 facial animation files that are now ready to be implemented into Squadron 42 the motion capture team has tracked and solved almost 1,000 new body animations for various characters within the persistent Universe the team has also been working on new facial animations for shooting guns Steve Bender our animation director has been a great source of inspiration so expect to see new improved faces soon well that's our update for this month once again I hope you enjoyed seeing what we've been up to here in the UK supported as always by all the other studios around the globe thanks again for all your support and encouragement and for joining us on our journey to make Star Citizen become this incredible reality everyone on the team really appreciates the trust our community

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    places with us allowing us to create this amazing Universe Without You All Star Citizen would not be the reality it has become thank you take care and I look forward to seeing you in the verse you know it's it's really great to see

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    the progress made on the procedural breathing when stamina is introduced in 3.0 players are really going to be able to experience the consequences of their actions like puncturing someone's suit or running for long periods of time yes it's part of the detailed Universe building that we're implementing first with the roll out of 3.0 then testing the expanding Universe from there yeah and speaking of the 3.0 rollouts up next we see how the new interaction system influences every aspect of gameplay take a look the player interaction system touches everything it's a unified interaction with uh across first person uh the experience of shooting of shopping of uh looting when you go up to

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    screens and you interact with those Terminals and also when you get into your cockpit you FL ership around and being able to point at things you know with recess abandon actually opens up a lot of opportunity for interactions of uh I want to find out more about that and we can give back contextual clues of the things that you can do so the uh player interaction system um that we're starting to show here is the third version of the interaction system that we've had in the game um the original uh interaction system is what was in the game in Alpha 2.5 and previous and it was this kind of mish mash of different approaches to try to figure out what the

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    player was looking at and what they were trying to interact with in the game uh after that um we made an item 2.0 interaction system that tried to be more accurate about what you were interacting with and so it would use raycast and collision geometry to figure out the results um that had some issues as far as usability and so we're adding some new uh features onto the current item toono interaction system that makes it more contextually aware about what you're interacting with our old system uh it was basically the credit use system that basically you know we had the bounding box that had to be inside and then you can only really have one action tied to that and you know wasn't very descriptive it was just used right that's why it's kind kind of deemed as the use system to get the player

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    interaction system going it really required a pretty fundamental rewrite of uh the interface we would use to interact with objects within the game um for example for um first couple of years on the project we were so used to just having the big horrible use prompt on everything and uh really that sort of not only did that not look good but it also soort always felt clunky it was very hard to actually get in the right spot to use stuff so we had to really sort of come up with the design that gave the kind of level of detail that we wanted to uh uh put into the game for the users to actually be able to interact with

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    things um that present in the levels to the level of detail uh that would immerse them in the gaming experience so to really make all that happen the easiest way was to just basically write a lot of this from the ground up write it WR as a fresh new system as opposed to uh just going with the old used stuff I did a prototype of cargo uh some of the the earliest you know jankiest bits of that that we've done and as part of that I did a little section in in a freelancer that would detect that you brought a thing in and then showed up on a cargo manifest screen which was the first time that I made a a thing with a cursor on it eventually that turned into mfds and how

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    you interact with with that stuff in your the screens in your cockpit uh and then eventually became well that's should we should unify all of these you know exponentially growing input systems to something that actually has a uh a core to it this is a whole completely new system that's coming in because before you didn't have a cursor anything so it's very hard to tell you know what you're actually focusing on okay so this text is popping up um on this door but is it for this door that's to the left or to the to the right so by having the cursor and then being able to highlight the objects which is another thing in the interaction system that we do is we highlight the actual object that's going

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    to be uh engaged so um when you bring up the cursor and you have your cursor over the particular item that you're focusing on you'll get a highlight on the object so that's additional feedback um that is very useful for you to know as a player when you know you're you're using this interaction system it's like okay I'm here's the door that I'm focusing on and here's the actions that are tied to that I mean the whole idea is to make all interactions that you can have in the game uh extremely consistent so so uh for instance if you want to walk up and interact with a terminal screen that's the interaction system uh you can you know bring up a cursor uh click certain buttons uh that can be applied to uh something where it's like a kiosk where it's very it has a very in-depth

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    interaction where you have multiple buttons and filters and all all sorts of things or it can be used for like an elevator panel where you're selecting between floor one and floor two and something simple like that but also not just that's just screens but we can also use that system for uh picking up objects in the world or interacting with a physical control panel as we've as we've gone through iterations of the interaction system it hasn't changed too much philosophically uh it's always been about having the objects in the world sort of dictate how you interact with them in tandem with your current state uh We've demonstrated that a little bit with the battery uh demo that I think we showed in some of the previous footage

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    where having the battery in hand uh gives you contextually the interaction to put it into the radar where you could also manipulate the radar directly and open up the panel and all of those things but because your current state interacts with the world you get to have these uh more more natural interactions so the way the system would work on a regular basis is the user would uh press and hold F to go into the interaction mode they'd then be presented with a cursor that kind of lead the choice choice may also depend on the proximity of the player to the various objects and the way been facing and such

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    but really the cursor would kind of lead the action and then clicking the left Mouse button could actually trigger the trigger the action so that that lead would lead into sort of an animation of picking something up or um could be inspecting a particular object and we've also added various different sub modes such as like rather than a left click if you do a right click we can zoom in on an object to focus on it a bit more to get that extra detail so we can see what see what we're doing with it um so very much curse a led to give us the Precision but then the result that comes out would tend to be something that would be animated it was important to me

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    that you'd be able to interact anywhere on the screen for a couple of reasons one I just I really liked the way it felt and I I I sort of got sold on that really early and uh through iteration there were versions of it that were more and less successful but I'm I'm really quite fond of it myself but also again with the animation your ability to look around the world is limited by your animation by the physicality of your character and so if there's something that you need to interact with you need to be able to look at it and traditionally Shooters manipulate everything through a dot in the center of the screen which is you really all all of your interaction capability is a

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    dot in the center of the screen and that means that if you're going to interact with something you have to be able to get it to the center of the screen which isn't so hard when you can fudge the animations a bit but when you're being really faithful to what's actually happening uh it's important to be able to look with your eyes to the edges and uh you can reach anything that you can see so if there's interactions on your body of where you would put items to Stow or to uh access things about the seat that you're sitting in uh these things should always be available to you as well the way it works is it uses uh what we call a proximity query so it

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    checks what's around the player in um the local area to see what is interactable but then also uses some raycasts to figure out what the cursor is currently pointing at and then using that it can figure out what its best estimation is for what you're looking at right now what you were previously looking at and what is the best result for what you should interact with if you press the interact button immediately so it's basically this cursor that's kind of um browsing the available options to you that are available you know depending on what type of item or what type of action that you're going that you're going to invoke on the thing you're focusing on uh you'll get different cursors for example so you get a very specific feedback on okay this is a dial so your cursor might be a uh sort of like a dial icon that indicates that

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    you can rotate it uh or or it's a onscreen cursor you know that you're over a button or you know things like that so you get like that sort of feedback that you know U makes it much more intuitive than if let's say if you just we use one cursor for everything and there was no feedback building in was a challenge because it required some collaboration for one between the studios we had design here in La um the main engineering was spearheaded in the UK was support support here in the LA studio and one big part of it was how to get the sophistication of that behavior to work with just you know screen coordinates you have this cursor um you know the player's position how do we figure out given this information in 3D space what is the best Sol solution and

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    so you kind of have to do a little bit of math you have to do a little bit of testing to test it out and prototype and iterate um to see what actually works and the other issue is performance you know how do you do all these checks and how do you make it so smart and intelligent about what you want to do and what the right result is and still be performant the kind of challenges you get with this is with it being a system that's going to be regularly used for all manner of different object objects in all manner of different scenarios um you really need to get that level of Polish um added to the system to make it feel good so the player isn't there getting annoyed every time they want to use use an object and also we need to kind of cover all these various

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    different scenarios and situation situations the player finds themselves in so that they can the player can actually do what they want to do with these objects as opposed to being limited by A system that um that been in the cry engine previously that was just very kind of flat in uh in what you could do with an object it's it's really the kind of situations you'd find yourself in where whether it was just getting in a ship often you were just presented with the option to use the thing as opposed to like you know open me the door deploy me the ladder um choose to climb up the ladder actually start the engine you know these are all the things that we wanted to add but we

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    just didn't really have the system there so it was a real challenge to get that system in place that allowed us to do all these things that we want to do but also sort of to a nice polished level where that wouldn't feel frustrating or um tricky to do part of what's been so difficult about getting this system together has been that as we built the various systems of the game we had to make them in isolation so that they would function you know regardless of the fact that the rest of the game wasn't there yet so when we now that we have those things and we want to bring them all together consolidate them into something that's a bit more robust and sensical building that is is difficult because you have to take all these really

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    specific behaviors that are tailored to all these systems and create a generic interaction object that needs to sync with a generic usable object which needs to sync with a generic animation object and all these things have to they they have to be that generic because they need to touch so many parts of the game on top of that there's the fact that we have uh we have these interactions that we want to do that need to coexist with a wide variety of gameplay you could be in a seat uh chilling looking around uh browsing Moby glass you could be in the middle of a firefight uh you could be frantically

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    repairing something you could be cautiously exploring a derel there's all these wildly different experiences that this needs to accommodate it took a lot of uh experimentation to sort of feel out what allowed you that that degree of expression and Nuance without impinging too much on the other systems that were so far a field from what you were doing now for example the grabby hands system as it's been so notoriously labeled uh was an exploration of how do we uh create a system that accommodates all these different types of carried object objects and what does it mean for something to be in your possession in your inventory when we

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    don't really have an inventory where we have physical places on your body and how do you access those things now how do you uh put them into the world how can you get close enough to take them back and so those a lot of those questions uh have also extended into this system you know which has been a hub of all these these things like the the terminals as well there's some um real intelligence added to the system to um create that nice feel of um an intuitive kind of selection of the objects that uh that you close by with and what you what you're trying to interact with um if you don't add in some sort of intelligence there it can uh can lead to kind of frustrations as

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    to like clearly like clearly the player's trying to interact with a certain object that's sat in a particular position but because you know without the intelligence it might require a very specific um alignment of player to object and there might be multiple objects in one scene or close by so we have to sort of get add some kind of intelligence to uh try and figure out which object the player wants to uh wants to actually interact with whenever you interact with something in the world the way that that thing is designated as being interactable is using the item 2.0 component system so a designer would

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    create some kind of record for something that they want to be interactable it could be an elevator it could be a door and then they'll give it the interactable component and on the interactable component they Define the sets of interaction that can be used with it and then the interaction points that are on that entity where they want those interactions to be shown um one thing that the new interaction system adds is the ability to kind of have interactions on particular bones in sub regions of an entity whereas previously the old system made it where you kind of had these large bounding boxes and you would kind of get lost whenever you're trying to find things it wasn't clear so the the important thing about having these generic components is it gives us the building blocks to make things that are

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    Ultra bespoke the problem with bespoke content is that it requires a lot of painstaking maintenance because as you move forward things about your technology change things about the environment in which you've placed this content change and in order to keep it all working lock step in sync uh you have to be really Vigilant going through all those things and when you make your behaviors separated and modular and generic it makes it so that you can build things out more conceptually this thing is heavy but it can be picked up and it takes two hands so that's going to

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    affect what you can be holding at the time you try to interact with this thing it's going to affect what's going to be the result of throwing this thing thing what's going to be the result of it in Zerg having collisions with other things and those are fairly simple examples and already it starts to spiral out into all these possibilities of when you can get really specific in the content that you're making it's usually because the rest of it has been nailed down we'd use similar subsystems within the game such as uh such as the zone system zone system queries for example to uh figure out which objects you could interact with we're in the proximity of the player

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    we'd also use sort of standard uh U engine techniques such as raycasting and um other such things to actually determine which of these objects were best to use but really there was a whole another layer of logic added for this system them to give us the feel and the depth that we wanted to add for interactions so now there is a through line of input that you can interact with the whole game and uh it remains consistent it adds quite a lot of exciting possibilities it gives you the opportunity to have essentially a point-and-click adventure game in your shooter so all those wild bespoke interactions that adventure games are built out of are suddenly available for something that is so systemic such as

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    star CI I think the biggest change in player experience is uh kind of a a change in mindset when you're using it when you use the old interaction system um you're kind of fishing around and you're not sure what you're looking for when you use the new interaction system it's more about fluidly browsing what you can clearly see and it's a really big difference I think because you'll walk into a room you enter into this interaction mode and immediately you can tell Bas on this highlighting that's happening here's the options about what I can work with right now what do I want to do given these options and you can kind of float the cursor around see what's close see what the different available interactions for those different objects are it might be that oh I can turn on the engines or I can turn off the power do I want to do that

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    and so I think it's just a more enjoyable experience you also don't have to move so much so previously with the old interaction system if you wanted to go interact with this thing over here you'd have to go over there you have to position yourself you'd have to look it just takes more work to look at the different options whereas this you can kind of stay put a little bit more and kind of more fluidly guide yourself through the different options you don't have to do as much work to see what is all there the focus up to now has been on consolidating all of our our behaviors in Tech to get to the point where as we're building things we can sort of stitch them together conceptually and be able to get really specific with things and that frees us up to have all sorts of uh creative ideas and this is just the start so what

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    we're also working on in conjunction with this interaction system is something that we're that we're calling rendered texture uh and in the UI sense that will allow the UI to render properly within the rendering pipeline um it'll pick up all the post effects and it will actually look like it's in the world um so that's another thing that's going to really make this uh your interaction feel much more um in world you're part of the game experience the other thing you'll allow us to do is project onto curved surfaces you know which you know in terms of like a Sci-Fi setting you know that's probably one thing we will want to have so wherever your cursor is uh it it'll allow us to EAS easily negotiate where what you're actually over in terms of the UI so if you're over a button that's on a curved surface the position of your cursor will

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    you know it's easier to um map that onto a curv surface with a surender texture Tech so that's kind of an example of um all these different pieces that are going to be coming together to you know make a fulfilling game experience I think the one thing I would add is that this new interaction system is starting to come online we're starting to add new things but there's still a lot that can be added uh like every day we're thinking of new possibilities for how this interaction system can be used where have we used other Solutions in the game that may maybe can be replaced by this one thing for instance is the item Port system in the hangers that's kind of its own thing right now but it shouldn't be it's almost identical to what we're doing with this interaction system so it doesn't have the same benefits it's an opportunity for us to

44. 00:36:14

    unify the systems and gain the benefits from the new interaction system but beyond that there's even new more wild things that we could possibly do um try to bring more of maybe the ship Hut for instance into the interaction system in some parts to where maybe you could look at something say that displaying the ships that are in the area it might be possible to then select one of them and then find some information about it or communicate with that particular player using the new interaction system we can generate new interaction points and new interactions at runtime so it gives us a lot of flexibility with deciding you know what Behavior do we want to open up to the player with the benefit that it's all using one system to do it this game has been very iterative and I think that's one of the great things about it

45. 00:37:03

    um but certainly the interaction system is a great example of that we we kind of start with this uh stuff that we have in in cry engine and it works it's it's not like it was broken but it didn't have everything that we needed so we started adding stuff to it but it was buggy it wasn't performant it didn't do quite what we needed so we kept having to iterate and change and invent and make new things and now we're getting to this place where eventually after a lot of work we're bringing it all together and uh I'm really excited once we get it in the players hands and they can start to see all of these things coming together you know as the guys said the new system is just the groundwork for more realistic experiences here in Star Citizen it will continue to grow just like our universe yes and it will affect every aspect of the universe to create a

46. 00:37:51

    more immersive player experience yeah Oh and before we go I just want to remind the subscribers that they can fly the Drake Buccaneer as part of our ship of the month subscribers will also get an Icarus one hollow model as part of their flare this week and if you're interested in learning about our subscriber subscriber program check out the link in the description that's all for this episode of ATV we want to thank all of our backers for your continued support you're the reason we're able to create the best Dam space Sim ever yeah and we're also very grateful to all of our subscribers who make shows like this possible thank you and thanks for watching we'll see you around around the verse thank you for watching so if you want to

47. 00:38:55

    keep up with the latest and greatest and star Citi in Squadron 42 development please follow us on our social media channels see you soon