Star Citizen: Bugsmashers! - Breaking up with the Sabre

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:06

   [Music] everyone welcome to bug smashers I'm your host mark gaben I have my good friend here Patrick Salerno and he's gonna show us what well I've got a bug I gotta fix the saber for some reason when saber smashes into things it doesn't blow up correctly so I'm gonna blow it up so you're gonna go pop pick up yep fix it I'm good let's fix it so I recently got a bug for the saber and the bug was that when a ship destroys its nose just kind of hangs there and the rest of the ship just spirals away right

2. 00:00:53

   there's no breakup of the pieces so this comes straight to me so I took a look at the saber and I took a look at the ticket and watch the video and someone kind of just rammed the ship into a rock and exploded and spiraled away so I'm like hmm what could be causing that right so what I did was I already fixed the bug I'm gonna go through the process as to how I fixed it it's usually a day or two process as I go and trial and error on my way through sort of various features so since I figured out that we ended up adding a delay feature to some of the debris and the order that debris needs to break off with I came up with let's see here we got a saber on our screen here so when we're looking at the saber here first thing I do is I'm trying to figure out what pieces break off or what it's the most important thing for me now there's two ways I can do that in the ship here I'm looking and

3. 00:01:41

   I'm saying well here's my nose right and you know it's God's a mess and damage and then these are parts that kind of break off with the ship now what I found out is well there's really no effects things had changed I needed to reorder this stuff and add new features to it to bring it in line what I have here is a tool that shows the difference between two xml's so I have the old and I have the new version and I won't go into too many details the specifics of this but I ended up changing pretty much every single part I either added new effects I added the way it breaks off of the ship I changed how the pieces are layered and how quickly they come off now in the xml we can see one at a time I came in and will add go to my fixed one here update that so if we take a look at our

4. 00:02:37

   object I ended up adding a bunch of effects to it as well because he was missing effects so let's hop in and see what it looks like prix fixe so what I do is I hop into the editor and I'm like well you know someone said the ship's not braking correctly let's find out got a couple cheats for myself dev hacks alright great so now if I shoot the ship I can check multiple things I can check the DV twos I can check the damage now from what I'm seeing we're getting some effects right but there's nothing to do too much going on ship blows up all right we're at the functionality part but we noticed that as the ticket says the nose kind of stays where it is so now the first thing I did was break the part back piece by piece now if you're just a ship and you're

5. 00:03:24

   peppering along the top of the ship boom it's just gonna blow up right what happens well the nose stayed but the body starts going forward so I'm like okay bug is reproducible come in and shoot the other one see how many pieces break off all right now it's time to get to work we have successfully reproduced the issue so from there what I do is I go into 3d studio Max and I try and see how the pieces actually break apart right and in here I have a variety of different ways to see what's happening so I'm coming in as you can see I've got this list down the side this is actually the hierarchy of the ship it's sort of like the skeletal bone structure of how it's set up so when I click a wing the wing is gonna detach we can see down here jump straight to wing and now I've got the wing geometry and these parts so I'm coming in I'm taking a look I'm checking these little green squares you

6. 00:04:11

   see here these are called helpers they end up being effects making sure that when a piece explodes melted metal happens because what happens is I'll get a bug for say a piece of debris detaching but for me it's what's called kind of like a rabbit hole notice a few other things that I can quickly fix while I go in there so I ended up going in tweaking all the damage tweaking how the debris hops off and then I went into the ship and I shot it so now that I did a couple changes in there what I do is I come in here I updated my XML and some tweaks come in to leave my ship restart the game now I use a ship setup level which gives me various lighting conditions to check under this is good for testing now boom there so now we have new effects debris kind of flies off and goes and this is kind of what

7. 00:05:00

   we're intending when he toned down my damage so I can pick off each piece so what I'm doing is making sure that every single component on a ship that can detach does correctly detach all the pieces that detach with it also detach with it and that the probabilities I've set for the way the debris actually flies off are correctly interpreted so now the cool thing about this is if I'm looking in the XML over here let's see under say nose for example we have this line here on top and if we look under the old one I noticed that you know it's it's got its mass and it's got it stuff but well check this out it doesn't actually get a CH so we have this piece of code called attach ratio and attach probability and we also have other things called like random force

8. 00:05:49

   and base force this is this is like X Y Z so when the nose detach is from a ship musical right but the body needs go and the wings need to fly off to the sides so I say you know forceps a to arbitrarily go that way go that way how much it's gonna spin etc etc and then I come down to each part and I say well when the nose is destroyed I want to be a slight probability of everything else coming off - so I had to reorder these from the original and basically nose and body should always detach right on destruction for effect but it has kind of a probability to do it and a delay to it once I'm done with all that I kind of do that to each and every component that does detach and then I go back in and I start just sort of picking it apart now if I blow up the nose

9. 00:06:39

   we can see the nose actually flies away we are now working as intended after going in and tweaking all of the damaged components now what I do after this if I've placed effects or I've done anything like that I send this back to the testers when I'm done and I ask them to reproduce the work make sure that what I've done has made it into the game and then I also send my temporary particle effects that you see flying off the ship right now I send those to the effects guys to make sure that I'm in line because I don't actually make say the particles themselves what I do is I go into a library and I'll start placing down one so fire sparks etc etc and you know try and place it logically make sure all the damage works ship melts away so on and so forth and then once I realize that yes debris is flowing all if particles are happening things are spinning I realized the ticket is that

10. 00:07:27

    completely and I commit my work but that's pretty much it a little bit of back and forth between XML when I hop into Max and make sure that all my detachable components work together and that they're actually flying off as anticipated and then in the editor I test the setup working live in game under various lighting conditions and I blow it up in as many ways as possible to make sure that it blows up correctly otherwise that's pretty much it problem solved bug completed just for a quick before-and-after again we will just get the old file and we'll delete this undo my delete and bring it back this refreshes the scripts so it knows it's up then I hop back in game one time that's my favorite lighting condition

11. 00:08:17

    which is space for some reason I'm gonna come in I don't blow it apart again and I'll make sure that what I've done is actually what's expected so it seems like you know that wing takes a little less damage than the other wing for some reason you know that Megaman fixed he takes a few shots he pops off let's blow off the ship make sure that the initial issue is still there yep no stays body moves forward all right you don't need to blow up the other ships to know it's consistent get my revision again delete these one more time just to be sure and try it what I'm doing is I still go through and

12. 00:09:07

    I make sure that yes the ship completely explodes it has one big explosion at the very end but each sub component can rip off all of its other sub components that's very important to the process because if I say for example blow this off but the wing doesn't blow off I have a problem with my damage hierarchy and I need to go and figure it out but as we saw blowing up sort of inner wing part actually took off the outer part but sometimes it doesn't that's the probability so that's actually working as intended great let's just finish because blowing things up is fun there we go fire death destruction awesome and we're good and there we go I send it to the final parties and get a testament putting game so we had a fun little bug there Patrick how'd it go yeah so far so good I think the bugs solved the Sabre actually breaks up correctly now you know that's the important part also did

13. 00:09:54

    a few updates to how the parts break apart what it looks like when the particles fly off and now it's getting tested and sent to the right parties little XML little export little fun pokes and buttons for something shoot some stuff boom everyone's happy cool hope you guys enjoyed so next time thank you for watching so if you want to keep up with the latest and greatest in the star citizen the squadron 42 development please follow us on our social media channels see you soon you