Star Citizen Live: VFX Team Q&A

11 March 202201:04:031,781 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

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all right so this is our audio check and you've never seen star wars just learned that michael's never seen the star wars holiday special no i'm coming over there we're gonna i'm gonna show it to you we can watch it on vhs oh yeah oh yeah we can absolutely watch it on vhs you want to start the show sure let's just start the show let's just show your show we're talking about the star wars on vhs here so i'm moving to the uk in less than a month i'm going to bring this to you and we are going to we are going to watch we're going to watch it mike's never been excited no it's so good it looks good it's a father christmas on the front it's so bad oh yeah yeah that's the whole well it's life day
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hi everybody welcome to star citizen live uh vfx team q a or perhaps uh more appropriately the mike snowden vfx q a uh joining us on the show this week uh mike snowden hi mike thanks for having me thanks for being on the show i'm sorry i'm sorry uh because of scheduling we couldn't get the more of your team on but we appreciate you showing up uh this week um no problem for folks who don't know uh you know every show is somebody's first show and if this is your first show i'm sorry uh who is mike snowden i'm the vfx director here at cig so i i basically run the vfx department to the best of my ability
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you're also an avid uh a a vintage video game collector as i can see i am yes i am indeed um i'm not allowed any of this at home so it has to it has to come with me to work you you are in very much the same boat i am where where all the stuff that i can't fit at home i just bring to the office and use this part of part of my background that's all being packed up right now but uh but yeah it's it's you when i when i go to mikey's desk and i'm in the uk i instantly feel at home i'm like ah yes the geek nesting instinct i understand it well at least yours is all themed at least yours is all like a consistent theme mine is all over the place yeah i like to think that the real reason we're moving offices to a bigger place is so i can fit more
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more stuff i think that's the real reason i don't know it it's the new office is going to be pretty swank it might it might yeah it might have might affect the feng shui want to see either way if if you can't for any reason you come bring it to my studio space that work just just across the street all right what are we doing today we're talking vfx uh so if you're watching live on twitch.tv right now you can submit your questions with the word question in capital letters surrounded by brackets uh maybe i'll pick it maybe i won't uh make sure it's vfx related uh uh because we're talking vfx today if your question is uh uh uh uh where bad new merchantman or or or why salvage or whatnot this
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isn't gonna be the show this is mike snowden vfx the visual effects director uh we also put up a thread earlier in the week uh thank you christian from the community team for doing that and uh collecting questions let's jump into those questions while the ones that uh come in live come the emp effect has aged gracefully that's nice but it's starting to show its age next to the mantis qed or the new engine effects any aspirations for a polish polish pass polish polish pass yes absolutely yeah i mean thank you for saying the vapes gracefully that they they are quite old i would i would agree that they are um definitely an
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uh a prime candidate for for an improvement and especially because we have a lot of better options now with with the tool set that we've got so we've we've kind of massively expanded our gpu particle system since we did the emp effect and a lot lots of effects actually as well so yeah absolutely it would be it would be it is is on the list to to be updated yeah what's it going to look like well we'd have to go with that we'd have to go through the pipeline wouldn't we jared so we'd have to we'd have to go go through the vfx concept in process and work out what we can and can't do work out if there's any kind of things that the designers need from it that the current version doesn't offer and uh yeah that's how we kind of defined the look really just taking all
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that into consideration and concepting i just saw it so it's a back to one kind of thing with it oh yeah creating a new effect it's not just there and remastering no no no starting again really i mean to be to be honest we didn't even have vfx concept back then when we when we did the amp effect so uh we would definitely go through that that pipeline now yeah okay what's the news on a new quantum travel effect rework that that was mentioned back in 2020 we have been talking about our desire to update quantum travel for a while now yeah so i mean our stance well our position on that is that we it's not a purely vfx overhaul or rework it it's actually the the whole thing itself so the whole feature um including all the teams that that entail so so the
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game code um i guess the ship designers um so it's kind of like we we know what we want to do we've got some ideas about how we want to improve the visuals again similar or the same answer to the emp question we've got a lot more cool tools now that we can use to make those effects a lot better so yeah one once once that's in the schedule once everyone's kind of aligned on that in the company then that's when we'll we'll jump ahead again we'll we'll concept that um that as well yeah uh from the live chat golden triangles hi golden triangles welcome back uh in terms of budget which is more expensive a group of small dust particles or something like a lightning bolt and are the effects built differently that's an interesting question um i mean
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the lightning well i can't i can't that's why i have a vfx programmers uh i just look at pictures um definitely the lightning wood would on its own be more expensive than dust particles but it kind of depends on on what cost we're looking at so dust particles might actually um i guess if we're talking about like dust moats let's just say dust smokes for argument's sake the dust motes might be more expensive if we for example had a dust mow it's essentially a sprite anyway so it's a sprite based particle that's right up to the screen that might actually incur more of an overdraw cost than the lightning bolt would but really the the lightning bolts always going to have a lot more cost associated with it there's going to be cpu costs because we actually need to know the positioning of the lightning
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bolt uh for gameplay reasons to be able to damage or to interact with with players and vehicles and things like that so yeah that that would definitely be the most expensive overall um what was the other part of the question i forgot already no are the effects built differently yes they are built very differently they're actually um we've got like lightning effects are a kind of a sort of a subset of the particle system um so without kind of sharing my screen and showing the the fundamental differences it's probably a little bit difficult for me to describe it but yeah just dust motors would be built in a much more simplistic way to to the lightning like the regions we call them actually so yeah very different jude lux says are we getting moister
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eyeballs yet that's my main concern listen dude no no this one's for me this one's for me mike listen where's my puncheon there you go look at me look at me jude we showcase everybody here at star citizen that's my purpose that's my passion remember remember when i did an hour with producers on how they made schedules remember when i brought the whole it team in here because we showcased everybody in that week we showcased the people who made moist eyeballs because they're essential and they're valuable and their contribution matters in the scope of all star citizen i know you want to see everything all at once but that's just not the way this place works it's not the way the show works but we'll cover it all we'll get to it all at some point but their contribution matters and it's
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important and i value it so should you and that's a word from disco i feel like i want to stand up and do a slow clock you know something else someday someday hold on someday i'm going to do a show with the hr people like that's my threat that's my threat to to to market so now i'm going to show with hr we're going to talk about how to build cover letters and and how to get hired in the video game industry and everything like i'm going to do everybody before my time here is done we're showcasing everybody because that's my mission quite right too we'll play the role don't we oh i'm snarky today mike can you show us any ship tractor beam work in progress uh can i if you want to am i allowed to seriously am i listening
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yes you are you are absolutely allowed to show tractor beam work in progress there's no secret there i don't i don't have any videos of the truck to be we'll describe it uh you know let me show the concept so the so the well basically the the ship tractor beam is the the tractor beam itself even the fps one we're going to be improving because i'm going to give full disclosure i'm not really a fan of the tractor as it looks i think i'm allowed to say that i hope i am because i just have to be real dude yeah yeah i'm not i'm not a huge fan of it um we went through kind of a few iterations with it and yeah just just to be completely honest it just didn't quite end up it kind of serves a purpose and it's i mean it's a it's a really fun item it's a fun actual game mechanic but we know we can do
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better with the visuals basically we we we've got some yeah we've got some ideas on how we want to how do we want to improve it we've actually one thing that myself and rob do so rob rob is the senior vfx concept artist we kind of we work really closely together there's lots of back and forth um we talk about ideas he's a great guy for like kind of adding logic to ideas so it's not it's never purely visual we're always trying to think of how and why it would work and obviously with the parameters of of making it fun and being in a sci-fi universe but yeah we kind of we looked at things like we look at things like sonic waves and things like that for the tractor beam and we've got we've got a new gpu particle refraction option now which we didn't have before that's relatively new in our tool kit so i'd been playing around with using
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kind of a fully refractive beam effect as it were yeah sound pattern sound waves things like that so it's working progress it's something that i'm actually doing on the side really um but it's gonna look a lot better that's my promise that's my pledge and for folks like shout show shot scl is in the show where we normally show things i put mike on the spot there with the question but uh if we don't get it today because he's got to sit here and ask questions uh i got a sprint report in two weeks i'll see if i can't fit it in there absolutely yeah yeah so let's see when you first said it i was thinking salvage when you'd said when you said the question i was thinking it said salvage um next we'll show that stuff next quarter okay okay do you plan to physicalize bomb shock
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waves well we we do plan to because we have done so the the size 10 bomb that we released apache ago two patches ago um that that is physicalized yeah so i don't know i mean there's so many cool backer videos when we released that thing i messed that up i didn't read the rest of the question okay who's on another line do you plan to physicalize bond shock waves for rivers and water ah yes yeah um we actually do i can't really kind of give hard details on on that whole thing but we there's an expectation from chris the the water interaction is is kind of realistic and physical forces will will actually
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displace the water um so that that is definitely on the to-do list yeah uh as a follow-up uh from the live chat uh a lethal nimrod uh sometimes the bombs on the a2 don't have explosion effects which makes mobbing very sad and unrewarding they're just a bug obviously yeah that's just a bug i mean if they're not triggering then then we need to get on that and see what's going on there okay so yeah i'll talk to i'll talk to a wife's bomb and get him on it i'm gonna write a post-it note let's see are there plans for ship trailing like in quantum when inside a gas cloud
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yes there are so ship trailing like king quantum so all of the the kind of effect that we've got where it looks like the the ship is kind of displaced in mata and causing a trail yeah absolutely that was one of the things that we i think when we first were we've talked about sign distance fields probably a million times and we use it a lot or we plan to use it a lot more and that's the kind of thing that the scientist feels would allow us to do so we have when we're in gas clouds we're in uh volume uh planetary clouds as well we have like template effects that are spawned from the cloud data so i know that i know that we said don't talk about clouds uh that's another team the actual creation of the clouds is being done by by the art team and by uh the code side is cast as i think ali might have mentioned
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actually in his side star citizen but the vfx team work on like the interior effects for gas clouds and clouds so as part of that we think of it like templates so there's different types of clouds have a different set of effects like a different template for the vfx inside it and one of those categories of effects is is kind of uh mist or matter which depending on which kind of cloud you're in going across the the um the whole of the ship and creating trails for that reason so yes we would like to do that uh the gladius and the redeemer engines are lit as af they are can you you can see them well before the ships are entering radar range is this intended or will it be
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addressed and toned down yeah this is an interesting one so the gladius i i did some tests for for people were asking like design were asking to be able to see them like further away in the distance so we as with anything in in the game we have to kind of have lots with our particle effects and i think what was happening was yeah i think like the actual thruster items themselves were getting getting loaded out and the particles were getting loaded out but from a point of view of readability for the player that was that was problematic so i did a test on the using a min pixel distance so i can i'm in pixel size so i can force a particle to be like a minimum amount of pixels on the screen and that can force it to draw further
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away than it than it otherwise would do it would otherwise be cold so um it's still in testing phase i guess so it won't be it's not been propagated across all ships it might need to be changed depending on how design feel about it uh longer term so that's one of those examples where some of the ships have have got this test applied to them but not all the ships because that wouldn't be practical to to do so yeah hopefully that answers the question it's one of those things where because we are operating a live environment in the middle of our development we have the opportunity to do that kind of a b testing and see see how it works in a practical environment and see what the majority of folks say there's actually another another question that says do you plan on making maneuvering thruster vfx more visible yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean i mean i
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can give a bit more about that question because i think that one i guess that there's always i've seen a few questions on this i know i know it's um a talking point and has been discussed before but some of the maneuvering thrusters are kind of quite like physically small so the actual effects themselves probably don't convey the amount of power that that that maneuvering thruster is putting out to keep the the ship afloat like when they're on uh like places with gravity one of the problems we've got is that we kind of take our cues from the physical thruster itself so if the item itself is quite small it's difficult for us to if we kind of oversize the actual effect that's that's going to look weird that's probably not the intention of the of like the people who created the look of the ship in the first place so we have to find that balance and this
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there's a bit of back and forth it's the kind of thing that we do have some we do have the ability to kind of discuss that with the people making the ship so if we if we look at the ship you know what if this would probably be better if we could make that maneuvering first just a little bit bigger that would give us give us a bit more uh more scope to create a more uh powerful looking effect then that that conversation does happen so i think it's i think it's personally if i'm allowed to have a personal opinion i think it's really cool when we can see those lights in the distance and like you know it looks like a moving star and you have to be like you know you know what is that yeah you know and then you know when they're in the the the idea being that you know when they're in the distance you know it's one light like a formation
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then as you get closer the one light becomes five lights you know as they spread out kind of thing like oh you know okay oh i used my swear my jar is not here let's talk about fire a lot of questions about fire uh for for a while there we were updating pretty regular regularly through the sprint report with fire stuff and then fires just seems to have gone cold uh haven't seen fire in a while uh uh uh warm warm our hands in our hearts mickey snowden give us an update on fire you just call me mikey snowden is that what i just did i think so i'm not sure i'm clearly in a mood right now i'm clearly in the mood today um so yeah i think one that i've actually i've got some notes written down for fire because obviously there
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was a lot of questions about fire and understandable so it's quite it's quite a big feature it's quite exciting and there will be big since since the gameplay time we spoke about it we've been actively working on fire the whole time uh but when i say we it's been mostly code so it's been leo our principal vfx programmer who i always ask to do these things by the way but he was away today he was on pto so even before i got a chance to ask him he was like before you ask i'm on pto but he he very kindly wrote some notes down for me but yeah a lot of the work that leo is doing now and has been doing in that time frame where you've not really seen much um on inside status as a citizen is just because it's kind of it's the less glamorous side of it so
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it's kind of more in the back end um getting the fire he's written here we're still working on getting fire integrated with different systems we're quite far along with that work and that what he means by that is kind of making sure it works correct with the room system making sure it's going to work correctly with with uh with with the player with characters with with the ai and things like that um so making sure it's like robust and actually triggers all the things that it should trigger so like room pressure warning systems uh all that kind of thing and and much more complex stuff that i probably don't even understand as well and and to address the inevitable question yep there it is uh is this all leading to a flamethrower at some point to a personal flamethrower weapon
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yeah probably i'm pretty sure many in fact yes it definitely will we're going to commit the weapon content feature team to this right now a creative video guy and the vfx director we are committing the weapon content feature team to making a personal flamethrower uh i wait to hear from johnny josephius i think it was him to ask for it will we get the the new dynamic landing dust for vehicles but for water we just put out a river thing gosh was it yesterday i don't know i'm working in different weeks worth of shows so but but yeah so then all those really cool dynamic lighting effects that we've added in recent patches uh other are there was going to be continued but for water
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yeah absolutely yeah yeah um it goes it goes back to what we were talking about with the with bombs actually displacing the water it's all part of we kind of see it all as the same thing we basically need to be able to have water bodies water volumes that can can be interacted with it can be displaced and yeah the ship the ship wakes or the vehicle wakes is probably one of the easier parts of that um but yeah that's absolutely the plan yeah uh and as a follow-up uh will dust like well dust like blown up from ships fall down on our helmets and block or reduce our visibility at some point if there's anything uh the star citizen backers enjoy it's reduced visibility like anything that can remotely reduce their
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visibility is is a big win yeah yeah we are we are as i said we are planning to do that have we got some of that in that's we're definitely planning on doing that um it that all kind of ties into the work that we did i guess 2019 now with with getting the frost and slush and rain onto the visor it's it's all the same type of work where it's kind of yeah it's it's tied in with like how the how we get other layers um like visual layers onto the onto that visor and how do we get them to play together so it's definitely planned but there there are quite a lot of complexities with it one thing i don't know if this is relevant but one thing when we when we brought out the the tank
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we i think did we show this or talk about this we like the idea that of a physicalized shock wave being able to displace dust from the surface of characters and vehicles but but conversely we like the idea of being able to put dust onto players from like nearby impacts and things like that um so all of that is is definitely planned and i'm very doable we just need to coordinate with the other teams again it's similar to similar kind of thing where we we need to just work out how where the roles are there like who like we don't want to put the character out some of the pressure to to kind of uv map all the like extra have extra uv maps and stuff on the visors um but yeah i love that kind of thing they're the kind of effects that i really enjoy like
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that very interactive immersive type of effect dynamic uh what's your mug say my mug says uh they up it's a it's a staffordshire staffordshire mug and that's uh that's how we greet each other and what mouse is that that's the corsair scimitar rgb moba mmo yeah people asking me well like what what macros i've got mapped to the buttons one two three twelve yeah i haven't got any uh let's see uh have you worked on vfx for waterfalls do we have one pulse yet maybe it's maybe in squadron i don't know we have i literally don't know
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we haven't we are okay we're actually working on them right now caleb uh our principal vfx artist just yesterday in fact was on a call with him where he showed me because he's in a different uh he's in frankfurt uh he started rendering out he started doing a new simulation in film effects to to have um kind of like a yeah like more more interesting waterfall visuals so yeah we're actively working on that and it's looking pretty nice and yes before you ask there will be treasure behind the waterfall you can't make the game without it it's a crime it's a crime against the geneva gaming convention of there's nothing more disappointing you see that for you know you've got to go through it and there's nothing there it's very disappointing
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now i'm committing the uh mission feature team to putting treasure behind real question from garrett wagner real question why did the vfx and star citizen look so stinking good come on because we've got a great team and we've got but also we've got we've got great um leadership who kind of push us to and allow us to to really go above and beyond to create create high quality effects and for that i am very grateful uh flip side of that from killer djk these vfx are crap no uh will we get fine-grained options with the new vfx's that come online so we can try to preserve fps but still get uh decent eye candy
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yeah yeah this is something that i was actually talking to my leads about the other day and something i talked to ali ali brown often min max settings dynamic scalability to the particles things like that that's that's something that usually comes in once you've got the tool set kind of locked down more so there's no more no more kind of feature requests for the particle system itself that's when we then start to look at look making that that toolkit or that particle system more more dynamically scalable more robust and you you need to kind of look at actually what what is it the where do we where do we claw back that fps or where are we actually using up that fps we start to look at it we've got we've got some really nice profile and tools actually with the but yeah absolutely we want to do that
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we don't just want to fry people's graphics cards which we don't do by the way but uh yeah let's see we're burning through the questions here uh uh orion star hunter in the chat asks uh uh oh no that's wrong i'm sorry tone uh tone tone full tone full ass will clothing and armor drip when emerging from water see tone full drip is not a vfx thing it's a it's it's the way in which you carry yourself and it's the way in which you maintain and curate the very clothing and armor uh that you're referring to uh drip does not come from external sources like
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water drip comes from within do you need to elaborate a lot go ahead go ahead go ahead um will they drip water like when you get out when you get out of the river you're gonna drip um i mean definitely definitely the the the outfits and the characters need to kind of have that wetness so that again that will be something that i'd be talking to early brown about and we'd be working with the the people like again like character all the people working on characters as well uh would they drip i don't know if we've got as far as like actually dripping sort of like if i had my arm up would it drip off me um maybe you know you know tier two uh uh
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tier that's all part of our new uh moist armor uh uh feature set that we'll be discussing in ise soon i like that word moist that's a good word i hate that word moist it's although it is one of my two starter words in a in wordle you start with you you start with crane and then you just second word is moist and between those two you've got like all the major the secret that's what's been going wrong i'm still undefeated approaching 100 games i've been speaking english my whole life what will repaired material look like will there be anything to differentiate
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differentiate it from standard unpainted materials or will they be the same so i'm being a little bit cheeky by answering this one because it's technically not something that my team will be in charge of in terms of how that looks but i do know that we are not planning we're basically planning on it to look to not look pristine so you could never repair say there was like a logo or decal or a decal on on your wing and you you were repairing that wing it wouldn't that decal wouldn't come back again it would be like a kind of a i don't know exactly but it it definitely would not look pristine because that wouldn't really make sense would it you know how does that how does that painted um logo come back on but that's just me as a vfx artist
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saying what i think i know yeah zulu foxtrot is asking about night vision uh you'll want to check out our q a we just did with ali brown a couple weeks ago uh for graphics engineering as that's a graphics engineering question as opposed to a vfx question that's good yeah but check that out basically the answer is at some point but uh he gets into more details there uh are particle effects budgets shuffled around a lot or are there large amounts of room for growth as vfx are developed i remember when we were shown engine exhaust being transitioned from particle effects to shader effects uh yeah yeah i mean the budgets change depending on
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the budgets do change i mean the weird thing is i'm working on this game is like people get better quality graphics cards it kind of it's very much tied to like the the hardware that you're working with or that you've got um but budgets do shift around we we i guess i try and give like a more specific example so an example of the budget changing would be like if we were using cpu particles like the old particle system that we've got that we had we would not be able to use as many individual particles so we'd have a lower count limitation to us using the gpu particles so absolutely when once upon a time we only had cp particles the budget was a lot lower
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and once we moved towards gpu the the budget was higher because it wasn't that we were taking a portion of the budget but the we we just had a the count limit was was was uh much more much more much less limited for us so yeah the budget does shift around i mean it's weird when you're making a game as big as ours as well it's really hard it's not like a finite you can't just get given like a budget from from again from ali brown like you can't just go yeah you can only use this portion of the budget on this very specific thing because you've got no limitation on how many ships could be in in the vicinity as well so you might you might kind of you work towards a budget for an individual effect say the gladius uh maneuvering thruster but if there's like 10 20 gladius then that budget has shifted dramatically and actually this ties in
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with the question about having dynamic scalability to the particle system that's the kind of thing that where we need it to be dynamic we can't really make those in those decisions when we're authoring the effects there's got to be some kind of dynamic element to the to the to the engine itself how it's deciding what to draw and what not to draw uh without kind of killing killing what it looks like to the player so yeah uh for those who maybe haven't been watching the programs for as long as we've been making them now uh we're better part of it almost a decade now uh when we talk about cost and budget and stuff like this that this is a this is a resource allocation thing in the computer it's everything you ask your computer to do slows it down just a little little tick so we always got to balance where we spend uh those resources it's not like a money thing or
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whatever i just saw some stuff come up why is your shell why are your shelves uh almost empty because i'm in the process of moving i move uh hoping to move exactly a month from today uh we'll see and then jared is clearly a less is more person no jared is a morris more person jared is definitely a morris more person uh they don't call me extra nothing for nothing is the vfx team applying performance improvements such as multi-threaded implementations more gpu intensive or not spending much time on these now looking for more visual fidelity first all right basically they're asking if how if you're working on performance
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improvements sorry i got a little weird there when i copied over i guess it's kind of a follow-up from from to the other question but uh um yeah yeah i mean what was the question again sorry i just loaded my editor basically there i guess i guess they're asking are you do you work on optimizations as you go or is this something that you that you wait for at the end kind of thing so some things you have to kind of wait for at the end some things you can work on you can authorize as you go some things if you try to optimize you go you're just repeating work over and over again and it's not very good what's your case yeah that's that's actually a really good question so we we kind of optimized as we go we have to we have to do that to an extent and i'll give you a reason why say i was working on a say i was working on the tractor beam and i was using a
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count of like a million particles for the for like a relatively short short effect uh it might look great it might get people might look at it and go yeah that looks fantastic show what show like show chris show the designers etc etc and they're like yeah yeah that's definitely what we're looking for we're really happy with that yeah thank you that's great and then i start to then i actually optimize it to the point where i couldn't i couldn't really use a million parts i could only use a thousand and it doesn't any it doesn't look like it did anymore for that reason then that's that's that's a bad thing there's no point kind of you have to factor in rough budgets while you're making the thing all the way through the the kind of lifetime of working on it otherwise you're just setting up realistic expectations so it's kind of somewhere in the middle you've always got it in
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your mind you're always being sensible but once you've got the you do you do still need to have the freedom to get the effect looking as good as you know it needs to be or you know it can be and then once you have done that that's when you will typically do in a more linear fashion through a pipeline you will do a more a more kind of full and final optimization pass just there's all kinds of things like trying to trying to make it uh can you can you make the particles deterministic instead of non-deterministic which will which will kind of be an incremental saving things like that so yeah you're kind of somewhere in the middle you're always thinking of the budget while you're working on the effect but you will do a final optimization pass towards the end this question the chat i want to
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rephrase a little bit uh it's common in some other games uh competitive games to reduce the graphics and everything to to lower standards so because it happens to reduce some of the vfx budgets usually uh you end up removing smoke you end up removing dust and other things that are designed to obscure your vision uh and you and in some games not all games but in some games it gives players a competitive advantage to bring all those things down and get rid of them um what are your thoughts on that are are you considering alternatives for that or preventative stuff from that well we talked earlier about being able to reduce the quality of vfx you know through sliders and so this is do would you consider a mode that just eradicates them like they're like there are in some games i don't i don't think
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our directive is is to be able i think we don't want to give players competitive advantages by reducing graphics options i don't think that's kind of the ethos of star citizen you know because that's just it i mean my favorite views of vfx artists i hate the idea that like the competitive gamers just won't ever have the effects on the screen exactly yeah so we need to find the balance i mean we obviously don't want to be uh crushing people's performance but i i wouldn't like the idea that we we're kind of forcing people to to hide the effects um i just think that that's yeah that's not really in the spirit as the game we're making we used to use we used to do stuff like that back in the uh old battlefield 1942 and tribes two days and stuff you used
00:38:41
to be able to reduce the gravitational point where you were basically playing on like lot five and so and so so the player characters really stood out from the front from the background you like you just need a new just need to know where the walls were you know don't get me wrong i'm off i'm all for giving yourself a competitive advantage where you can wait to take it like i used to play counter-strike 1.6 and i used to actually i had i'd drawn like a dot in the middle of my screen not that it didn't mean much good i was never that good at it but yeah i understand where people are coming from with that i miss shaz but uh regarding fire plus salvage effects a bit more gameplay related but have you heard or had any work on potential hazards whilst salvaging always like a person who used the word
00:39:29
wasps uh i.e accidentally lasering a fuel line or causing a fire or explosion anything so this is ultimately like a design a design decision so i'm what i i'm just gonna speculate and and this is really again just me thinking about this from a point of view if that was a requirement how would we deal with it uh from the vfx point of view i know it's been discussed i know i've heard people talking about this in various conversations we've had not not not too long ago it's how do you mark it up i think is the is the thing though it's how complex does it need to be like we i know that there's certain ships in the with the damage shader where they've got kind of once you've once you've stripped away the damage sorry once you've stripped away the top layer of the whole some of the ships and you can
00:40:17
do that just when you shoot the ships with the damage shader as it is but that's kind of similar to what salvaging might be there are lots of pipes just in in the art itself so in the in the shader um that'll be quite tricky to mark up i think from the point of view of having that pipe have gameplay implications so i don't think that it would make sense to go that detailed with it um but yeah i i think that like the risk versus reward element of of salvage gameplay there's probably going to be things like again i can't really i can't clarify too much because it's a design question but i i i know that that's in the mix i know that's in the discussion and if that needs to be done like there's ways that we can um have our effects from from those
00:41:05
situations uh any plans to create greater visual effects around ambient temperature on our ships or characters a more heat waves up a hot ship kind of stuff like what just like sort of a little slot a little bit of a little bit of refractive yeah you you know that you that that that that shot from like top gun when the when when when the ship you know goes in front of the camera and you see all the the the heat come in the distance yeah you know funny thing is we we actually used to have that we had like a heat haze with the old planet effects and i'm sure the people who remember and i think this has been called out by by some backers as not being in the new um but yeah i mean again we we we've got we've got like a new gpu refraction is really expensive that's what i should
00:41:54
say like that's a really expensive over draw transparency sorting they're kind of their real real kind of big thorny issues when you're working on vfx just in game engines in general to be fair so that could quickly become very expensive but yeah we do have a we have a better potentially cheaper gpu refraction now let's be honest we're going to need to have that kind of hazy heat effect for fire anyway yeah i think that it's feasible that once we've once we've sold it for that we can start to look at it propagating into more general uh general circumstances there's always an interesting uh a phenomenon in star citizen fandom that
00:42:42
you know ostensibly were were an outer space game but as we had uh when we added planets everything became about planets and then when it went underground it became about cave you know the questions is for people uh now that we're talking about rivers there's a lot of questions about water and specifically underwater with rivers and underwater content coming what is the high level plan for underwater particle effects will we see haze refractions like that suspended dirt particles mud clouds there's just or suspended styrations that's a good i like suspended styrations yeah but what's the danger right i don't know i'm not i'm not i'm i i'm not an underwater person i'm gonna i'm gonna write down all my poster suspended starrations i just like saying it though
00:43:31
it's a great it's a great phrase it's a good illustration yeah um kind of sounds like a i don't know some kind of ambient audio playlist um yeah yeah so obviously rivers rivers are very exciting for for the backers and for for the people here at cig that there's going to be there's one toll there's loads of potential once once we get them kind of propagating across all these locations when we get to to do the effects side of it because obviously as you know the first the first iteration it doesn't have effects in it um we're going to probably want all of that aren't we like it's the basically my my stance whenever people ask me about these kind of what will you be trying to do it's always like well we'll try to make it as
00:44:19
realistic as we can we'll try and make it as dynamic as we can that's that's the expect that's the expectation from chris at the top um so we'll we'll need to deal with that when when we get it kind of scheduled in so yeah i mean i think fog fogging underwater would would probably be more on the graphic side of things or or the program is kind of working on on rivers and water bodies in general but then we could probably look at we're probably going to have to look at surface types for the actual the soil that that layer at the bottom of the rivers and you could probably want that to displace when when the player kind of displaces the the surface and maybe that needs to lead to kind of a more more misty look to it maybe we need to use space loop particles we'd probably approach it
00:45:06
in a single way that we do with gas cloud interior so we might have like template effects depending on the type of water there's going to be more swampy water potentially again i'm just thinking future iterations by the way i'm not committing um to like immediate uh things here but yeah i guess all of that yeah player players interacting with with all the kind of small little bits of particular we can do all that with our screen space collision so why would we not yeah i think it's in this is a good opportunity to just talk about greater star citizen philosophy here for a bit uh our goal is always and we've said this a lot take it to the point of realism bring it back to the point of fun uh but there's also another underlying consideration that that there are games that specialize in one
00:45:55
particular aspect like people were bringing up hard space ship breaker you know a game that's whose sole focus is salvage uh or or a game like subnautica whose sole focus is underwater and it's like this it's we are a sandbox game you know so so our our focus is a bit broader than that stuff so it's it's we always want to take these things as far as we can like that will always be our intention that will always be our desire the question is only ever how far is that before it begins to affect other aspects of our sandbox that are just as important either in time resources like in the physical world or resources in the virtual world like this it's always just a it's a question of how it fits in with everything else it will always determine how far we take a
00:46:43
thing our desire will always be to the absolute end and we will and i think we've proven over over uh what is now when we're now in our 10th year here that we will always push things as far as we think they can go and continue to push continue to refine and continue to develop and stuff like this so it's it's a harder question to answer than that than it seems it's it's we're going to do everything that we can within the sandbox universe that we are creating it's just always important to remember when managing your expectations that there are dedicated games to that kind of stuff we are not that we are that we are the sandbox we are dedicated to a life in the persistent universe kind of thing so it's all those considerations
00:47:33
have to be taken equally it fires a good example of that jared because we we already have i've been clear like the the first iteration of that is is like interiors v specifically vehicle interiors uh if if we just try to just do fire full-on propagation for star citizen you're looking at like burning forests yeah if our game was burned the universe then then yes then obviously you know at some point you would expect fire everything in the universe to be able to catch fire but because it is one aspect of our of our entire sandbox it will be limited but it will be limited after we push it as far as we can so i already asked that question why is it still on my screen um
00:48:22
will we be seeing lighting lightning effects and other things in the gas cloud interiors uh if uh uh and if so what will they do to ships and people in and out of ships well the last parts again the design question so we'll we'll just go with the visual will be seeing lightning effects and other things in gas cloud interiors yeah absolutely well we obviously showed which star citizen was it um sorry which says some comments we showed like a a a video that we did where we got lightning requirements going on in yeah yeah um and yeah that's absolutely that's absolutely what we are doing or as i said we're going to be doing that's what we are doing um can i say anything about squadron 42 yeah that's uh like i said uh i'll go i'll go ahead see you yeah you said coil sorry yeah uh
00:49:12
yeah uh we showcased the coil back in our squadron 42 vertical slice a couple years ago and if you if you can track that down on the youtube uh if you haven't seen it you can see the process of navigating an enormous gas cloud that has lightning and stuff then actual you know damages and effects to the ship as it goes through so yeah um we've actually we've lightnings are similar to kind of the the process of working on the fire so we got we get to we got to a point with the lightning where lots and lots of code work was done lots of visual work was done but then you get to a point where a lot of the work that then has to be done to kind of get this properly working game is more again less glamorous it's more in the back end it's more kind of just making this thing work with systems and work work with networking and stuff so we we do have the ability to
00:50:01
the lightning regions if you drop the light region in a level and the the surface types are set up correctly in a level then it will it will strike it will strike a player it will strike a current a vehicle it's all networked as well uh it will work we can design i've got kind of full control over what the lightning actually does we've got it we had it killing people if it hits them as you probably expect but we've got con there's a conductivity setting in the in the service type setting so you can make it you can make a service more conductive less productive and then there's lots of interesting gameplay requirements for that uh in terms of the actual spawning of the lightning within a gas club that's the interesting thing and that again i've probably said this already way back but we we've got the sdfs the gas we
00:50:52
create sign distance fields from the the gas cloud vdbs so we know that we can use that to spawn the lightning where it becomes a design conversation is do design want the lightning to spawn more regularly to prevent players going to certain areas of the gas cloud i.e the thicker the gas club becomes do you want the lightning spawning more regularly or do you want rather than spawning more regularly would a designer maybe want just one much more powerful light and bolt to strike the player so all of these kind of things we can do we take our instructions from design we're always kind of trying to i've said this before but vfx team we we we kind of serve two masters if that makes sense we want to make it look as good as we can for the art direction but
00:51:39
we also need to make sure we're hitting the the gameplay requirements um from the design teams hopefully that answers the question am i rambling vfx are traditionally uh downstream of a lot of things would you would you consider vfx a downstream team in a lot of aspects i don't like that term by the way i'm not a fan even though i use it myself i prefer support yeah downstream makes sense in as much as we typically can't do our work until other people are done the process has cascaded down so that's where downstream comes from but for me downstream kind of conjures images of
00:52:26
like i don't know like the the muddy bog at the end of the pretty stream like with a discarded shopping trolley so i like to think of myself as where the suspended striations are yeah exactly but yes we are yeah we are along with audio yeah uh i bring that up because the questions is what uh what are you currently working on for pyro and i was wondering if anything at this point or if pyro has made it to you yet or not i mean it's made it to me by ian and with lots of lots of requests hey mike hey mike um yeah we have actually done quite we have done some work or quite a lot of work for pyro uh i've been in tons and tons of
00:53:12
meetings where we've signed up to do more work so obviously this pilot pirate there's a lot that comes with pyro there's the actual um gas clouds themselves so hey guess what lightning is going to be needed in pyro pirate gas clubs as we've already shown um but then it's just all the different locations that have been powered there's all the planets there's going to be different themes visual themes we've done some we've done some kind of preparation for for the different planetary effects for the pyro locations um then there's just the actual landing zone well the actual rest stops and locations and things like that um so yeah so some of the work's done lots of it is is is ready to be done and kind of part of the part of the schedule but we won't be
00:54:00
oh because we are support team or downstream we won't be as polished at the moment as some of the other teams are i've seen lots of cool pirate stuff uh and he worked on the uh uh most backers will know but maybe if you don't the dying star from arena commander is the it was based on the pyro system uh have you done anything for the dying star in pyro yet the actual dying star as opposed to the iranian commander dying star no short answer fishing i really hope fires will not burn indefinitely for the sake of gameplay well i can tell you they're not going to burn indefinitely for the sake of performance
00:54:48
a fire will only continue to burn while there are solid material or gases to fuel it and where a fire is burning changes constantly will star citizens fires behave dynamically like real world fires i am prepped for this question uh thanks to leo again so leo's leo's lovely answer here is that for the full systemic fire in the pu it is modeled on real-world fire behavior so it does need fuel oxygen and heat it will react accordingly if fuel or oxygen is missing so so to give an example if there is no no fuel left obviously the fire will stop burning if if if something if there's no oxygen in a room so like if the safety systems kind of shut a room down then the fire will stop burning and it will it won't just switch off we'll
00:55:36
we'll have it kind of visually looking correct for that and the play will be able to see what's going on through the visuals um having said that we we can add infinite resources for the fire and that's actually been requested through designers so the system itself is fully dynamic but the designers do and have requested the ability to have a fire that's like constantly spawning and then example what there and that's it wouldn't make sense if it was like a like a pile of logs or something that's burned forever but we can have a like a pipe say there's a fuel pipe that that's a good way that we could kind of allow design to build in some some kind of barriers or some some blockers or reasons not to go somewhere by just keeping that field burning constantly so yes and now i guess
00:56:28
we're almost done we've only got five minutes left uh how does the effect culling in star citizen work can objects block or redirect smoke and other effects like building walls can yeah so this one this is interesting because the particles on their own don't really know like there's never a concept of that just just by if i just place a big smoke effect in a room nothing's going to stop that particle as it is from just kind of going outside the the the room and certainly it's not gonna react to the to the ceiling and crawl along it having said that if we're clever about it and again for fire we are going to be wanting to do this try not to commit overload to some of these facts but yeah but for fire like
00:57:15
we want we want smoke crawling along ceilings eventually that's something that we aspire to be able to do that's just how you mark it up so maybe again we use side distance fields a lot maybe we have a similar kind of setup there um i know we've we've actually played around with that in some of our fire work so far these areas actual screen space collision on certain effects it kind of depends on what the what the effect is i guess but yeah yeah it's just depend again it kind of depends what the game needs and what what design they're asking for what are asking for we can absolutely make it do that but it might be more complicated to get to get it to kind of look visually right as a sort of follow-up to that to take take that back up into space uh have you has anyone considered applying the sign
00:58:06
distance fields for effects related to entering and exiting gas clouds it would be impressive to see a large ship emerge from the cloud bank and have the mist streaming off of its hull yeah chris wants that so it's gonna happen everybody wants that yeah but it's a great example of uh it is a good example of how we can use an sdf uh it's it's a little bit tricky because the the gas clouds themselves or the volumetric the planetary clouds themselves they're not going to react so it's not like we're going to kind of morph the the actual the the volumetric form itself but if we if we do it with parts because which we'll try and do we need to just make it kind of look like it's connected to the to the cloud so uh it's quite a tricky one to do um we've already actually
00:58:56
done some experiments with it trying not to give away spoilers but it's something that we've definitely kind of worked on visually as i say chris chris wants that i understand why because it's a great idea so yeah yeah that's another another one that i'm sort of saying yeah definitely what's a backlog last question what's a backlog it's a big thing yeah um no last question uh uh take us on a tour of what's behind you starting with the turtles tournament fighters well i put this here for you jared it's it's no it's no secret but yeah i was not good at tournament fighters but firebase i appreciated that it existed 16 meg cart it's amazing yeah that's a power version
00:59:45
you just had the point of things we're not gonna have time to pick everything up so just point at everything and tell us what it is uh uh mega sg super nt so they're basically hardware mega driving super nintendo or genesis super nintendo emulators that's the sega saturn that's an xbox ogx box the crystal one that's my dreamcast games sega saturn games mostly certain games super famicom super nintendo some playstation including wing commander four more certain games loads of junk under there unsorted um wink finder four big box pc private to the darkening super star wars super famicom um cybernator which is a brilliant sort of mech side-scrolling shooting game sega saturn steering wheel arcade racer
01:00:38
some arcade sticks yeah did you did you put that cover on the xbox the the translucent cover no no this was this is the crystal crystal pack yeah the it was kind of i think it's the 1.6 uh the model it's a later edition with the smaller remember that time when everything was coming in translucent cases so nice it was such a nice nice 90s aesthetic although that was obviously to the 2000s but but that was like one of the last vestiges of the uh the translucent case you got the matching translucent controller to go with it is that a duke or is that the smaller one it's the smaller one not the duke yeah there's loads more as well but you can't see this off camera there's a wii u down there there's my dreamcast
01:01:25
there's a playstation one and nintendo 64. 2064. when i got my first credit card and immediately went over limit and destroyed my credit for like 10 years after that that's my that's my lasting memory of the n64 all right thank you mike thank you for being on the show thanks for thanks for talking uh vfx uh to the folks who had to listen to the show sorry for my constant tapping thing it like it didn't occur to me until like two minutes before the end of the show that this is probably really annoying with the table mic so really apologize for that happening throughout the show join us again on isc next week uh isc next week uh we we we are talking uh uh
01:02:14
looting and selling in alpha 317 uh with with the changes to to loot that are coming and the addition of being able to sell uh uh all that loot now that you that you're collecting and an update on medical in alpha gameplay uh and then a discussion of where we want to take the system after that that's coming in and start an inside star citizen next week and then scl uh i actually don't know because we just had to reschedule our guest they just told me they couldn't make it so i don't know who's going to be on seo but i'm sure it'll be great oh speaking of rescheduling uh the eupu gameplay feature team will be coming back on march 25th so not next friday but the friday after that so that show that we had to reschedule from a couple
01:03:02
weeks ago it's happening on the 25th uh we're using all the same questions that were already pulled in and so so look out for that on the 25th [Music] yeah so that's that's what i got right now uh that's mike uh that's me um this is my uh ever dwindling uh office uh this this this this is a copy of rogue one on vhs the best way to watch star wars movies if you're our generation and uh we'll see you next week everybody take care i definitely i don't know what i ate or drank this morning but i'm probably gonna get an email
01:04:02
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.