Around the Verse: Episode 1.08 (2014.07.31)

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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   [Music] welcome everybody to episode 8 of around the verse I am Sandy Gardner and I'm Ben Lesnik welcome home Sandy thank you we missed you here in the office it was pretty quiet with that I see that our home is now a little different yes we have moved into our new office it's actually next door to the uh previous community area expanding the Star season team in La they're going to actually be doing ship production up in the area that we were in and we have this uh cool new office space that is time to start decorating mhm it is time to start decorating what do you I have a couple

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   of ideas already all right this time un bu bug species hey everyone this week on bug Smashers how to fix Dev related bugs so this bug is directly related to our development and it occurs randomly when you either reload our scripts which will reload our vehicle scripts or in this case if we reload our item and since we're constantly iterating on our items and our vehicles we needed a quick way to you know reload them so that we

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   could see our results in the game and because they were crashing this was a problem for our designers even our programmers so let me type it in and we should get a crash and there's a crash woo to recap on the code it was essentially the optimizations I implemented earlier oops so if we have 10 Hornets we'd only use have one destruction instance of a character loaded and we just Swap all the geometry and unfortunately the code I writ for that worked but not well enough when you reloaded a vehicle or item it would cause a crash oops so I'm going to open up two different three different change lists to tell you what was happening in this part of the code which checks for a essentially gets called when we want to spawn someone it will look for a place to spawn and then some kind of linked

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   entity if that thing didn't exist and it tried to access it right here you immediately get a seg fult and crash simple fix was to make sure that the pointer was valid if not and we just continue on next fix this time it was a little bit more complicated issue the Thruster or their ammo boxes they would um when the item first gets created it will call this function and it will save some parameters the ammo parameters in this case anything in our XML well if you reload the game it doesn't call this function again and now we have a dangling pointer of this guy and so when we try to access it we will get all sorts of random crap one second I have to burp but it's

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   not burping the fix was to essentially change how reload process gets called so we have when we called our reload thing it will do a preload and then a postload and I added a post reset prams which will remove our original Amo prams and then it will process the the actual XML to see if it's valid and if it is it will you know set our pointers back again otherwise if it fails it aborts and deletes the item as you can show you even the slightest features that we add could have repercussions on anything that we do so we have to be careful that we don't break things sometimes we do and we just have to quickly fix them let's go on to the third so uh the player code will actually check to see if there's any

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   items around so if there's like random guns around it wants to see if the player could pick it up which is strange because our vehicle weapons should not be automatically picked up so in the vehicle weapon we're just like we override this function and go hey we should never pick this up automatically especially for players and so no longer get crashes and we could do some fast calling on whether or not the player could pick that thing up so I fixed my code up bam worked now all our designers could reload our scripts or even our items and continued along the way yay no crash woo and that is another day of fixing one bug which leads to three separate fixes sorry our sky is made of

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   skin some of our backers have noted the uh similarity between David ladyman and Game of Thrones Arthur georgo R Martin so uh they actually managed to meet up at ComicCon and uh we got a picture check this out check it out I just can't I can't believe how similar they look that is pretty great I wish I knew the white it's just wish I knew what that conversation was like I know so now it's time for news around the verse [Applause] let's do this module by module starting with Arena commander and the big news out Arena Commander is the 12.5 is out

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   woohoo after a lengthy lengthy battle with the rubber banding and latency bug the team finally believes they have an experience to be proud of for arena Commander we're sending out into the wild now uh fingers crossed that it fixes a lot of issues we know it's going to fix all sorts of things and there's some cool stuff there for backers too uh give it a try let us know what you think uh we'll be watching your Twitch streams and uh for your emails meanwhile the Star Citizen team is working hard on our planned Gamescom demo we can't tell you what it is just yet top secret but it's going to be very cool Foundry 42 the Jean kaga room concept is now complete as is the uh shuin mining stations Comm area these are the uh the sets and set pieces that they're going to be using for the first couple missions of Squadron 42 so you'll be able to explore them and you'll see them in the

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   cinematics design is updating the Bengal carrier for later missions you guys probably remember the Bengal carrier from early in the campaign we basically put it aside and said you know we're not going to have this in Arena Commander we're going to tackle it down the road and uh down the road is here we're going in there and updating it to current standards of star ciens it's going to be pretty cool and as reported from the UK they are tidying up action bubbles I included that in the script because I just thought it was delightful expression I don't know what it means in the concept of the game I assume it's the nav points but uh I just love that report they're tidying up action bubbles oh yeah I didn't think about that uh persistent Universe they have finished laying out their first year road map and what that means is it's uh how we expect the game to evolve in its first year of use what are players going to do what do

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    we have to have contingencies for uh it it's pretty exciting to be thinking not just about star SEI launch but beyond it at this point and they are also working on the mission generation tools yep that's what's going to let us create organic star Cien missions missions are going to be a big factor in our economy and uh we don't want them to be just like generic missions like in private tier go to and have one kill one ship and come back they need to feel like they're part of the world and the team is putting a lot of effort into that other news they're working on the transitioning from Hangar to Planet to space and there's a big focus on outfit Generation Um it may seem like playing with dolls but we need to figure out how to make our our different costumes the space suits the informal suits everything uh fit together properly the Gladius hanger animations are

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    complete see the Gladius coming sooner and later in the UK f8 lightning concept is 100% complete and now is going in engine and we are gray boxing the Interiors of the Gladiator the javelin the Panther and the Retaliator the Arin n50 animations and model revisions are complete it's ready hanger ready well that's what that means right it's hanger ready we're hoping and finally the Mustang model is now complete and it's uh going off for animation and hookup uh to clarify when we say that a model is complete we mean that it's in the engine you can look at it but it doesn't work yet so there's a there's a little bit of buffer time between when we complete a model and when it's uh ready for you guys the bit that I probably wanted to clarify would be hookup but that's okay moving on that's it for the news

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    let's go over to Ally and James for customer service report hey guys welcome to customer service I'm James Pew and I'm Alexis Lesnik I'm filling in for Chelsea cuz she's on vacation Gamescom tickets are now principal but the door list is locked so CS cannot help you change your ticket at this point and we would like to thank Quicksilver for sending in a box of these extra Gro stoop waffles they're pretty Gro you know like normal cookies have a normal amount of groat those cookies have extra of that they're Gro back to you guys uh yeah that looks Gro and speaking of Gro I hear you have some new merchandise to show us I do I have playing cards which I've been playing with for pretty much the whole episode ready I'm going to uh right right stick that one on your

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    head okay now who's got the higher card I think you have the higher card yeah I do think I do too let's see ah yeah yeah you see at first I thought that was an ace but you can play much more sophisticated games than that um and these will be on sale shortly with matching little notepads and and a pen and show them some of the face cards these are cool all right where are they I see here we have that's a okay you can hold that one up okay right that one because they all have different things so origin have I given you a diamond yet you have oh you a heart oh you give me a diamond and a heart Spade Spade spade and then you need a club right let's just see clubs clubs clubs where are you

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    we have our different ship we go look at that there you go uh we've got our different ships from different manufacturers The Joker is a vandel site got some logos in there it's they cool set of cards where did I put those can't find the Jokers to save myself but I do have the Four Aces so we have the RSI MK origin jump works and anle Aerospace represented so these are really cool I'm not sure how much we're selling them for not a lot probably around what the dog tags were yeah somewhere in there let's go over to William for this week's MVP hey everybody I'm lead moderator will here to bring you this week's MVP this week's MVP goes to both King noobs

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    and bad news Baron bad news Baron recently took to Twitch acting like Darth Vader playing Arena commander and King noobs was nice enough to take a few of those clips and put them into a video these guns do nothing they are underpowered and they need to be buffed Chris Roberts if you are listening to this you need to buff the Aurora for the glory of the Empire skip the song Brian skip the song I can't listen to this anymore it hurts my mechanical ears Shield you're doing this wrong it's because we're being spawn camped yes look at me look at my score I am first on my team I contributed I am the Aurora Master fear

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    me so thank you very much both you're this week's MVP thanks William and speaking of awesome fan projects uh you've probably seen the Lego Hornet that's been making the rounds well the creator has now submitted to Lego ideas and is seeking votes to try to make it an official Lego set and we are all for that if they want to do it we will get behind it it needs 10,000 votes uh it has 1100 right now uh hit the uh link provided and you can check it out help us make an official star s in Lego kit and now back to James who sat down with Forest stuffen to talk about spaceships hey guys I'm here with Forest Stefan Forest how you doing buddy excellent how you

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    doing pretty good answer good a little nervous you look nervous I am d I'm always nervous it's your first interview I know right well we get into some questions okay first question is from Amant or Amato dou L you know what I mean like okay how does a technical artist differ from a non-technical artist and are they both in the same business team uh yes uh basically a technical artist works as a bridge in between a programmer uh specifically usually a graphics programmer and an artist okay so if an artist wants to do some kind of um effect on the ship whether it's uh maybe wear and tear or maybe it's something like exploding an asteroid or you know um I want to make laser bolts look this way uh I always

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    want to make laser bolt always right it's the best uh so I will work with the artist and be like okay what would you like or an art director and how would you like it to look and then I'll kind of look at the tech and see if that's doable and if it's not doable then I'll go to the graphics engineer and try to convey what the art director or the artist would like to do and then give some suggestions on you know is this possible is this doable what do we need to do and then they'll give me some suggestions on these are the options and then we'll kind of get together and weigh the options and then they'll write the necessary code to provide uh a user end interface to allow the artist to do the vision that they have right created Okay cool so you're kind of like the artists come to you with a concept they

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    want and you reiterate that to the people who can get that process started and then you take that information back to the artist yeah exactly my job is just to make sure that uh whether it's Chris Roberts or an art director or another artist whatever Vision that they have is doable in the engine and then I'll work in between kind of like the liaison like they have a they have a concept and you try make sure that concept is doable within like the engine of the game correct right and then I'll have to worry about things like making sure that if a graph if a graphics engineer says that okay this is really expensive and then I'll go back to the artist and say okay well this is really expensive can we cut this out uh maybe do this instead and they say okay that's actually fine and then I'll go back to the graphics engineer I'll be like all right if we cut this out is it now doable and is this going to hit our

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    frame rates is it going to look the way that I envisioned it to look and they envisioned it to look then it's kind of a team effort and I just make sure that the programmers can talk to the artists without having to actually cool talk to each other so it's almost like you got your feet in both pools right yes cool awesome thanks man yeah my feet are wet all the time always yeah second question comes from Sky Stars what is your favorite ship and how challenging is it to make the graphics and physics better I assume it means for that ship uh my see we have so many cool new ships now like I I I feel like my original favorite ship was the 300i it was modeled by Chris Smith I love that ship that thing is slick and cool I like the interior I like the exterior um really like that ship but there's a lot of good Ships coming down the line that are

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    pretty awesome that might steal me so like what I can't I can't say I can't say but uh I am excited about the constellation because we've been working really hard on the constellation to get that into the game and into the players hands and that'll be the first teamship where you get to play with your friends and have those awesome moments like with the turrets and everything so um that might be my favorite ship in this next near future cool so how hard is it to get the graphics and physics correct on let's just go 300 eye because you said it was your favorite well it's getting easier and easier at first it was really difficult I mean it's the amount of physics that are involved you have to make sure that the mass on all the all ends of the ship are all correct otherwise you get some

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    really funky flight stuff and we have people like Dan Tracy that spends a lot of time actually trying to balance to make sure that um all the mass is correct to make sure that it flies right as far as looking good uh we have a pretty good pipeline right now as far as getting ships to look that the way they want and we're now figuring out exactly how we do that for every ship so it's getting easier and easier but obviously with new ships like the consolation um lot more pieces lot more mass a lot more aspects having to balance against each other to get it to fly correctly and to look good right so uh but we're figuring out and it's looking better and better and better and it's going to keep looking better and better and better and better and better that cool next question from jsd uh what kind of special effects can we

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    expect to see on our ships engine lens flares wing tips condensation Trails during the sharp turns well we obviously uh like to um reference movies a lot and try to get as much of a um kind of simulation realistic look um and kind of combined with kind of that movie style uh look and feel as well so when you're playing it feels kind of cinematic and not so gamey even though you are playing a game so JJ absy so but again um you know you don't want lens flares in your face at all times you know and so there's a lot of stuff that goes into because normally it's all post and you could just place it wherever you want but the difficulty lies in uh you want it to still be fun to play and things that could not be so annoying and sometimes some people they are in film

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    um can be really bad as far as uh when you're playing uh in the game right the HUD is something that's always a big challenge right how much of the screen do you take up how much of the screen do you leave open um and then like lens fls for example uh we do lens flar is based on angles so if you're looking at a lens flare directly uh it'll show a certain way if you're looking at it completely on the side of the screen it'll show a certain way and then if you're looking at it from an angle you know maybe you don't see it at all so a lot of times when I do a lot of the visual effects whether it's uh the muzzle flashes which are still coming online um um engine effects all that stuff it's going to be uh perception based so depending on the angle you're looking at is the angle uh is the effect that's being played at

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    that particular time to give that feel of cinematic movie feel but not that Annoying It's always in your face type situation so it's more like a game does that make it more difficult by because if I imagine if you're looking at it from if you're designing where there's different focal points you can look at does that make designing or does that make coding it difficult no the cating is not difficult it's more labor intensive cuz you're creating more effects and uh at first it was a lot of trial and error a lot of trial and error but um over time you create a pipeline and then you get your system and then you figure out all right this is how it is every time and this is what looks the best so then it's just a matter of creating the additional art but we make lots of libraries to use stuff over and over and over again um even if it doesn't look like it uh depending on the situation which helps it flow and uh makes the process of creating it a lot

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    more less uh intensive and take a lot less time so a big part of it and this rolls back to being the doing the technical art as well is it's not even just getting the effect to play the way you want it to play but having it simple enough for an artist to be able to do it in the time frame that is allowed for them to do it in so you try to make things uh look as good as possible and be done as quickly as possible it's like a b it's always The Balancing Act it's always a balancing act cool all right thanks next question from Socrates well socus he's been drinking not yet well yeah all right all right will the ssao and shadows get more love to get depth on

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    the small objects to look richer EG in the rivets and hornets cockpit it seems that it should be darker in certain places but instead has a flat fairly flat Luminosity first of all explain ssao ssdo and ssao well one's for console one's for PC but uh basically what that is it's it's considered a screen space uh Global illumination or or occlusion so to speak so uh if you're in walls uh basically when a wall hits a 90° corner you have a little strip of shadow um because that represents where the light gets trapped and so when you see things with sharp corners and stuff and screws and stuff you know they they don't look flat compared to the ground because you have be light being trapped and so they pop a little more the difficulty with games is uh that's

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    extremely expensive really uh as far as doing something that's the quality of an offline renderer because you have to use r tracing and stuff to figure out where that stuff should be so the ssdo is a screen space effect that does an estimation so to speak um however it is difficult in our situation because we have giant environments and very small environments and normally you would make your settings be based on one type of environment and so when you have something like a screw that's a whole different set of ssdo settings as you would a 90° wall That's 100t tall okay so uh that's that's been a challenge is how to make things not look flat as far as what he's discussing in the interior of the ship uh the real issue is that uh we haven't yet implemented the process of how to control the light going

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    through the ship and so in general how gamees doing in the past uh especially krych games is uh you create What's called the viz area and then the viz area will block out the Sun so it doesn't bleed through your architecture or your uh ship geometry for example and then you would have something called a portal and then the portal you would stick in the windows of your Vis areas and that would allow light to come through that portal so to speak uh however uh most games uh use that technology with just shapes and boxes our ships are a lot more complicated so we need to work on a type of tech that allows the sun to come through the ship but yet it's not coming through all the geometry and everything it only comes through like the windows and the areas that we really wanted to come through oh wow that's czy which makes it a little

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    more complicated and it's not that uh I think that the issue is the ssdo that's making the interior ships look flat for the screws for example it's the fact that there's so much light coming in so it's really hard to get your dark areas because it's kind of being blown out MH but that is something that we've talked a lot about we've been talking about it for a long time and uh working on Solutions and I think that that would probably solve the answer to that question is having better control of the lighting environment and where it's happening all right cool all right so last question is from Jesse Adama are there going to be any wear and tear is that the relative dama from Battle Star Galactica I would assume but I think I think it's spelled differently like isn't it no there's two M's in the Adama cuz they spelled like one in the show not a

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    real person I was just joking wait are you telling me Battle Star is not real that's what are they going to be anyway we're actually on Earth right now cuz they found well I mean spoiler alert it could work yeah totally well we won't say anything more people haven't seen Battle Star there going to be any wear and tear aspects of the ships over time inside and out this could be the result of not taking the ship in for regular repairs or refurbishments and if so how do you show that oh yeah wear and tear we've been saying it the whole time we want wear and tear um specifically right now we're concentrating on the exterior of the ships uh actually two weeks ago we wrote some additional Tech to support what we call layer blending that could blend a set of Textures in between another set of textures and then we are hooking up code to access that and

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    depending on what design would like to do uh we're going to provide them numeric values that will represent the wear and tear between clean and super dirty okay um there's still a lot of things to be worked out um as far as uh the wear and tear and there's still some aspects that we haven't figured out um like glass uh that's something that currently we started looking into is uh instead of just having scratch metal and more and more dirt happening over time and maybe you know you get your vehicle and then you're out and you're never taking care of it and then you take it to a base and you get it cleaned and then your numeric value goes back to zero right but now your ship is actually you know clean cuz you switched your layer blending back to the original transition um but however for like glass that's a whole different Shader and a whole different set of layer blending

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    stuff but we really would like to do stuff as well where that's getting dirtier and then there's stuff like the damage states that are similar to the wear and tear but they are handled differently but again that kind of works for glass as well we'd really like to start seeing kind of glass get old and start kind of cracking and then there's a lot of cool stuff that like movies do where the more damage it gets it starts kind of getting Frosty and stuff and kind of that kind of thing it's like kind of murky kind of yeah so that's right now we're kind of working on that aspect um the interior of the ships will be done similar to the exterior of the ships but again it's a balance because you're dealing with a mass amount of textures and even if you're using even though we're taking steps to eliminate a lot of the need for the the textures and having particular textures that are being reused over and over and over

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    again creating the same effects um it still gets pretty uh texture heavy mhm uh but so we're working on methods to do the materials and to blend materials to make it as efficient as possible so it's not hurting people's computers when they're seeing their vehicle you know we don't want to hog up the texture memory too much cuz we got lots of big ships that we got to take care of is it a little weird cuz you've spent so we've all spent so much time making these ships look nice is it weird designing them to look kind of no I think they look cooler when they're messed up oh yeah cool I think they look cooler I I would start my ship just destroyed just crash it right off the lck never take it in for real never take it in would you would it be a car wash ship wash I I don't know how that works Starship wash yeah ship wash still just people with you know mops or whatever

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    when you just people yeah how do you wash a Connie that's all I'm saying yeah when you fill up your power plant there's a guy there trying to wash it for a Space Credit One that's actually what I'm going to do I'm just going to clean people's vehicles for Space Credit doing the Pu yeah that's that's but I've seen some super people have done some amazing like wear and tear jobs where I've like I said I thought it was almost cooler without it because you get this like this pure metal under coing the pain that has all it rivets and it's just like super mechanical and cool and you kind of see it raw um so like all the famous like most most famous starships are usually not very pristine they're almost like you know like he like the Serenity and you can't live your life in a space garage got to get out there all right

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    man well thank you so much for coming on thank you pleasure talking to you thanks for coming on and back to you guys back to you guys back to you guys pick whichever one you want Thanks James we are lucky to have Forest he's a genuine talent and what better way to end the week with a new Hangar ready ship you don't say a new Hangar ready ship gosh we already know what that is don't we yes it is the M50 uh available starting tomorrow finally your uh your racer is ready in the hanger if you bought one during the early campaign you'll be able to find it once you patch to 125 and uh we're making it available for a week uh to anyone who'd like to pick one up now to share a little bit of the process for the M50 we uh we got ready to releasing it last week and Chris Robert said no it needs a new coat of paint so Chris Smith our artist in Austin gave us 10

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    different options which we'll share here and uh tomorrow you're going to find out which of them Chris selected that's not all check out the Star Citizen pledge store starting Monday when it'll be getting an all new design developed by the crack web team turbulent all right you ready oh yeah the collapse happen collapse happen

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    okay are you ready I'm ready all right so we're here we're here with uh Christopher Smith um I can call you Christopher right no it's CHR you would rather pref you'd rather Chris not Christopher Christopher is what my mom calls me when I'm in trouble so what are you working on man I know you've been working hard you've been burning the midnight oil I've I've seen it yeah so uh I've been working on the must thing uh been trying to get that ship ready uh it was supposed to be ready at the uh finale of the next greatest s but that didn't happen why you even slacking yeah yeah you know just you know my office back my sleeping under your desk I understand you just you know

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    yeah it's so comfortable you know the comfortable the uh the carpet's so nice and cushy so it's hard not it's hard to do work but I finally got to it and it is ready now it's it looks damn sweet looking nice I think Chris is pretty happy with it as as you are as you are as well yeah it looks great so I think there was a couple wasn't there a few back and forth redesigns with the like uh the interior yeah so the issue initially was that it was too tight for our character uh David hobbins it was just you know I think his his skill character was just a little off and so uh that he used when uh doing the concept phase and so when we put our actual character in there you know he

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    just wouldn't fit it was like a little hobbit door the other thing is the um the damage stuff is like kind of that's really that's really detailed and it's a lot of work right especially uh you know especially for ships and we essentially have variant of the ships which are the same thing but there's always these little pieces that are different so they have to be re recreated you know red damaged yeah it's a lot of stuff it's very uh complicated and tedious so few people know this actually that uh Chris and I have God how long we we've known each other for I think we started working together in 2007 it was at 3D Realms yeah 3D Realms and we worked on the famous Duke Nukem

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    Infamous Infamous Infamous yeah that was fun that's where we first uh yeah so Chris and I Chris and I decided that it would be a good idea in the middle of summer to pick up dis golfing if you guys don't know what that is it's like throwing frisbees at Chains It's like this it's like golf except you're you're doing it but we we decided to do it in Dallas such a hippie sport yeah we decided to do it to pick it up in Dallas in the summer and then we just kept playing even though it became like de yeah people would go out with us would be like what are you doing want to get the office for an hour you know and just the first like the first couple of weeks we did it like I I forgot to bring clothes I would just be like soaking wet yeah

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    sitting in marks that was gross so anyway all right well thank you uh Christopher Smith um I appreciate your yeah your mom's calling you Christopher Smith um I appreciate your time and all your hard work cuz I know you've been putting in the hour man and it shows the uh the Mustang is amazing and uh I'm sure you guys will see it soon and uh thank you very much thank you that's it for around the verse this week sure be sure to tune in next week when we sit down with programmer Chad zamzow and you get the Chad zamza experience I love zamza and we're going to leave you of course with an art sneak peek um did you guys think we forgot about the caterpillar we almost did no

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    we've been working on it in secret and here are a couple of shots of recent Concepts you can see we've uh updated the landing gear trying to figure out exactly how it works in the Star season Universe check it out I'm still getting that wobby wobby from you it it's a scientific term