Star Citizen Live: Planet Content Team Q&A

11 February 202201:02:201,661 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

00:00:00
star citizen live the planet content team q a i don't have it nobody makes me music or anything hi everybody welcome to another episode of star citizen live this time the planet content team q a i'm your host jared huckabee now as always if you've never seen an episode of star citizen live before it's where we take a little bit of time at the end of our week invite our developers to join us and we answer questions from you the star citizen community and joining us on the show this week we have members from our esteemed planet content team say hi everybody hi everybody hello daniel hello only sebastian followed the instructions
00:00:49
correctly thank you sebastian i'm sorry you're welcome uh now uh the planet content team uh we've got sebastian in the corner we've got uh max this way and then down in the uh the corner down there uh daniel uh before we jump right into the questions here let's take a few minutes and uh talk about who you are and what you do because there are many uh teams that work on planets planet tech you know and environments in general so wanna make sure that that folks understand specifically the areas in which you guys work uh so uh sebastian let's start with you who are you what do you do for star citizen all right um yeah i'm sebastian i'm a principal technical environment artist with the planet content team and what i do most of the time is work on workflows and pipelines with the
00:01:40
planet tech team as well to figure out new things on how we can do things we couldn't do before and every now and then i also do some content for the game but it's mostly about research and development every now and then you get to make something for the game uh max who are you and what do you do for star citizen um i'm a senior environment artist and i mostly create assets and set up planets and biomes that kind of stuff like you're doing behind you right now with your plants uh yeah and uh last but certainly not least uh in his first star citizen video of any kind whatsoever daniel who are you and what do you do for star citizen
00:02:29
so i'm an environment artist in this the team um i do basically the same that max is doing creating content setting up planets and stuff like that but i mainly focus on vegetation in this case wow so you can do everything max can do just better maybe nothing's good maybe not that's good it's the end of the day for you but it's early in the morning for me and i'm just starting crap i clearly chose violence today all right now uh sebastian you mentioned the planet tech team which is a different team than the planet content team uh let's talk a little bit about that set some expectations here before we jump into it uh what does the planet content team do and how is it different than the planet tech team right um like we're basically the end
00:03:16
users for what the planet tech team does so they like actually build the tools and we are usually often the ones that request them and like find out from the design browsers and like figuring out how things should work um but they are the ones that actually like implement them and write the code with them we are mostly making content that fills the planet um but they have they are making all the the magic that brings it all together basically not yet so for that reason uh while we're going to talk we're going to talk about planet tech and many of the questions that came through today uh are reflective of upcoming planet technologies uh that is a a separate team we attempted to get some of those folks in with this show as well but scheduling issues prevented that from happening so we are going to discuss
00:04:05
some planet tech stuff amongst everything else that the planet content team works with but because we have a dedicated team for that we are going to reserve some of those questions that came in this week uh for the folks who are dedicated to making that additionally uh one of the most highest one of the highest voted up questions uh this week was about the progress of ro of rivers of rivers and we have a segment that uh we have filmed with a will hayne about rivers that is going to air in isc in two or three weeks depending on some other scheduling stuff so uh we're going to reserve most of the rivers conversation for for that but we'll touch on it a little bit today so uh right off the bat um one of the one of the big questions that
00:04:52
came forward and everybody knows that we're heading towards pyro this year that's the focus of many teams throughout star citizen in the different studios when pirate the idea of pyro was first introduced so many years ago through the concept art and stuff there was a lot of talk about lava you know molten planets stuff like that um we haven't seen that as of yet in any of the stuff that we've shown up pyro so the question here is simply will pyro or any of its planets and moons have flowing lava fields right with river if you work on rivers they're obviously looks like the bridge to lava it feels very close and we will definitely we're definitely
00:05:40
planning to do um lava and also probably retroactively on pyro after release but i'm very unsure right now if it's gonna like make the deadline for the initial para release to actually have flowing lava rivers but it's definitely planned and once the rivers are fully there i think the next step shouldn't be a big one to get to lava as folks as folks have seen with the stanton system uh a first for an initial version of a planet will go out and then it will continue to be iterated as new technologies come online so just to reiterate that uh whenever the pirate system does does come online and uh folks in the chat are already saying you said pyro this year i said we're working on it this year that's all i'm committing to we're working on it this year um
00:06:28
it may or may not have the flowing uh lava uh when it's first introduced it just depends on how the schedules and the technologies line up at that time ah let's see what else do we got uh any plans for explorable oceans seas or lakes lots of underwater gameplay what can you tell us about the future of underwater gameplay yeah for us as the content planet content team like i do think we all want to provide like the same gameplay experience that you have on the planet surface like visually um also underwater so i think we're excited to yeah look into that some more and yeah i have a lot of like biome diversity
00:07:17
underwater eventually like when it comes to like exploration and stuff i mean that's for like other departments right but we're definitely interested in yeah providing the space and making everything look interesting uh unicolor says stop saying road to pyro no we're on the road to pyro that's where the majority of our focus for the persistent universe team is working towards right now doesn't mean it's going to come out this year it's we're working towards it with the introduction of clouds uh recently in what was it alpha 3 15 is there any work uh currently done for dynamic clouds and weather effects like storms lighting etc right um so what we released with was like the we warm of clouds basically um and there's like i think it was being
00:08:07
communicated plenty of times that we're still developing but developing the technology for it um and the long-term plan is certainly to have dynamic clouds animated clouds and having clouds form and dissipate based on climate and weather right now the focus is more performance getting them to be as performant as they can be and then there will be another round of quality and detail improvement to allow us to make more elaborate and more realistic formations of clouds and more diversity within or on one planet basically and then either with that or after that um the plan will be or is to look into dynamic clouds uh animating and you know forming and you know the whole
00:08:55
cloud deal basically how detailed are you planning to go with cloud formations are you going to see things like supercells or hurricane formations um as part of our continued effort to improve our tools and pipelines and we're also working on more realistic cloud global cloud generation and part of that is definitely superstars and hurricanes that gather our oceans and then start moving towards land and stuff like that like for for the first iteration they will be static obviously um unfortunately but um eventually the goal is definitely to have those and uh yeah we're live on all fronts like even large scale and small scale there are a lot of things we still want to improve and are working on to to make better and more realistic uh while we're on the subject of clouds
00:09:43
here um the clouds on microtech are seemingly different from those in the pyro demo that was shown at citizencon is this due to performance reasons or why do they seem different um fundamentally they're like the same using the same system the same kind of data they just use a different amount of a different type of data that goes into it into them and that was mostly because start direction for the para clause was a very different one than for the microtech ones but fundamentally they are the same clouds and they should perform almost the same and uh yeah they will hopefully come out with paradigm but there's like fundamentally no real difference between them is that something you think you might explore later though
00:10:30
i mean what would would clouds on different planets and different star systems form the same or look the same that's a very good question and something we'll definitely have to come back to with a lot of we're making like a space game with a lot of stuff that nobody knows how it actually works like i don't think anyone has been to a guest giant like really at least so we're like always taking some liberty and trying to make things as interesting as we can and with the systems we still want to release i think there's plenty of room for more alien and other kinds of exploration to yeah we'll see but uh yeah it's definitely not gonna be all of like clouds that's pretty sure
00:11:19
let's just stick with the clouds here for a little bit before we move on uh uh why don't we have clouds on other planets besides microtech yet right um it is a decent amount of time investment to make to offer clouds especially since we're like so early in the process like we don't have all the knowledge um and all the tools we need or want to get whatever specific um visual target so we do have to spend a fair amount of time to develop those and figure out what we need to do to get the visuals we want um and then the system is still very much subject subject to change and will change dramatically over time um so we don't want to spend too much time you know making things that are going to like have to be reworked a lot of times um so we're definitely working on rolling out
00:12:07
more clouds to more planets but it's not gonna um as long as the system is so much being in development um we're not gonna just do them for all of them but like we're not gonna do like generic ones for all of them we want them to feel different and like portray the planet in a way that makes sense for the planet and just like enhances the atmosphere um or the vibe of the planet you know what i mean um so yeah that's pretty much the thing like we want to do each planet justice and not just have something generic everywhere um but to do that we need to spend the time on it and not want to throw away all the work we do so it's like an integrated process that takes a bit of time if that makes sense uh recently uh the jumped you know we put out jump down two and uh
00:12:57
this question is about the 2d cloud layers here let's just get all the cloud stuff out of the way on one the 2d cloud layer is the jump down to events event moons uh look uh uh poor in comparison to the microtech clouds this is their words uh how is the progress looking for clouds on the uh okay why do the clouds look different on jump down two than they do on uh microtech well i mean they're using the old 2d clouds and obviously they look they look worse um and just to re it's basically the same answer that i've given before all right we will get to it but it's not like we don't want to do generic clouds everywhere but rather like tailor them to the specific scenario on planet okay that's the process uh max let's go back to talking about some underwater stuff
00:13:46
uh oh any updates or progress on uh you said you worked on florida and stuff uh what about underwater flora and stuff like that um i mean like the wasan explained like we do talk to like the engineers right um they ask us what we would need to create like underwater biomes and then it's like a back and forth and yeah we i don't know make some white box um kelp meshes for example and then we say okay we need them to like sway in the water right and if that's not something that they've done yet they have to like make that come back to us and that's like um like the process that we that we have for like creating this um obviously i don't want to take anything away from
00:14:35
their upcoming uh river special which will touch on the underwater stuff um but yeah we did look into that like a little bit to support them early on so they know what we eventually need um yeah basically we want to like scatter stuff around bodies of water right we want to have different vegetation underwater different rocks how how do the rocks behave uh in comparison to like planet surface rocks yeah just so that the player sees what he would expect to see if he goes underwater right he or she uh so these conversations about underwater stuff are happening now i mean it's a it's a process right
00:15:28
yeah it's like it's a yeah it's a development process like it starts somewhere right uh eventually they ask us and um but yeah i don't want to like spoil anything fair enough right now it has come out though like you know with rivers and blair touching the river and them dying feels a bit weird it's not like asking conversations about underground yeah at some at some point it has to be where you step in water you don't insta die yeah nice it's it's nice to know those conversations are starting anyway um let's move from we've gone from clouds to the underwater let's let's go into some some biome stuff here uh are dense jungle like biomes uh even feasible with the current planetary tech
00:16:18
like could you could you make a really dense jungle right now you just haven't or uh what's going on here i mean the the problem is twofold uh i'm gonna touch on the technical side of things like the the larger issue which is like um with star citizen we have to make things that work from all distances um so it needs to work from space from orbit and from the ground um and right now but that's something that's actually being worked on soon very soon i hope um will be like a better representation um of things in the distance on the gpu instead of the cpu but then we can draw them much further out and much higher quantities um and that's like a big blocker right now it prevents us from doing really
00:17:05
dense anythings at a distance and forest obviously being the big item that we as a team and i guess the fans as well and our art director at everybody wants um is pretty much the biggest thing that's like being held back by not being able to draw enough things good looking far out that's but um hopefully the planet tech team will touch on this in there if they come on the show and uh kind of elaborate a bit more on how they're gonna solve this issue but um it's definitely on the one of the top priorities for our team and i hope for everybody else's work what uh sort of in the same vein here what happened to the uh
00:17:54
touch bending uh like the binding skeleton to plants on planets so they can react to player characters crossing through uh they remember seeing some early tests on the isc a while back any updates on that um so that's something that's been is being worked on for a long period of time as maxi and sebastian already talked about this is something that you don't do once and it's done you want to study all the the possibilities all the different vegetation types be italian be it more earth-like that's an effort that's being made in conjunction to a new vegetation shader that is has been worked on for a while now and it will still be worked on in the future where we will not only
00:18:42
have touch bending so that the player interacts with the vegetation but also stuff like better far distance rendering which we will look into better billboards things like that probably new wind if we have the the possibility to study that and also new approach a new approach to coloring the vegetation which will allow us to not only use let or what we call luts which are basically some color pickup tables that allow us to make very easy and fast variations of the same assets but this is also something that will allow us to do stuff like seasons and else on plants for example so this is all an ongoing effort that's
00:19:32
being done together with the dutch bending and all of that so usually you using luts to help uh depict seasons that's the first i've heard of that that's that's really cool yes so basically the current system doesn't allow for a very dynamic way to change the colors sometimes you might need to to do some hacky ways to achieve that result and there is an ongoing progress on a new tech that will allow us to just recolor vegetation using those color lookup tables essentially and these will provide not only on not only a better quality but also make it easier to do that variation so stuff like seasons will be possible now once that is done of course and also
00:20:20
having health states for plants and stuff like that will be way better and easier health states are plants you shoot a plant in the arm and it gets that injury yes exactly let's see what the players do uh let's let's let's are super cool we're not going to go into what lights are but uh they're used in uh uh cinematography and and stuff all the time uh a lot of a lot of the color and stuff that you see in you know my housing and stuff is done by you know messing with luts and stuff so uh that's cool to hear to hear that being used in that way it's it's not usual when i do these shows usually i know all the answers before you guys are saying them and it's not usually i hear anything i haven't heard before that's cool uh see how much you how much more you can surprise me daniel uh will we ever see uh all right so
00:21:09
let's set this question up uh star wars is infamous for having the single biome planets you know here's the desert planet and here's the jungle planet and here's the yeah here's here's the water planet stuff uh will we ever see multiple biomes with rivers lakes waterfalls on planets as diverse as our earth with tropical desert tropical zones sandy dunes swamps forest all on a single planet we would very much love to do that um like earth is obviously obviously like the the big the big goal we eventually want to get to i mean there's a lot of things that still need to be solved to be able to do anything as diverse as earth
00:21:57
but i think we're like we can definitely already do something that's like more than worse than single biome planets and i think we're already doing that for for the most part um for earth um like we'll definitely do more diverse planets and we'll also like come back to the existing ones and add more diversity as the dagger wolves um and allows us to do stuff like that like rivers and waterfalls um once those are gonna be a thing at scale we'll definitely come back in that position um and probably also make some biomes that go along with them just so this isn't nice um but yeah all the other stuff we all want to do that um it's just like more or less all the interesting biomes like a swamp you def then end up being in a place where you want like terrain
00:22:46
displacement like like for snow or like mud you walk through and wait through and get like the the player track uh dragging through and like causing leaving a depression in the mud um stuff like a lot of interesting things and exciting things we do want to do and we hope to get to uh in the near future or in the far future we'll see but um it's still the goal like it's uh until we haven't until we've done earth i think we aren't there tech wise and content wise um so it's definitely the goal and we will just get more and more and better um the longer we do it but still a ways to go i think if you it's very good no good uh like if you compare to like if you look at how we started right with um
00:23:34
selin and dama and yella um they were technically like star wars planets right they only had like one thing um and then we tried to like yeah push it with every new release and then eventually we had microtech right which was like very different you have like the the icy snowy parts and then the yeah the the lusher um regions with the trees so i i don't think it's like a spoiler because people saw some of that already during sitcon but i feel like pyro and nyx will push like the biome diversity to a degree that's different and better than what we have right now so i think people people will enjoy that when they eventually see it yeah i don't think it it's anybody who's paid attention to star
00:24:22
citizen's development over the years you see the same phenomenon happen across everything uh the ships that were made in 2014 are not the ships that can be made in 2020 2021 the planets that were made in are not the planets that we can make you know today and will not be the planets that we can make tomorrow as you know as more tech comes online as more tech gets developed and and our our our artists and and designers get more familiar with them and get and just better using them and stuff like this all these things combine to to not just increase the speed at which things you know come as they as we exponentially build but the diversity and the and the complexity that are involved with it so so yeah it's i don't think it's any i don't think there's any
00:25:12
you're not you're not spoiling anything saying that you know eventually you know you know we we have the we plan to have saul in there we plan to have earth in saul and as and we want to you know recreate earth as much of the diversity as we can and that's the important the key word there as we can at the time that it comes at that point when it comes into development and then of course uh we're always open and willing to go back revamp these planets and bring them forward as the new techs come online so that the planets that were created before these this tech exists don't just fall to the wayside you see that with planets you see that with ships you see that with everything so it is one of the unique challenges of star citizen because we operate a live game environment during our development
00:25:59
it's it's we're constantly we're constantly updating and revamping and it goes goes to the uh the uh the lava rivers question before if maybe the first version of pyro will have it maybe it won't it depends on scheduling and where that tech is with where we are when we want to release it so uh since i brought up the lava field things let's let's go back to to that stuff um what is the overlap in labor between roads rivers and lava throws you already mentioned uh sebastian that that rivers and lava are kind of like the inverse or whatever it's it's what is the overlap does the riverwork just automatically get us roads and lava or how does this no no no i mean like um i assume that the tech team will get into a little bit more in detail um but um
00:26:49
like a lot of the things that make a river work will also make a lava river work right just like the name implies and for raw it's a lot of detect it's been it has been developed and is being developed for the rivers like adjusting the terrain so it's like flat and or like looks like a riverbed can then be applied to make a road flat and drivable and but i still i assume i don't know i'm not on that team lots to do to make the roads happen and it's most likely going to be more collaboration in planet tech and the locations teams and not so much us we we're just like there for awareness but um i don't expect us to do all that much work with roads or on roads since it's mostly going to be like connecting outposts and connecting cities um
00:27:37
so yeah basically based on what those teams will need okay now as a disclaimer here before we get into these next ones here the planet content team is mostly involved in art and and tech stuff and game play is the is the realm of our gameplay features teams you know dan truffin and his team and stuff like that uh but we'll touch on a few things here that i think you can talk about uh what planetary mechanics uh will force us to use ground vehicles instead of flying a ship is this is a common question that comes up often as more and more ground vehicles get introduced into star citizen yeah like obviously what we want and i think that's also like aligned with the plan for the tech itself
00:28:25
is that weather especially extreme weather conditions will affect the ship and the force the player will like prevent the player from flying through very extreme storms and stuff like that um and that could definitely see this being a feature that will prevent the player from flying and needing to use ground vehicles more in certain areas or maybe on entire planets as weather continues to be developed some of these lesser aerodynamic ships you may have more and more trouble reaching ground safely in some conditions yeah so uh let's see uh are the clouds as a follow-up to this are are the clouds purely cosmetic or do they have additional metadata attached leading up
00:29:13
you know uh leading up to this kind of stuff yeah i mean technically they they already like there's some stuff attached to it like you could uh for example in the pyro demo um you could see the the lighting storms um and those are only like piggy bank of some data that's being that's coming with the cloud density and like the the type that's there um and there's like once other themes hook into this and then use it more they will they can make use of the clouds and have them have gameplay implications for the players and the playership uh somebody in the chat mentioned the like magnetic differences in certain planets making navigation you know impossible like like with the poles messed up or something
00:30:00
like things as examples of things that could stop you from flying in the atmosphere of a planet and wanting to transition to a ground vehicle open to all kinds of stuff let's see what else do we got from the chat here when's the players coming out to what no it's not a question for you i'm just i'm just trolling the person in the chat who thought they should ask the planet content team that what new biomes or locations from star citizen's lore do you think would be a challenge to tackle well besides the forest that you mentioned that we talked about earlier the dense forest
00:30:48
who wants to jump on one i will say right there there is a bunch of stuff that deck can still handle i will say yeah the forest is the obvious ones yeah i mean other stuff like swarms also something like like if we do them then we want to do them right so um we definitely need some more tech there would be my answer for that aside from the phones but here's a question chad what about quicksand as a child of the 80s i'm very concerned with quicksand well i think we're all concerned with quicksand even though it turns out not to be that important growing up in the 80s like it was like quicksand was you thought quicksand was everywhere like every alien planet you went to every strange country you went
00:31:36
to there was always quicksand dangers and yet i've been on this planet nearly 50 years i've never encountered quicksand yeah i'm not even sure does it even work the way it does in real life as it does in films i don't think it does i don't know yeah we'll see i mean we have the other planet so so maybe maybe all right uh will stanton get some of the canyon and rock spires that we saw as part of pyro uh during this year's citizencon or are the stanton landscapes uh finalized um i mean like you're already hinted that i mean we we always try to go back to the older planets and make sure they're yeah they match the the newer content um but yeah for some some of the the
00:32:24
pyro rock sets that we made are specific to pyro right you want it to feel different you don't want like the same i don't know like spiky rock set on five planets right um but for like generic stuff like generic cliffs some boulders and stuff if if we do feel like we have better sets um that could complement what's what's already on dama for example then we do go in and yeah um switch it up switch it out um but yeah technically we do make things specific whatever planet um we are creating um so that everything has like its own vibe and feel big canyons and rock spires are our
00:33:14
common question that comes up there's a lot of a lot of that in the live chat right now uh do you ever foresee the planet tech allowing cliffs with like overhangs you know like the kind of thing wiley coyote would run out over like kind of stick out and then kind of just come back down um it's like ever since we i mean probably since forever but definitely since we worked on planetech before that has been like the big thing we always like tried to get to work um but haven't been able to figure out how to do um and it's still very difficult to do just because of how our tech works and like a lot of the specific works to make a planet at scale just work and at all distances um it's something we always come back to
00:34:04
at least once a year we're like oh can't we do this to make cliffs happen um or like overhangs happen um and um i think there's a lot of very interesting stuff that's planned to happen in the next whenever we'll see in the future [Music] i don't want to commit anyone to anything so but they're definitely technical improvements plans that will make things like that more feasible and allow us to do better things easier and quicker and one of them could hopefully be if not overhangs i mean probably also overhangs but just better looking cliffs or like any clips at all and like really straight cliff faces which we really can't do right now because um reasons
00:34:53
so yeah there's things that things are being done and um i'm very hopeful that they will improve a lot of things and allow us to do things we couldn't do before you know like fix the tiling of the ground textures make proper cliffs and you know integrate assets better with the terrain like all of this thing will piggyback on one of some fundamentals that are being worked on in the near or in some future uh the the the the person who asked about the polaris is now giving crap to the person who asked about server meshing and chat is just like turning on itself don't do that chat be better with with clips and whatnot i know the the the conversation always turns to you
00:35:43
know like texture stretching and and stuff like this to make that it it's it's that the procedural tools we want we want to find solutions that work with our procedural tools that you know and and we're trying to avoid hand crafting uh these things because we can't do that it's that's not a scalable solution it is so so when it's not that it's not that we couldn't hire an artist to go and just build a clip with an overhang and then plop it there but that's not a sustainable solution for all of the planets and moons that we have to do how do you balance that oh it doesn't look right it doesn't look realistic when there are with some of the weirdest looking things that actually exist on our planet like devil's tower in wyoming have you ever seen devil's tower that thing looks like
00:36:31
a mistake that thing looks like something a junior associate artist made on this on their first day and would get yelled at by an art director but i mean it it's real and it's iconic and it actually happened how do you how do you balance that that unbelievability with it's actually possible sometimes we do sometimes have these um things happen where you have like a weird bug right um but then the fans really like it like we have this one example it's called the schedule rock i think that's the name of it and like one day the boston sent me like a like a threat from from the forum and he was like oh like was this like a point of interest or was this a bug and people complained that like this huge um overhang plate on magda it was i think
00:37:22
um was gone and apparently it became like this travel destination for people to like check out um and like i don't know if we took it out like on purpose or if someone just tweaked like a setting in the procedural generation and it disappeared right but it was like if we look at that it's like it just looks wrong right but then obviously like the players see it and feel like oh what's this looks different that's super cool let's go there let's meet up so we did feel a bit bad that it disappeared and we brought it back but yeah in general i mean we also want like more interesting cliff formations more points of interest for people to find um but like you say it's like yeah we could build that but there's so much space that we would need to fill
00:38:11
and until we have a solution that lets us um yeah confidently fill all of it in same quality bar um we don't try to do that um because then it just sticks out like a sore thumb right you have this one area that's like neatly dressed and then you go like five minutes to the right and it looks a bit procedural again yeah so that's a tricky balance it it it is one of the biggest distinctions between our project and you know other games that can make that that are out there with amazingly dynamic environments stuff that we have we have to build procedurally so that it scales and and such like that so uh it sometimes means that it means that landscape features that seem basic and and and and normal and like it would
00:38:59
be one of the first things in any other game sometimes take a little bit longer for our stuff but uh if we've shown anything over the years we'll get it uh i'll i'm gonna commit you guys to that we'll get it was like what did you just say let me get an email from marco what type of minables are we going to explore when we have the new systems in uh are they just going to be the same things from stanton repainted in a different color for pyro or are they new is the is the is it new flora is it new my levels it's it's how different are we going here i mean we i guess that the plan is that um you only find certain minerals on certain
00:39:47
planets right so that there's like an incentive for a player to whatever visit the pyro system instead of going to stanton again right because you need like a very specific resource like we're not in the loop i think on the whole like economic aspect of it like if they need us to make different assets like new harvestables new minerals like we're happy to do that right um but yeah i don't think the plan is that you can find everything everywhere all the time i think we only did some new harvestables i wrote in the past it's been a while now again since we started work on pyro so i think they exist but uh it's been over a year since we worked on those
00:40:35
maybe more that's not a spoiler right no okay we we made some new stuff we made new content for the system sorry rice there's no there's no there's no there's no spoilers for pyro share what you got share what you got um yeah it is worth noting though that that you know while there's certain we certainly there certainly should be things that are unique uh to pyro um these systems have been explored and traversed for you know decades in our in our fictional timeline sometimes hundreds of years so there's going to be cross-pollination they're going to be people who bring melons from one system and plant them in another city you know with these colonial outposts and stuff like that so there
00:41:22
would be some natural cross contamination cross pollination so i i think folks can expect a mixture of things that are unique uh to the pirate system and things that uh sh that are shared uh with the standard i mean even the stuff in the stanton uh is if you look at the lore of some of the harvestables that you see in stanton they themselves the fiction behind them originated in other systems and were brought to stanton in the lore so so there's there's going to be some cross-pollination that includes in the fauna as well i mean because settlers bring cows with them horses with them and stuff like that so you see that kind of stuff too no following questions though we don't no no final questions that's not you that's that's that's not you folks um
00:42:14
what prevent uh what are the blockers for adding more altitude or depth uh to to planets right um now you've been talking about local altitude and depth um i guess people can refer back to the sitcom talk from 27 no two years ago when we talked about the planetary when ali talked about the planet attack uh at length he um i think he went on on this uh issue at length um um what do we what has changed uh recently there was a hard-coded limit to the global elevation that has now been drastically increased and so we will be doing more with that and having more
00:43:02
height differences across the whole planet but not necessarily in a very local area because that has still the same issues of texture stretching and that stuff that isn't gone um until we some of the things that are being worked on will hopefully make the planet shader much cheaper again and then we can afford to do things like dry planar protection of textures all of the rain we might be able to finally confidently do very steep slopes and have assets integrate right of them but until then we really won't be doing super steep terrain parts as a follow-up to the lava question uh what about volcanoes any thought or development on volcanoes
00:43:51
i mean that's that's that's largely a bfx question i think um like sure once we have rivers and lakes and we have lava rivers and lakes um the volcano part will be gameplay and vfx doing the rest mostly um so i would be for those teams that say we talked about how some of the uh you can about how we need to build the procedural aspects for the clips with overhangs and stuff like that but as far as uh uh points of interest uh specific rock formations or or you know things that can be used like as as landmarks like the scots bluff or mount fuji uh is that stuff that you would still craft you know by hand and place in or is that
00:44:39
something that also works through the we'd want to work through the procedural system i mean max has only touched on this that we don't want to right now do things manually that won't work at scale for us but obviously like different planets will have different unique features like standard one has the the mining bit uh like person sorry um that's the big mining pit and stuff like that and some of pyro and nyx will also have unique features like that um and we do try to handcraft them within the system as much as we can but yeah i mean that's we're all we're always trying to work within the procedural tools and make those things um and unless it's like the the iconic feature that makes or breaks this planet um we will stay away from handcrafting
00:45:28
things too much um but yeah i think it's always a balancing act uh it's always a delicate alchemy um let's talk about caves we haven't talked about i feel like we haven't talked about caves in forever what can you tell us if anything i'm just going to i'm going to start with a wide question here what can you tell us about caves are we done have we seen all the caves we're ever going to see is are there more caves in our future bigger badder more dangerous what do you got for us bros want to know cave bros want to know i guess i could start by saying that at least personally i guess each one of us have a lot of crazy ideas we would
00:46:16
like to see for caves like lava caves under a volcano would be awesome but of course as we talked about there's tech dependencies uh i don't know ice caves fungi caves where you have a lot of bioluminescence going on stuff like that i personally would love to see that but i guess i maxi can spoil it yeah i mean um right now we have like rocky caves right so we definitely will need more archetypes for caves because we can't put like a uh a rocky cave on i know the icy regions of microtech so that will need its own um cave and yeah i mean we've we've done work on
00:47:05
you're allowed to say that we're working on uk archetypes i never know what i'm allowed to say and whatnot but yeah where are you what about the new cave architecture yeah i'm the one that gets in trouble they yell at me so you just you just you just talk you just talk yeah i mean we have plans um to yeah extend the current cave systems and add more archetypes so yeah rocky is what we have but we want to improve the look of the rocky caves then yeah desert caves that will fit nicely on dama which obviously are going to look way different than the rocky caves then we're going to have hopefully caves that are more overgrown like moss and lots of foliage ice caves
00:47:53
acidic caves yes underwater caves so yeah that's that's a tricky one right i will say yes from an art perspective this will i i think it's not so different to create an underwater environment than it is to create any other kind of cave but there is a lot of tech dependencies and gameplay dependencies that we can't take on ourselves but i guess when the time comes we we will i'll be very excited to do so what about uh yeah wants to play the roman ice and water i think water and caves will be a thing uh and i swear this is from the from the
00:48:41
chat not for me uh what about caves we can fly through i have been conversations about that um it's obviously gonna be a lot more work to make a cave as large that you can actually fly through and still maintain the same visual quality that you want when you walk through it there have been conversations about that and i think they are eventually going to happen um but we are not working on them right now somebody asked what the thing on the progress tracker is that that's not announced on the blue content team we're working on uk archetypes that's the thing we're going to do this year if i'm allowed to speak on behalf of the the the the d'amore rally and the
00:49:29
stanton seven focuses like this uh caves that you they could actually traverse through as part of the race would really open things up yeah we're starting small though we'll get to the big ones later okay i can already see the emails coming [Laughter] uh i definitely chose violence this morning um why is my tank flipping over when i ram a small tree or a succulent and not the other way around who built the indestructible succulents max wasn't someone it wasn't one of us but that's more limitation of the of the system where um like it can't differentiate between like the the golf cart uh
00:50:18
vehicle that we have and like the the rover for example um so yeah we understand that that's frustrating yeah and it's also like tricky for us to to to get that right um with like some of the random randomization values that we have where a small rock that the golf cart would get stuck on or that you would expect the golf cart to get stuck on but the rover to drive through we have to like decide on one or the other right for now eventually the system is going to get improvements right it's going to automatically automatically check um for example based on the bounding box if an asset is supposed to have collision or not have collision um
00:51:08
but yeah for now i yeah we understand it's it's a bit of a problem so we try to avoid that like um yeah little succulents make the vehicles flip which is unfortunate yeah you're already killed man sorry and we can't wait for the cyclist to start exploiting me to travel whatever oh yeah hopefully gonna happen uh that leads me into the follow-up question about the rocks uh obviously we've made some uh i think it's fair to say we've made some improvements uh uh over the last year uh with the sheer volume of of rocks that that folks encounter as they as they drive along the surface of some of our planets and moons is that
00:51:55
is that dialed in is that where you want it uh right now or is there still more work to do there you mean the amount of rock the the amount of them the yeah i mean the nightmare of driving across some of these surfaces we've heard the feedback in the past and i i think we try nowadays to yeah keep um space or keep in mind that there needs needs to be like a good balance right it can't all be covered in in boulders and rocks to get stuck on so yeah we also went back and i hope the the fans and the players the players will see that that we did go back to the old moons and try to have more drivable space in there but yeah i mean for us like it's a struggle because obviously we want to
00:52:43
like cover everything nicely you know like have something interesting everywhere but i also understand if you want to like have a race and you get stuck every five meters that sucks um but yeah for example on on pyro and nick's we did keep that in mind from the get-go so there is a good balance of biomes where you immediately know okay this is one where driving is going to be tricky and then you you have another one where it's like okay this is a good one to drive through to kind of guide you a bit um so yeah we we do we we're doing better on that you guys are legitimately doing better like watching this year's dmr rally was was a much more enjoyable experience than in years past because of that you mentioned nix
00:53:32
i'm not going to let you off from that what can you tell us if anything about your your work on nix um yeah we did work on that uh like lots of work looks pretty good you know it's like we still have to do like one final polish pass on it um but yeah before server meshing isn't ready um yeah it's not it's it's not us um holding that back i think it is is not being no is created being created with the same uh planet tech tools that are the other planets and moons are uh yes is nyx a perfectly round thing or is it
00:54:24
how does that is a different seems like it would it might be different go go ahead if you say anything like anybody gets mad at they'll get mad at me not you i just i ask him what that am i yeah yeah yeah i'm sorry i'm speaking of delamar specifically right um yeah every every now and then we get asked to see if we can't make a non-spherical planet and we try and then something breaks horribly and then we say we can't um i think it's going to be a little bit less spherical than it is right now and it was the delamar was before um but it's not gonna look like a potato unfortunately not that attitude what yeah yeah i mean
00:55:11
sorry it's a bad american idiom i apologize yes uh let's see we're we're almost done we just have a few minutes uh left to go um what planets or what what what what's your favorite uh planet or moon in the pyro system at this moment is a personal quest is a personal question about you just they can't see it you can't spoil anything here what's your personal favorite planet or moon in the pirate that's tricky you can say it's your it's the one you worked on yeah yeah you're gonna say pirate two for that pirates pyro4
00:56:04
the thing about pyro is that i feel the planets are very they feel unique to themselves they have an identity i think and viral mostly because it was the planet i worked on and it was the first planet i worked for for star citizen and but also because it is a more deserty kind of uh planet with a mix of other stuff going on and i like the the color palette that it brings and the vibe in general okay and max y pyro4 um yeah like i like i said before it has more biome which is nice and i feel like it's it's a good mix between more alien looking like otherworldly biomes but it still feels grounded
00:56:56
and i like the colors of it so yeah sebastian ah pyro3 like power three why i i liked working on the clouds and the moss mostly and the colors are great i think like yellow just works power three was the one from the citizen gun demo right yeah yeah okay uh and lastly i'm gonna ask this i already know the answer but we're gonna ask this so that everybody else wants the answer uh uh do you guys uh work on art corp it's always on our backlog to make sure it doesn't rot um and like break horribly but we are aware that it has declined a tiny bit in quality and um there's a backlog item on our
00:57:45
backlog an item on our backlog about going back to it and you know evaluating what its current status and what we can do to improve it um it has always been the odd one out like it's breaking all the rules of the planetary always it always has it's very difficult and tricky to work with and it's very easy to break um obviously you would like to do it just as much as we can but it's also not the most fun planner to work on yeah when we when we talk about the systemic solutions i think our corpus ed is a different beast from every other planet and moon uh in star citizen it uses different tech it uses i mean it's it's just it's a it's a whole nother thing so it's i i think i think it's safe to say to
00:58:33
everybody who was asking and it was coming up a lot in the chat that it is not forgotten and it will not be ignored uh it's just that it's just that we're developed with the tech that's being developed by the planet tech team and stuff that's pushing the tech forward with pyro and with nyx and with other things beyond that our focus is just there on the more organic side but there will be a day when the wheel of development spins back around and it comes back to pi comes back to arccorp just like it does everything at some point and uh and it'll get its time in the sun yes i mean just by the nature of planet evolving eventually it will have changed so much that it breaks arccorp and then we'll have to go back so later until then players can look forward to the newest planet rock corp
00:59:23
which will just be all rocks it'll be impossible to drive on rock corp uh take that to reddit reddit confirmed rock corp it's actually happening and it's happening sorry us we don't do one questions on the thing at the beginning of this people are like oh so pyro's not coming this year i'm like that's not what i'm saying i'm saying we don't do when questions in the video we haven't done one questions on videos for like years and people still ask it's like but me not saying pyro's coming this year or not it's not the same as saying it's not coming this year it's me saying i'm not saying when that's all it means it doesn't mean anything more than that
01:00:16
i had a i had a morning all right sebastian daniel max you did it you survived you survived star citizen life how do you feel relieved no it was pretty good yeah i might have lost one of my lives but i'm good you didn't get anybody in trouble i i see a couple messages on teams though so i'll probably have to deal with some but uh thank you so much for uh being on the show uh uh next week's uh inside star citizen uh what is it we've got we've got a look at uh um some of the updates to the character creator uh that are coming online in 317 and beyond uh the new uh dna head textures uh stuff with the eyes and the eyebrows and and and maybe maybe
01:01:05
if we can manage it a tease of some new hair stuff and then um i can't remember what the other one is planetary nav mesh uh discussion with the ai team about about getting ais that are going to be able to roam the surface of the planets those are coming in next week's isc and then we'll be right back here next week uh with the stars in life with the props team uh we're gonna jump into the pyro system and see if we can't uh make something uh uh fun uh to go into the pirate system with the props team next week so that's max so this direction that was max that was daniel good job on your first video daniel thank you uh that's i'm jared and uh we'll see you next week everybody take care
01:01:55
bye bye you

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.