Star Citizen: Around the Verse - All Systems Argo | 3.4 Ep. 6

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] w whether it's sunsets or Finish Lines

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   you're chasing choose tumbrl to get you there tumbrl RC's improved handling and modified controlled intake system provide you all the power you need just when you need it tumbril RC get in front of it hello and welcome to another episode of around the verse I'm Sean Tracy and I'm Josh Herman that was the winning entry in our recent tumbril Cyclone commercial contest as always there were a ton of great submissions it's true you can check them all out right now on Spectrum awesome today we'll dive into the flowing ground traffic of AR Corp and I hear there's news about a new vehicle in Star Citizen it's true we'll jump into that in a second but first the

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   exciting world of asset optimization using layer Blends you know it's not always about the flashy stuff in game development we're constantly striving for ways to make our work as efficient as possible and we've recently implemented a way to improve performance with all our characters that's true and better character performance means more characters on screen at a time yeah it means more work for you guys too it's true well that's good here's for Stefan with more recently here in La we did a training seminar um basically we took all the artists and walk through the process of performance and walk through what exactly causes bad performance and how to get good performance one of these things is completely crucial to rendering objects is draw calls you need them to draw all the objects to the screen so it's something that you have

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   to keep count of in order to ensure that you have the best performance possible the characters use what's called a layer blend Shader and a layer Shader so the layer Shader is essentially a list of materials textures similar to in Photoshop how you have different layers that get stacked up the layer blend Shader is what Blends all of these layers together so the reason that's beneficial is the characters get to use these two shaders together and we can take all of these different sub IDs and collapse them all together which normally every layer would be a separate draw call so instead of the clothing being 10 12 15 draw calls it's just one one of the reasons is important to do the performance and the profiling now uh for the draw calls is because later on in the development process you have a

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   lot more assets and if you train the artist they'll start making the assets correct now which will be less assets we have to optimize in the future so that kind of empowers the character artists to be in control of their own assets and ensure that they're making not only the best looking asset possible but an asset that will perform the best of its complexity which is a huge benefit um across all disciplines because having better optimized characters increases the memory pull and the draw call pull for other assets such as ships and environments because everything kind of works together in regards to an overall performance so what's great about having the opportunity to give this training session is it's not always about refining our tools but it's also about educating our internal staff to ensure that everything from the create of the

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   art to the way that it draws on screen is correct and is as optimal and gorgeous as possible so there wasn't really new technology per se unless Forest you know giving a training is new technology it's more of like a like a training initiative um and that's really important because we've got you know some mid and some Junior guys that are coming up in the industry you know it might be their first product and generally a lot of these guys get shown how to do a thing but they don't really know why um and this just is something that's is good for their Career Development and everything because yeah our our Tempo is really really high so we can't really feed in you know how many different polyes you got to use how many different draw calls you going to do how many different materials you going to do for that particular character do you want to use a shadow proxy do you want to use how about the new vehicle oh I hear that's from a manufacturer we haven't heard from in a

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   while oh mysterious let's go to vehicle pipeline director John crew and concept artist Sarah MCA to find out what draw cost the Aro SRV is a entrylevel uh single man uh search recovery vehicle that primarily focuses around using tractor beams so it's our first ship that has dedicated tractor beam functionalities it's main gameplay feature lots of other ships do have tractor beams but they're sort of ancillary for helping do their their primary function but it's a very collaborative ship um obviously is a recovery ship you need someone else to be recovered if there's not players requesting this we'll have NPC missions to accept and take on so there there will always be something to do whether it's NPC or players but you can use it as a group for some of those other gameplay Loops like mining or Salvage to help with those the SRV it's its sole

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   focus is purely around its tractor beam and recovering other vehicles for me I've never really I suppose done anything quite like this which is quite exciting it's so versatile and you don't necessarily have to pull ships either you can pull cargo as well so with that in mind I had to make the tractor beam quite versatile in terms of its movement and also it's radius of traction the SRV has quite a large power plant to to power the tractor be which is quite a a power hungry device obviously masses vary hugely depending on planets and what car goes inside the ship but we envisage that the default operating range to be around the cutless up to perhaps the constellation depending on how it's loaded but for a single SRV cutlasses and that area should be what

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   you're able to recover yourself if there's more than one of you you can pull it together together to be able to maneuver larger ships same for the reverse for smaller you might be able to pick up a couple of smaller Vehicles sort of just Clump them up and take them together the considerations that went into mainly the the arms of this SRV is they had to be quite versatile and they also had to move quite a significant amount so that it didn't matter where you were where or got stuck these arms and this tractor pad could hone in and pull you up so I had to make sure that this back section had enough room for these arms to grab you essentially but I also wanted to make it look really like grounded as well like like Cool Tech and with a bit of cool hard surface as well

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    just thrown in as I say I looked at real life to just see the range of movement particularly uh as well wrists I think the human body is really good to see how flexible uh how flexible you are because you know you've got this great degree of movement in your own body I think Machinery as well as always trying to imitate parts of the human body which is what I thought is in this toe arm you want this flexibility in order to doesn't matter where you are or you're stuck you've got this degree of movement that allows you to just track wherever you need to to be and then hone in on it and pull it up so I just look at real life nature and and also Robotics and try to ground it in reality but also

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    give it the Sci-Fi twist that you know is is really cool and looks really feasible we picked Argo for this ship because we wanted to expand the Argo range we could have picked misk or some of the other more industrial ships but Argo we've only got really the mpuv as the sole ship there and we wanted to build that line up so in future we can put other ships in there and we have a a wider range of Concepts to pull from the Argo SRV is available to everyone tomorrow so head to the RSI website for more details on Friday there's also a special edition Super Hornet heartseeker available just in time to celebrate Valentine's Day it's a custom Loadout with a thematically appropriate skin while you're checking that out you can also take a look at the winners and all the great entries of our be my Valentine card contest yeah that's right we

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    challenge the community to design Star Citizen Valentine's and as usual the results were impressive yeah I'm going to print some of these out and use them my Valentine is going to be stoked I sure will Steve's going to be upset undoubtedly now let's dive into the ground traffic of art Corp where the environment art team is working on the ways to make this planet's surface look populated and busy here's Daniel Harris with details I've been working on the traffic tests and it's mainly about getting this sort of low-level very small scale traffic along the city streets so at the moment this feature is in the early stages we've done some initial testing very simple geometry very simple uh textures and we just want to get the effect in and see how it works in the game because it sort of adds a bit more interest to the city it's not static you know there's

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    movement and you can fly around and you can sort of spot these distant lights and distant specs of glow as you fly through the city and I think it just gives you the sense that you're in a real city which I think is kind of important and it's done in a simple way but it's quite effective because we can simply have a texture that Scrolls across some geometry allowing us to do simple roads and paths through the city the traffic itself is sort of staggered up and down so we can can add some variation in the heights this allows us to add some simple glows that add a sense of scale and interest as a player flies over the city well the traffic itself you wouldn't necessarily see it from space it would be from quite far up but it would be more sort of in atmosphere I'd imagine and then you'd sort of see it down up until the no fly zone and then you know that would be where you'd see it clearest I guess it's just a small scale effect but I think it it helps sell the uh the city as you fly

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    through thanks Daniel well that's all for us this week if you haven't read January's monthly report head to the website for the skinny on what all our Studios have been working and tune in to twitch.tv/ starcitizen tomorrow at 10: a.m. Pacific for a new episode of reverse the verse live where Jared talks shop with the audio team sounds like a good time we're also currently working on revamping the selection of physical merchandise in our online store and we want your input yeah we do so head to Spectrum and let us know what you think would make the best additions to our merch offerings and thanks to our subscribers for their continued sponsorship and thanks of course to all the backers from making our games possible so until next time we'll see you around the verse thanks for watching for the latest

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    and greatest in Star CS in a 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. Roberts Space industries.com thank you very much for watching