CitizenCon 2953: Navigating The Universe

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:13

   [Music] how you doing Los Angeles boy there's a lot of you here it's great to see you hi my name's David but everyone calls me bone don't don't ask or maybe ask me later so my job is to oversee all the uh technical implementation of the UI across the company and if I'm lucky I get to do some programming from time to time a previous citizen con uh one In the Flesh uh in Manchester I talked

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   about UI Tech with my um friend and colleague Zan BN and we were making new tools and Technology to help our developers with uh to develop their UI so that was a few years ago now and now I'm really privileged to share with you how this technology has been utilized by our talented designers to help improve your experience in the verse so along with some of my UI friends that are hidden out the back there would like to show you some of these improvements which are going to help you the players navigate the Star Citizen universe

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   so why are we doing this well star is big really big there's so many unique places massive planets moons space stations rest stops you know there's just loads of places to explore we have a huge range of spaceships of all shapes and sizes and there's enormous amount of things to do and see and people to meet and all this can be shared with friends online and as we've seen today as our amazing online technology grows takes great leaks and our online Play account grows the possib

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   possibilities become almost endless so how are we going to make sense of all this H right well one of the main ways we do this is with either user interface or UI for short uh well that's uh where we come in fortunately being the UI guys and we do this in loads of ways that you see already whether it's uh your vehicle mfds or the hood or the kiosks U where you get your spaceship or you trade Commodities or buy weapons and all manner of uh diagetic uis that you see diagetic meaning like things in the world that you can interact with but our first real

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   opportunity is through the helmet visor display now the visor display gives you Vital Information about your status and the environment around you but this V this this display has gone through many iterations over the years and it's been built upon and adapted and um I don't know if who remembers Arena Commander 1.0 that came out that came out about a year after I started um which was primly space combat and racing so the the visor was geared towards that and then it evolved with our first Adventures into the online

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   universe and as all the features get added and all these new things the visor grows and we put things on it to show you know uh different statuses and like tells you all about what's going on but with all this Evolution we sometimes lose focus there's so much we need to know and when we need to know it is important so how do we zero in on what's important and at what time so leaning on this technology that Zane and I and the UI Tech Team wrote a few years ago we trying to take a smart smarter perspective and rework the visor for you

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   so I'm not going to tell you about that I'm going to invite Simon bery onto the stage and he can tell you more about it Simon on this hey everybody okay so Star Citizen as you know is a big project which has evolved over its lifetime early on in the project we added the visor which is the display you see on your helmet when you're walking around the universe in first person because the game is always expanding we often add new gameplay features and with those come new UI the various teams slotted pieces into what whatever Place made sense at the time but this eventually M the view became

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   very complex as you can see the current live UI can get very cluttered we have lots of information competing for your attention so you don't always know where to look and sometimes the overlaps can make things difficult to read so as you can probably tell the UI team wanted to do a redesign we wanted to improve the player's experience by presenting the important information in a clear way we also needed to create a new framework that supports all the existing features and allows us to add more in future and finally we wanted to bring the visuals up to the high standard we're setting for squadron 42 and soon the star czm persistent universe so how do we go about that I believe user interface should always be

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   a collaboration with the teams who build the underlying features so we worked closely with them on a new layout keeping some pieces combining others and maybe getting rid of a few once we'd figured out the design we built a new framework using our 3D UI system and then we worked closely with the various g game teams to take all that complex data that existed before and hook it up to the new user interface when we designed player facing UI we often tried to start with the worst case first so we can see everything we have to deal with it was important for us to keep the central area as clear as possible to make it easier for you to see the underlying game we designed a set of regions to that attach to the different parts of the view and with each of those we have a set of widgets that can show hide and

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    stack when you need them so I've told you about everything we wanted to achieve but wouldn't it be great to see it in game does anybody here want to see a live [Applause] demonstration good I was hoping you'd say that otherwise it would have been a very short demo okay so we're going to show you some of our new UI running live in the game everything everything you see is in real time but I have to tell you we've created a special Mission just for the show which is a little different to what you see in the live game okay so as you can see bones driving um I'm going to say Bon's name a lot and the other guys too so it's probably the most times you'll hear that

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    in any presentation okay welcome to the orison pro platform you may have spotted it ear you may have spotted it earlier but today is the first time we've shown the new visor we developed and tested in Squadron 42 but you'll be happy to know all the UI you see today is going to make its way to Star Citizen but this is secret uee Navy Tech so we'll give it a different look for the persistent universe as you can see the display is very clean by default many of the elements are contextual meaning they appear when you need them to avoid cluttering on the screen we've also temporarily hidden a couple of things so we can focus on them later in this demo okay bone let's move into the scene please all right okay when we get a new Mission

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    objective it appears in the top right of the screen and you can see that our first mission is to repair a radiation leak we've done a major overhaul of the augmented reality marker system so we can follow the yellow on screen marker to get to our objective at the top of the screen you'll also see the compass okay bone let's head towards the objective we were already we were already happy with the way the player status widgets worked showing you contextual information about your character and environment so we've given them some visual polish and added a few new ones the environmental radiation here is quite High and over time it will wear down our suit and damage the

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    player looks like we can see the source of the radiation there I think somebody's damaged a pipe so how are we going to fix it if we were in space we could use a salvage and repair ship luckily uee have some Advanced portable Tech bone please equip the military multi-tool the military multitool from Squadron 42 has various modes one of one of which gives us the ability to salvage and Repair on while on foot okay bone let's use the multi-tool to repair that pipe okay right we can see at the bottom left of the screen the radiation levels

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    are decreasing so let's head into the scene go bone let's walk forwards a bit okay now we fix the damage we need to find the enemies that caused it while we're on the way you'll notice that the on fooot emissions at the top of the screen we're emitting infrared electromagnetic radiation and also sound if any of these go higher than the background levels it will be easier for the enemies to detect us let's take a look at the bad guys bone as part of the emissions and radar Tech we also have the ability to scan while we're on foot if we tap the button we can do a quick scan to reveal

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    everything to reveal info about anything that's in our in our view currently okay bone let's do a quick scan this highlights whatever is in our line of sight there's also some risk and reward to the scanning system by holding the button we can charge our scanner and this RS this reveals enemies through walls using a more powerful wave but it does cause a spike in our emissions which makes us easier to detect okay let's do a charge scan please bone okay we can also see the augmented reality box outs which give us a summary of what we've

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    detected okay let's have a look at our weapons let's get the BN out gun out bone okay we wanted to help the player see their equipment during combat so we upgraded the weapons display as well as the ammo in the gun and the spare mags in their pockets we also now show The Players explosives and Med pens okay let's fight the bud guys there you can see our new explosives marker designed to help you spot deadly grenades mines and missiles more easily I got you

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    cover do it okay golden B success okay uh there's no more hostiles nearby by so let's take a moment to talk about mobiglass the mobiglass is the Star Citizen equivalent of your smartphone it has various apps that hook into the gameplay systems like all the UI we're showing you today we wanted to redesign it with

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    the player's usability in mind to make it look good and also L lay the groundwork for future expansion uh let's bring up the mobiglass please bone pretty cool huh we've redesigned the interface to give a smoother user experience we've overhauled the visuals as you can see to make it feel more threedimensional and holographic this is actually a sneak peek of the uee military mobiglass we've created for squadron 42 this verion has a focus selection of apps and we're going to expand on that when we bring the M Glass to the Star Citizen persistent Universe we'll also

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    have more of a smartphone feel in the Pu with a wider range of apps okay let's briefly talk about this home screen it gives us an overview of our health the environment and even our ship we can also check our mission objective okay so that's enough about the mobiglass uh we've got some more really cool UI just around the corner and to tell you a bit more about that is the very talented Zan bienen throughout human history as we have ventured towards the Allure of the unknown we have used craphy as a key

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    component to help shape our understanding and make sense of the world around us without these systems in place to catalog our experiences and to chart our Journeys We Are Forever lost amidst our own environment and we are just running around aimlessly this is why it is super important that you as citizens of our ever growing ever pers ever evolving persistent Universe are equipped with the tools necessary to make your Ventures meaningful so with that said I want to show you something extremely that I think is extremely cool so bone our next OB objective is to go to the map kiosk and download a

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    terminal let's go ahead and activate it what you see on screen zoom out a bit what you see on screen is a fully live 3D representation of the environment that we are in you can see callouts of the various default points of interest you can Pan the map around you can rotate it and you can even cycle the floors that you're on to isolate the visuals of the floor that you're on so our current objective it's much more interesting if we can actually take this on the go so let's download it to our data

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    Bank as you'll notice we now have the representation of the environment in our in the upper left corner of our visor now the thing that's really interesting to not at this point is not all environments will have such a convenient kiosk available you may encounter rundown settlements or you might come across a cave that no one else has ever set foot on before what will happen in this instance is your radar will incrementally update your map and it will incrementally reveal uh your environment and save that

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    to your datab bank so you kind of reveal incrementally so the this map what we see in the upper left uh corner of our visor is not really just a map what it really is is actually data it's our radar and we can see contacts on our radar as we scan and it's basically uh what we have available in in store stored in our data bank so because we have the the location data saved to our data Bank we can obviously access that via our mob glass so let's go ahead and pull it up in our mob glass because this is going to get really interesting

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    so bone I would like you to cycle the between the different floors for us please so you can see this luring transition between the different floors and marker call outs of our objective and also where we are I would like to talk a little bit about the tech behind this what you're seeing is not a pre-baked asset and I want to reiterate that because all of our D all of our environments can be very Dynamic and they can change they can take damage perhaps uh economic shifts might cause changes in the environment and we can't export a totally custom assets um so what we've done is we

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    collaborated with our Graphics team to enable us to render the environment in this way and what it is is we're actually wh listing objects that we render and excluding everything that we don't need to render so in our level markup we basically have the designers and artists mark up only the bits that are necessary for the map this lets us have a very compelling visual but without much of the cost so I think what we can do at this point what I want to show you is something very interesting so we might look around on this map and note

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    down certain areas that might look interesting that we might want to revisit later we can see some doors on this map and these doors are various are entities that are called out on the map and they may change state so they're can be some doors which have a locked state which they will display red and doors that are open will be green and there are other entity call outs that can happen in our map so let's go ahead and find a location to to put down a pin please maybe that one maybe that door looks

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    interesting press T so what we can do is set a marker and we can customize we can customize the details of that marker now what you'll notice as well is as we set markers there's metadata that is encoded into each of these markers on top of the customized name that we can specif ify so we can Mark as many markers as we want in this map and these are all saved to our data bank and we can sh eventually share these markers and even sell these markers on a on the market so the thing about this we can't really talk about markers without going without mentioning

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    data running so you might specialize in Exploration whereas perhaps a minor might specialize in the equipment and they make make investments in their equipment so you as an Explorer might be in the business of going around and exploring and finding locations that are very valuable to other professions and the role of these markers are very important in uh uh coming up with the data and um yeah so it's very important we can cut basically when you name your markers

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    you can you can make it as uh um maybe obvious or you can leave it a mystery so you'll have uh when you sell it on the market you you could get rated for or how accurate the data is so the other thing is we have a mission objective as well and it would be very nice to be able to route to that mission objective how do we get there that is another purpose of the map is basically navigating and and letting us know the way towards that objective towards a destination so let's go ahead and plot a route to this objective so we can see a line being drawn from

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    where we are up the stairs to our destination and where we want to go so you will no longer be lost amidst all of our super complex environments and what's worth mentioning at this at this this point and what's really cool is this under the hood is actually utilizing another piece of tech AI pathf finding and so what that allows us to do is leverage other existing Tech to basically uh they it does all the heavy lifting we just make it look pretty so because of that there are certain cases where the path

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    might be blocked it might have a locked door or there might be a fire uh that is in our way the AI path finding will account for that it will go through doors it will handle elevators and it will handle fires lock doors and it will just handle everything so that is an example of sort of a piece of tech that we've leveraged under the Hood to help us achieve this goal so one last thing we can do at the moment is we want to make sure we want to ensure that there are no more

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    hostiles in our way as we make our way to our objective so what we can do is we can send out a ping bone if you sound out a ping please so the scanning will also be represented in the map in the same in the same fashion as it is when you're in fps so we know that there's no more hostiles let's go ahead and make our way to our objective as you can see in the upper left corner we now have the route line represented our destination and the the distance it takes to get there as we Traverse this path the path automatically updates and if you deviate from that path it will recalculate the route you

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    need to get to your destination so there's our buddy flying in so we'll make our way up to the Carrick here to the right you'll also notice the pin that we've laid down as well as our marker objective called out on the map and as you'll notice as we head up the stairs the floor will be done will dynamically change as you head up the stairs if we can if we can get past this first B we don't trip

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    up so as we make our way into the carriot it's not just environments or caves or cities we can represent the ship on our interior map and it's totally seamless as you transition between the two so let's go ahead and pull up our mobiglass again and get a wider view of our ship so we are now on the technical deck but we can also see the other floors if you Traverse the floors bone just to demonstrate it here's our cartography deck down

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    one and our habitation deck so you will have noticed noticed from a previous presentation that this was very similar looking right it's utilizing our Tech so not only will this benefit you as a player but it also benefits us as developers because we generalize this system to so that other developers can leverage our map to create compelling so other teams can leverage our Tech and we Leverage The Tech from other teams and it's a circle of life and I think that's just too

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    cool for school so we've been talking about environments cities representing ships on our map maybe Planet terrain these are quite I mean our our universe is quite big right that's only a small fraction of what our universe is what if what if what happens have we have we tried this have we what happens if we just just take your mouse wheel and just zoom out a little bit

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    keep going Z keep zooming out all the way out all the way out let's go let's go so it's not just the interior map it's not just the radar it is the map it is one single unified system just across different scales and I want at this point we are above Crusader and at this point I want to invite Emily Hansen onto the stage to talk about the map as seen at this scale thank you very much everybody hello assistant con are you

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    ready for this B do you want to click on the marker as you all suspected this is the star I'm so excited to be here today to reveal this to you all I hope you're excited too now I think we all know the current star needed a bit of work and we've done that now mapping the universe is no easy task but we've taken some big steps

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    forward with this upgrade to make it so much easier for you to navigate the Stars before we dive into the details let's just take a second to admire Crusader's New Look bone why didn't you take a look much like the interior map the star map is holographic and this lets us add some cool interference effects and details to our plan Planet textures you can also see our improved player marker and that we're currently at orison the player and location markers have merged at this scale because they're so close together the player marker takes priority which is why the marker displays the player icon and color by smartly merging with bigger points of

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    interest at larger scales the player marker always remains visible to you you'll always know where you are relative to points of interest near and far so is everyone ready to see more bone let's take the step back button that's the one on the right over here so we can see take a look at Crusader and all of its moons yeah so here we are Crusader moons orbits you can also see that labels have received a major visual update then our fully 3D and this gives them a really cool perspective most labels are aligned

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    to the galactic plane and they rotate with the map bone give the map a spin phone can you still pass the Horizon please Co when we do this the labels flip so you can always read them clearly labels for City markers and outposts work a little bit differently bone let's double click on selling now to focus on it surface labels face the camera and

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    appear when they're in the central part of the planet reducing onscreen clutter bone want to show this in action markers on the far side of the Planet fade out so they don't take Focus From the locations you currently care more about on the near side of the planet bone can you double click on one of the points of interest as we selected this marker its label will stay visible at all angles so far we've showed you that you can use buttons and double clicking to jump to objects you're interested in but wouldn't it be nice if you could also freely Zoom out and into locations shall

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    we try it bone let's zoom out until we can see Crusader we wanted to ensure you have freedom to move around but this flexibility requires us to be really careful about how and when markers appear markers need to disappear when they get too small but also stay visible when they're still relevant to your view this isn't simple because objects in a solar system are vastly different sizes think about the size of a star versus a planet versus you the player you're kind of small compared to a star right our solution is a Technique we

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    call cosmetic scaling this allows us to draw a marker at its real size when we are close to it and artificially increase its size as we zoom out out until we reach the point where it collapses into larger points of interest hierarchy you can see this in action here there's no way Crusader and its moons are this size at this scale in reality they've been scaled up massively so you can see see them bone let's zo out a bit more so we can see the moons disappear you you can also start to see Crusaders orbit lineing around the sun here but before we go back to before we move on to that let's Zoom back in so we

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    can see everything come back as we get closer as well as Zoom you can also pan around the map unrestricted bone feel free to have a quick look around as as we draw closer to a marker the cursor automatically magnetizes to it this ensures you never lose track of what you're trying to view when you zoom in no more zooming in on empty space bone let's use this technique to take a closer look at Yaya the magnetic cursor does not

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    require us to click on markers keep zooming in bone can you keep zooming in thank you you can see that the surface markers appear without us needing to select Yer itself imagine how much easier finding that Outpost will be now Crusader as you all know isn't all there is though got a pretty big uh Universe out here do you want to see some more let's have a look at the location further appeals can we just pant a kopy maybe bone let's give that a try yeah uh I think we're getting lost

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    pretty sure we can all disagree this might not be the best strategy so what can we do bone let's try clicking on the middle button over here this returns us to our previously selected marker as I mentioned we did not select Yaya so we've gone back to selling so now we know where we are that's a step in the right direction but we're still not at KI so we need to find a different way bone could you take a step could you use the step back button until we can see the whole solar system please there it is I think kopy is one of microtex moons

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    so if we double click on that bone we should be able to see it and there it is bone let's pan to it and then zoom in so we can see that magnetic cursor in action again can you zoom in B thank you it's so cool to see more of our moons and planets and how different they all look okay so this is great but what if I hadn't already known where kiai was surely there's a faster way we've got you we've provided a dropdown that lists the points of interest in the solar system

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    phone want to extand it now go for a little bit we're actively working on ways to improve the way this list is presented to you to make it even easier to find what you're looking for and yes this will include search functionality but for now bone let's use this to go to Ariel I absolutely love zooming around on this map bone want to find area 18

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    for me so Area 18 is currently on the dark side of the planet it seems of course it's not just planets and moons bone how about we take a look at security post carea it's quite a long way down isn't it this is where the upcoming search will really come and useful phone want to zoom in a little and show off our holographic model of station B can you also um drop the drop

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    down again please thank you as you may have noticed the recent list in the dropdown populates as you click on locations in the list it will remember your three most recent selections so you can use this to quickly return to places in case you want to check something else again bone let's use this to go back to aeriel Okay so we've done a lot of exploring I think it's time that we head back we could do this by selecting orison from the list but we also have our own marker that we can take advantage of here the eagle eyed amongst you may have noticed that the player marker clamps to the edge of the map keeping it visible to you no matter how

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    far away you go to get back to our position we could double click that marker or we could click the first of the navigation buttons to zoom straight there now I'm sure many of you have been wondering if we can go back to our Carrick map from the star map just like how we got here from the carrot map just a few minutes ago so let's see what happens when we focus on our player marker go ahead bone all right so yeah here's our car

53. 00:43:54

    again being able to simply Zoom between these map contexts let you draw meaningful connections between what's on the ground and what's in the skies like never before bone just for fun let's Zoom all the way back out so we can see the entire Stanton solar system it's just so cool to watch the verse open up before our eyes with all these new possibilities for moving around the star map you should never find yourself lost again the controls are so much smoother and easier to use than the star map you're all used to as I hope bone agrees knowing that what we've shown here today is just the

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    beginning for the upgraded star map you saw pinning in the local map and we'll add this to the star map before you get it just imagine being able to mark something interesting you find out there in the verse and then sharing that location with friends just like Zane said exploration is about to get a lot more interesting and we're doing everything we can to ensure the star map is your brightest window to the Stars yet and now let's welcome our Intrepid demo driver bone back to the stage thanks

55. 00:45:30

    Emily thanks a lot so we're really really excited about getting all these features into your hands and of the players of Star Citizen and Squadron 42 we know they're going to make a huge difference to the way you make your way around the universe so let's just quickly review what we've seen we've rebuilt the visor display to give you a better understanding of the environment around you with a new Mini map with integrated radar and ping and it will help you find a way around there's a new mobiglass coming

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    with its Sleek new design we're improving all the existing apps and we're going to develop some new ones too along the way so we got a video now and then Des our interior map technology which will truly help you understand your surroundings better awareness of your surroundings and threats exploring new map and mapping new areas pinning locations for later and sharing these with your friends what the

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    interest that looks great more of Arison Rison and of course our entirely new integrated star map with its new UN to face and let's face it a much needed refresh to the user experience no more getting

58. 00:47:57

    lost a whole new perspective with all these upcoming features where will you explore today thank you very much cheers